Horror has always been political

I'm always encountering people who think "political horror" or "social commentary horror" began with Jordan Peele's Get Out in 2017 or Ari Aster's Hereditary in 2018, but horror films have drawn on social fears since their inception. Music video director Joseph Kahn would disagree, though. In a piece for The Hollywood Reporter titled "Horror Movies and Politics Are Killing Film Festivals," Kahn argues that film festivals are no longer cinema's elite "refuge from Hollywood's worst commercial instincts." Instead, Kahn now sees the film festival circuit as a "schizophrenic marketplace" where "gore gets dressed up as political commentary and the bloodiest movie on the screen can spark the biggest bidding war."

Kahn—author of such gems as "Bring Back the Hollywood Asshole!"—goes on to clarify:

"There is nothing wrong with playing horror or lowbrow genre films at prestigious film festivals… The problem is when the self-importance of festival political activism crosses wires with these horror nerds. As these dopamine chasers inflict their limbic systems on every film, cheering for lizard-brain human suffering, the Olds scramble to give all that bloodlust a higher purpose, laundering it into political statements right there in the Q&A. A horror filmmaker on a festival podium is suddenly facing a town square of Inquisitors, eager to intellectually vivisect the entertainment in search of some morally superior meaning. It's how body-horror humiliation rituals like The Substance get hyped into Greatest Movie Ever territory on the festival circuit, attracting a combination of prosthetic fetishists, fifth-wave feminists and theater-laugh exhibitionists."

The body horror of The Substance is integral to the film, narratively and thematically. Director Coralie Fargeat utilizes decay, transmutation, mutilation, and monstrosity in a critical thesis on desirability with a story about an aging actress trying to recapture her youth through bizarre and desperate means after being callously disposed of by an industry that no longer regards her body as serviceable. The ripping skin, oozing wounds, and putrid flesh are meant to emphasize how the self-scrutiny and body policing encouraged by society do a sort of violence to our bodies and psyches—especially in the post-COVID, algorithm-subservient, attention economy and internet age of Ozempic, increasing orthorexia, Botox, fillers, and "looksmaxxing." The visceral gore of The Substance may be an acquired taste, but it's not meaningless. Its significance to the story is what makes the film a stunning entry in the modern horror canon as we contend with late-stage capitalism, body fascism, desirability politics, and the body as a consumable commodity. 

I—a proudly self-proclaimed and unapologetic horror nerd—have been vivisecting horror for nearly two decades, learning from works like Carol J. Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws, Robin R. Means Coleman's Horror Noire, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's Monster Theory. I studied them as closely as I studied Sharon Patricia Holland's Raising the Dead, Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection, and Vincent Woodard's The Delectable Negro. Reading these alongside horror films like The People Under the Stairs (1991), Candyman (1992), The Skeleton Key (2005), and many, many more has made it undeniably clear to me the work that horror does, and has always done. 

As I said in my 2023 welcome interview for Scalawag, horror "can shed light on things the dominant culture would rather go unsaid, things that come into focus through who or what gets constructed as monster, victim, savior, or survivor. Essentially, horror is a mirror." Horror has never needed a new generation to come along and give it "meaning" or "a higher purpose." Horror has always moved with and responded to culture, and it has always been imbued with meaning for those who are willing to look with an open mind and critical thought. 

French illusionist and filmmaker Georges Méliès' Le Manoir du Diable (1896) is credited as the first horror film. Though it's often argued that Méliès intended to evoke excitement and wonder rather than fear with Le Manoir, the four-minute short established a foundation that horror stands on even now—the dreary castle or manor, supernatural and shape-shifting forms, and innocence preyed upon by a scheming evil. I see echoes of it in Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak (2015), Mike Flanagan's The Haunting of Hill House (2018), and, of course, both F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) and Robert Eggers' 2024 reimagining.

In Le Manoir du Diable, the Devil shifts from bat to human form in a medieval castle before conjuring Mephistopheles and a beautiful young woman from a cauldron. Soon, a pair of unsuspecting cavaliers wander in. There, they encounter Mephistopheles, the Devil, and their various supernatural tricks. One cavalier runs away in fear, but the second remains—the first horror movie character to stereotypically lack proper threat assessment. After he is frightened by a skeleton and shrouded specters, the beautiful young woman who emerged from the Devil's cauldron reappears and entices the cavalier with her beauty. When he kneels to kiss her hand, she transforms into an old crone before multiplying into six haggard witches—the first on-screen femme fatale, if you ask me. 

1890s Belle Époque France was a period of ardent fascination with Satanism, occultism, and black magic, and all of these are invoked by Le Manoir du Diable. During this decade, French society experienced what we would now call a "Satanic Panic," and a significant aspect of this panic was the Catholic Church's fixation on women supposedly in league with the Devil. Literary tropes of this era—the height of the Decadent movement and Fin de siècle—often framed women living outside of patriarchal church structures as sinful and sexually lurid. Works like Joris-Karl Huysmans' 1891 novel Là-bas relied heavily on the use of the femme fatale or maneater, a woman "often described as having a power akin to an enchantress, seductress, or witch." The femme fatale—like the witch woman in Le Manoir du Diable—possesses a dangerous beauty and "represents a mysterious, but palpable, danger for the men around her and above all for those who succumb to her attraction."

