Why watching the news can be like watching a horror film – literally

From presidential debates to any discussion on social media, politics is often absolutely horrifying. Watching the news can be like watching a horror film.

Or is it the other way around? Are the terrors on screen simply a reflection of our political reality? That’s the argument made by Jon Greenaway, author of Capitalism: A Horror Story. In his new book, Greenaway painstakingly details the last 200 years of capitalism and gives example after example of how each era’s social and political landscape has actively shaped what makes us squeal and squirm.

“The reason the horror film is the way it is,” he says, “is because it’s speaking to what it’s like to be alive under a political system that is violent, increasingly fragile and out of our control.”

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There is a constant stream of scream-inducing films released in cinemas and streaming platforms. Coinciding with our own general election is A Quiet Place: Day One, the prequel explaining why the world had to turn silent – which around the election campaign sounds like solace rather than a horror film. Over the next couple of months we’ll be revisiting the universes of Alien (Alien: Romulus is released on 16 August) and Beetlejuice (Beetlejuice 2 is out 6 September). At Christmas there will be a resurrection of the ultimate cinematic vampire, Nosferatu, in a Robert Eggers remake – you can draw your own parallels with the US election candidates.

Greenaway has been studying gothic media for more than a decade. He finished his undergrad at the time of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. “It’s not a coincidence that the big film franchise that kicked off at that time was Paranormal Activity,” Greenaway says. “At the time you would turn on the news and see homes being repossessed. Then you’d go to the cinema and see a story about a house being possessed.” Your home being taken from you, whether from a ghost or the bank, was terrifying. 

Greenaway has an impressive, encyclopaedic knowledge on horror cinema. During our talk, he references everything from the camp Spanish social commentary of The Platform to refugee horror of His House, and he finds it effortless to draw out the politics in every case: “It’s the background that informs the writing, production and design of these films, either implicit or explicit.”

One example Greenaway gives me is Eli Roth’s Hostel, which was released in a US still scarred by 9/11, and that he calls a “nasty, gory, little horror movie”. According to him, the film coming out in the throes of George W Bush’s presidency is right there in the script: “It’s about Americans who end up in former-Soviet Eastern European countries being tortured to death. This is in the context of emerging American anxiety about the war on terror, right? What’s going to happen to the good American boys who go overseas?”

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Two successful franchises that encapsulate the most pressing political issues of our time are the Saw and The Purge series. “On one level Saw is mindless entertainment,” Greenaway says, “but if you actually pay attention to the films, they’re clearly about for-profit healthcare and the idea of human life being disposable if you don’t have enough money to literally stay alive.”

The Purge series – in which America holds a holiday once a year whereby all crimes are legal for one night – is perhaps more overtly political. Greenaway points out the films have interesting critiques of capitalism sprinkled through, but they ultimately reflect our own inability to imagine something new.

“The Purge films can’t talk about a potential solution to capitalism, so the only way out for them is to escalate the violence. The final film (thus far) ends with America literally self-destructing in an orgy of violence. People get so addicted that the country descends into permanent chaos. It’s very telling that that film came out during the Trump presidency.”

Art reflecting the politics of the time in which it was created is not a new idea. But Greenaway believes horror films aren’t just a way to reflect the terror of real life, it’s an artistic and creative way to explore what could exist beyond.

“I think we’re in a cultural moment that can be very bleak,” he says. “What’s hopeful about horror is that in the midst of pain, blood and disaster we can come out the other side. 

“That isn’t an easy process or even guaranteed. In other words, horror doesn’t buy its hope on the cheap. Things don’t just get better – sometimes we go through a nightmare, but horror shows us that we
can survive.”

Capitalism: A Horror Story by Jon Greenaway is out now (Watkins Media, £10.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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