From Social Allegory to Political Statement: Academic Reception of American Horror of the 21st Century

For a long time, horror was an entertaining cinema genre. Since the late 1970s, critics and scholars have gradually started to examine it in terms of social and political content, often conveyed allegorically. Meanwhile, publications in English have prevailed in academic discourse, which is largely due to the long dominance of American horror. Film critics applied different methods of analysis – from Freudo-Marxism and gender studies to trauma studies and affect theory. Political analysis was often based on the thesis of the critic Robin Wood about the allegorical interpretation of monsters as the return of the repressed. However, in the 21^st century, horror has changed significantly. New subgenres have emerged: “torture porn”, “found footage”, folk horror, post-horror, etc. Studios started to film a huge number of remakes, sequels of classical films in series format, etc. At the same time, researchers have continued to study horror as an allegory. Social and cultural consequences of September 11, 2001 became the main topic of the analysis. This trend kept going for more than fifteen years, but with Donald Trump’s coming to power the allegorical messages of the American horror have actually been replaced by direct political statements. Many horrors have begun to tell about current socio-political problems – racism, poverty, migration, etc. Scholars have to react to these changes, comprehending the transformation in the genre and correcting their views on allegorical reading as a method of analysis. The article describes an academic research transition to the understanding of “political horror” on the examples of the film “Get Out” (2017) and the franchise “The Purge” (2013 – to the present). It is concluded that this trend persists so far. However, despite the popularity of “political horror”, it is obvious that allegorical reading will remain an important tool for academic analysis of horror films.

Keywords: horror, social philosophy, practical philosophy, terror, Donald Trump, violence, fear, cinema studies, 9/11, remakes