When placed in the context of the culture and setting in which it was created, it's clear that Le Manoir du Diable speaks to late 19th-century French society's fears of shifting religious practices and the "new woman" breaking traditional social and sexual molds. The world's first horror film, over a century ago, was precisely the kind of "political"/"social commentary" horror that modern disdainful anti-intellectuals insist is newfangled and sigh in exasperation about. 

In my welcome interview, I explained:

"Horror has distinctive eras that are demarcated by societal and historical events. New subgenres and narrative tropes took form following the First and Second World Wars, as well as the Cold War and the Korean War. There is post-9/11 horror, post-Katrina horror, post-Ferguson horror, and we are witnessing the emergence of post-COVID horror. This is largely how I organize history in my head, by how horror has responded to these world-altering events."

During the first 20 years of the 20th century, horror films were often adaptations of popular Gothic literature, with some of the earliest works being Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1908), Frankenstein (1910), and The Werewolf (1913). Post-World War I, filmmakers who had served on the front lines channeled their angst and trauma into horror, producing classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), and The Man Who Laughs (1928). King Kong (1933) drew on both antiBlack and sexist tropes while painting Indigenous people and rituals as dangerous and barbaric, in keeping with 1930s exoticism, Depression-era escapism, and fascination with Africa and its Indigenous people. Cat People (1942) is known as a "critique of female sexual repression and the patriarchal fear of female sexual autonomy" in the early 20th century. 

Godzilla (1954) is famously the child of U.S. imperialism, inspired by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, as well as the radioactive fallout from the Bikini Atoll hydrogen bomb tests. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) reflects fears of "alien infiltration of society [and] Cold War paranoia about spies and secrecy." Horror from the 1960s, like The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), This Is Not a Test (1962), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), also encapsulates the paranoia and nuclear anxiety fostered by the Cold War. Towards the end of the decade, Night of the Living Dead (1968) and its zombies held up a mirror to the cultural fragmentation and racial tensions of U.S. society during the Civil Rights Movement.

Deliverance (1972) and Deathdream (1974) drew on the stark violence of the Vietnam War and the irreparable trauma inflicted on veterans. The Hills Have Eyes (1977) captured socioeconomic conflict, state abandonment, atomic anxiety, and "postwar fears of government-sponsored scientific horror." Alien (1979) was blatantly about gendered violence and forced pregnancy during a decade when Roe v. Wade had only recently passed. Beginning with Halloween (1978), slashers that carried through the 1980s—Friday the 13th (1980), Prom Night (1980), My Bloody Valentine (1981), Sleepaway Camp (1983), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), Chopping Mall (1986)—are a response to societal panic about youth counterculture and teenage promiscuity. The People Under the Stairs (1991) and Candyman (1992) both respond to the socioeconomic fallout of Reaganomics and its impact on Black living spaces, with The People Under the Stairs specifically indicting gentrification and Candyman focusing on housing projects. 

Early 21st-century horror was shaped by 9/11, and fears of sudden attacks and foreign invaders were embodied by a surge in zombie media like the Resident Evil franchise (2002–present) and home invasion stories like The Strangers (2008). In 2011, Scream 4 was ahead of its time, examining the younger generations' place within developing technology, growing surveillance, and streaming culture. Dystopian action-horror franchise, The Purge (2013–2021), offers an analysis and indictment of white supremacy, capitalism, nationalism, liberalism, and how political violence is disproportionately visited upon the most marginalized. 

Host (2020), Safer at Home (2021), Sick (2022), The Harbinger (2022), and Else (2024) all either engage directly with the COVID-19 pandemic that hit in 2020 or use video calls, quarantine, isolation, paranoia, and contagion as core narrative and thematic elements. The 2020s have also been a distinct era of Incel horror, "Nice Guy" horror, and Men Behaving Badly horror post-#MeToo, including but not limited to: Promising Young Woman (2020), The Invisible Man (2020), Don't Worry Darling (2022), Fresh (2022), Barbarian (2022), Blink Twice (2024), and Companion (2025). 

Mere days apart, Obsession (2026) and Backrooms (2026) both arrived to "dissect aspects of toxic masculinity" and also "depict different elements of the horrors endemic to human reliance on generative AI" at a time when our privacy and autonomy are being rapidly eroded by technofascists and AI data centers steal our art while destroying the environment. This year, Yeon Sang-ho—writer and director of Train to Busan (2016), itself an exploration of class divide, ineffectual government bodies, propaganda, and the necessity of empathy during crisis—also gave us Colony, a twisting zombie thriller that "reflects anxieties about artificial intelligence, collective behavior and the erosion of human individuality," and it feels right on time. 

The global horror canon of the last 130 years speaks for itself, and it speaks plainly. 

Joseph Kahn, however, believes the horror films finally taking up more screen time at film festivals—within an industry that has historically had an open disdain for horror—are simply "wrapping gore in political language."

"Under the guise of Everything Is Political, we are indulging the most annoying audience in the world. It's a crowd that whoops at a decapitation, then posts on Bluesky how the decapitation interrogates colonialism."

I love being annoying. 

From its infancy, no matter which decade you sift through, horror has always interrogated race, class, gender, sexuality, queerness, disability, xenophobia, state abandonment, institutional failure, autonomy, grief, isolation, trauma, war, capitalism, imperialism, fascism, and, yes, even colonialism—see: Prey (2022)—and much more. Decapitations and all.