ABSTRACT
In a basic sense, all horror movies are political. Normality (as defined by a particular culture, at a particular moment) is disrupted by the Monstrous: and that end-of-the-status-quo is either a good thing, at least potentially (the radical stance) or it’s bad (the conservative view). Similarly, as a horror film ends, we either return to ‘life as it was’ – or we wind up in a ‘new normal’. In 28 Days Later, for example, the ‘new normal’ involves living in an armed military camp, where one is protected from the zombie horde outside the walls … but not from the military men themselves, who quickly devolve into brutal authoritarians.
Cuba’s Juan of the Dead (2011) also uses zombie tropes, to suggest that Cuban-style socialism has hollowed out its people, leaving them passive and mostly hopeless. Ghosts animate a number of films with implicit political messages, including Spain’s Civil War story The Devil’s Backbone (2001), and Japan’s Pulse (2001), one of the earliest movies to warn of the darker side of the internet. And a djinn stalks the protagonist of Under the Shadow (2016), where – in the streets of war-torn Tehran – ‘reality’ is no escape from the supernatural terror haunting her home.
