Marxists have often talked about the pinnacles of revolutionary cinema – the Italian neorealists’ anti-fascist films, Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. This article is not about those kinds of films. In fact, horror as a genre tends to be avoided, either simply because it is gruesome or because it is written off as exploitative and misogynistic.
But there is social critique in horror films – particularly in the new wave of the past decade, with films such as Get Out (racism), The Babadook (grief and motherhood), His House (migration) and Sinners (the African American experience in the South). Recent horror films have dealt with specific issues: Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later confronts Brexit Britain’s isolationism; in Blink Twice a billionaire’s private island is the site of horror for young women; Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite tackles class, exploitation and lack of solidarity.
Two years after the overturning of Roe v Wade, which ended the federal constitutional right to abortion in the US, two mainstream horror films involving forced pregnancy and state/church conspiracies – Immaculate and The First Omen – were released.
Yet neither film was as scary as the real story of Adriana Smith, who, earlier this year, died from blood clots on the brain while pregnant in the US state of Georgia and whose body was kept on life support as an incubator until an 800g baby could be excavated from her corpse.
At a time like now – with genocide, threat of nuclear war, climate emergency – feelings run high. And horror has a particular ability to express things that are normally repressed. The fears and dread, feelings and desires that are socially unacceptable, that don’t fit the heteronormative binary model of gender and the family. Bodies that don’t fit the ideal we are used to seeing on the big (or small) screen. Taboos. So, even the trashier end of B-movie horror can speak to us in unexpected ways.
As a teenager, I watched a very silly (and certainly very problematic) 1960s zombie film in which a man was commanded by voodoo witch doctor to pull his own head off. The special effects were laughable – a wax head splattered with paint-like fake blood. But the image haunted me. After all, what is work under capitalism if not doing someone else’s bidding in a trance-like state for eight hours a day? Horror can use strange and extreme metaphors that relate to the everyday horrors of the system.
Another factor in the recent horror revival, and particularly for the new feminist horror studies, is that there is something very attractive about the unruly, untamed, disobedient creatures we meet in horror films. Women fuelled by rage and not willing or able to suppress it. Like Alex in Fatal Attraction, who says, “I will not be ignored, Dan.”
Horror fans are reassessing old films. The so-called “Hagsploitation” films of the 1960s and 1970s are one example. These films, such as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? feature middle aged women who are refusing to grow old gracefully and therefore become monstrous in their unruliness. In Strait-Jacket (1964) Joan Crawford plays a woman who has just been released from an asylum 20 years after axe-murdering her husband and his lover. Her attempts to overcome the stigma of mental illness and to find her place in the world again are incredibly relatable. You root for her even as the axe murders begin again… I first saw this film at an International Women’s Day screening, where the organisers handed out inflatable axes so we could all hack along with the on-screen murders. There can be a joyful sense of community at such collective screenings.
Another film recently plucked from obscurity by feminist film scholars is Cindy Sherman’s Office Killer. In this 1997 art-horror Carol Kane plays a meek office worker who is forced to work from home. But her home is a site of trauma and going to the office each day was her only escape. Driven to breaking point, she starts killing her co-workers and bringing them home to her basement, where she places their bodies at desks with telephones. In the evenings she arranges them on the sofa to watch TV with her. Just like the opening scenes of the 2002 film 28 Days Later showing a deserted central London, this felt like Covid times, despite being made years before.
The Marxist film critic called Robin Wood wrote in the 1970s that there is no better genre than horror to express and contest the oppressive nature of capitalism. Our culture operates by forcing us to repress every thought, impulse and emotion that goes against the “normal” standard of bourgeois ideology. A genre that tends towards extremes, like horror, can undermine that. And this is true whether the films are consciously anti-capitalist or critical of the status quo or not.
Horror has more than doubled its market share of the US box office in ten years, from 4.87% in 2013 to 10% 2023. Much of this comes from the big franchises like Malignant and Paranormal Activity. These films are not especially interesting. But there have been mainstream films that are more challenging. Sinners (2025) is the highest grossing original horror film since 2018, with worldwide box office takings of $366 million. Sinners is not pure horror, but a mix of genres. Director Ryan Coogler uses supernatural elements like vampires and voodoo to explore the legacy of colonialism and slavery and the persistence of African American culture and art.
It stands in a tradition of black horror. The 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror tells the story of this filmic tradition, asserting that the first black horror film was D W Griffiths’ racist epic, Birth of a Nation (1915), in which a white actor in blackface portrays black men as violent sexual predators who need to be lynched.
Horror Noire documents the absence of black representation in horror films through to the 1950s – unless we count the implied blackness of monsters such as King Kong. But a key turning point came in 1968 with the release of Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s zombie movie starring African American actor Duane Jones as the hero. The interviewees point out the visual links between the self-appointed mobs and armed police depicted in the film and those on the streets in the real world at the time, attacking anti-racist protesters and enforcing segregation.
It is interesting that horror audiences in the US are 15% more likely to be African American and 23% more likely to be Latinx. Perhaps this links to the experience of racism and oppression, among other factors.
Get Out (2017) is one of the films that marked the horror revival. In it, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a black photographer, travels with his white girlfriend to visit her family, only to gradually realise they are planning to auction off his body to their wealthy white friends. It is a satirical film about racism hidden behind a liberal façade.
