New Horror Cinema and the Return of Politics (Preview)
by Christopher Sharrett

I considered using in my title the word “intelligence” rather than “politics,” since intelligence and innovation are very striking, for the most part, in the current phase of the horror genre, especially after so many decades of teen-kill pics and endless reboots of stale franchises about undermotivated masked serial killers. But intelligence, it seems to me, inevitably leads to observations about the social world, if at times in conflicted, incoherent ways. The past thirty years saw a decline in the horror genre’s prestige precisely due to an absence of intelligence, at least for discerning followers. My suggestion that the New Horror Film (for want of a better term, since all categories have very limited utility; we are referring to certain films from the last decade) has witnessed a “return of politics” might bemuse those who recall the “engaged” horror of George A. Romero, whose zombie films of the twentieth century’s last three decades are remarkable parables of American decline since Vietnam, or Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), the young Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes (1977), or Larry Cohen’s God Told Me To (1976), all caustic satires of American life in the final quarter of the last century.

The political ideas of New Horror are as expansive as the social jabs in the Golden Age Horror of the Seventies, particularly when we recognize that its main focus—women and the family, sexual politics—is at the foundation of politics if we pay any attention to Simone de Beauvoir and Kate Millett. The new films provoke, and run against the grain of the American way of life since the age of Reagan, the conservative retrenchment and the current descent into collective idiocy marked by the election of Donald Trump to the highest national office.

New Horror is not without problems, however, especially given one of its key points of focus: the female as source of disarray and madness. The theme, basic to American narrative art, appears in Ari Aster’s mostly distinguished Hereditary (2018), where the idea of the female hysteric is contradictory, and often highlights the female’s plight in a society where male authority is still preeminent. Along with the female, the family, always a site of upheaval in the best horror films, is at the heart of New Horror. In Hereditary, the Grahams, especially wife Annie (the remarkable Toni Collette), seem troubled by a family history of mental illness, so says Annie at a support group after the death of Annie’s oppressive, secretive mother. Annie uses words like schizophrenia and psychotic depression as she looks to sympathetic listeners, pointing the viewer to mental illness as the origin of the crisis to come. Hereditary puts me in mind of Robert Wise’s masterpiece The Haunting (1963), like Aster’s film concerned both with psychological and supernatural horror, trying to walk a fine line between the two (the song over Hereditary’s end credits, Judy Collins’s plangent “Both Sides Now,” makes sense as a coda) so that we are uncertain of horror’s real origin; we would like to console ourselves that horror is rooted in the pathological and therefore manageable rather than the other-worldly, until we understand that the psychological is so profoundly threatening that the world of ghosts might be safer…

To read the complete review, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Spring 2021 issue, or order a copy of this issue.

Copyright © 2021 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 2