Director Jordan Peele was planning to mirror the bleak ending of Night of the Living Dead, in which the black hero survives until the last moment only to be killed by the authorities. But during the time he was developing the film, Trump got elected and Black Lives Matter intensified, and he changed it to a much more satisfying conclusion. Peele says he felt compelled to put an argument that black people can survive if they have back-up!
Some of the symbolic language Peele uses in Get Out has become part of the lexicon. In the film, Chris is hypnotised by his girlfriend’s mother and falls into “the sunken place” – a place where he is trapped and unheard. He must escape the sunken place to be free.
This is the power of film – one visual metaphor can encapsulate a feeling or experience that is hard to express in words.
At a recent academic conference, I heard a talk by a woman who had documented her long journey to endometriosis diagnosis through clips and fragments from horror films, specifically haunted house films. She explained how disorientating chronic illness can be, especially when undiagnosed, how you don’t trust your own senses and no none believes you. She found connections with haunted house narratives when she couldn’t find a language elsewhere to express her experiences.
Body horror as a subgenre has a particular appeal for those who face oppression based on their gender or sexuality.
The Substance, directed by Coralie Fargeat, made a huge impact for an independent film. It takes to extremes the idea of the beauty industry and wanting to stay young forever. Norwegian body horror/fairy tale The Ugly Stepsister upturns the story of Cinderella to examine the violence of beauty standards.
Trans film writers Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay’s book, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema (2024) has several excellent chapters on horror and related films. The chapter on The Silence of the Lambs points out that Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism is somehow represented as less disturbing than Buffalo Bill’s desire to change his gender. Maclay, who is intersex, has written about how she felt seen by the main character in sci-fi horror Under the Skin, in which Scarlett Johansson plays an alien in outwardly human form, but without all the working parts. She can’t be fully woman or fully man and this distressing realisation leaves her isolated and lonely.
The 2023 book Queer for Fear by Heather Petrocelli focuses on the community-building side of horror film screenings. Petrocelli documents how, in big cities across Canada and the northern US, you can find midnight screenings of horror films for queer audiences who find affinity with each other while watching these “othered” beings on screen.
A similar phenomenon is happening now with feminist horror networks. The Final Girls Berlin Film Festival exhibits films by women, non-binary and LGBT+ filmmakers. Podcasts such as Monstrous Flesh invite film experts and enthusiasts to discuss old and new horror films from a fresh critical perspective.
To return to where we started: “now is the time of monsters” is a liberal translation of part of a quote from Italian revolutionary Marxist Antonio Gramsci. (The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In the interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms/phenomena appear.) Gramsci was writing from prison in Fascist Italy in 1929, as Europe was struggling between workers’ revolution and fascism.
This kind of gothic language runs through Marxism. Marx himself uses it when describing capitalism: “Capital is dead labour, which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” And it has a “werewolf hunger for surplus labour”.
More recently, Chris Harman wrote in Zombie Capitalism (2009):
“Faced with the financial crisis that began in 2007, some economic commentators did begin to talk of ‘zombie banks’ – financial institutions that were in the ‘undead state’ and incapable of fulfilling any positive function, but representing a threat to everything else. What they do not recognise is that 21st century capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals and responding to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all around.”
Is it any wonder that we have been culturally immersed in zombies for 20 years now? 28 Days/Weeks/Years Later, The Last of US, The Walking Dead…
This is post-apocalyptic horror about survival and found family in a destructive and unsustainable system.
We live in an unstable world; it is going to get more unstable. Hunger is rife, environmental destruction is increasing, violence surrounds us every day, and mental health is under tremendous strain.
If you want to read the signs about how people feel about this situation – watch some horror films. You will find fear and anxiety – but also rage and anger, also the refusal to be buried (literally!!), the refusal to accept the repressive norms that are forced onto us.
By nature, horror films tend to be bleak. They often don’t have happy endings. They often leave things unresolved, but that in itself poses a question to us. We are not going to resolve those questions in film first – we resolve them in life. That’s our job as revolutionaries and as activists, to find ways through the horror of capitalism.
Films mentioned:
- Sinners (2025)
- 28 Years Later (2025)
- The Ugly Stepsister (2025)
- The Substance (2024)
- Blink Twice (2024)
- Immaculate (2024)
- The First Omen (2024)
- His House (2020)
- Parasite (2019)
- Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2019)
- Get Out (2017)
- The Babadook (2014)
- Under the Skin (2013)
- 28 Weeks Later (2007)
- 28 Days Later (2002)
- Office Killer (1997)
- The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
- Fatal Attraction (1987)
- Night of the Living Dead (1968)
- Strait-Jacket (1964)
- The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Recommended recent books on horror film:
Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema by Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay (2024)
Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator by Heather O. Petrocelli (2023)
Women Make Horror: Filmmaking, Feminism, Genre edited by Alison Peirse (2020)
House of Psychotic Women by Kier-La Janisse (expanded edition, 2022)
Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present by Robin R. Means Coleman (second edition, 2022)
Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews by Robin Wood (2018)
Return of the Monstrous-Feminine by Barbara Creed (2022)
I Spit on your Celluloid: The History of Women Directing Horror Movies by Heidi Honeycutt (2024)
