ABSTRACT
Since around 2010, there has been an increasing number of horror films featuring a “monster” who is a white man. He is merely human with no supernatural or unnatural characteristics at all. Within this subset of films, there is a reiterated scenario, one that galvanises the horror and dread of the film: a woman is discovered chained or caged in a cellar or basement. She has been captured for a variety of reasons, but, as viewers, our emotions are targeted by the simple and visceral spectacle. Emerging from men’s sense of powerlessness, which escalated dramatically after the Great Recession of 2008, this central horror trope intersects with one of the clarion calls of Donald’s Trump’s 2015–2016 presidential campaign, the chant “Lock her up!,” which played on men’s antagonism toward powerful women. The Woman (2011), Don’t Breathe (2016), and The Neighbour (2016) elucidate the complicated ways in which men’s felt loss of power and desire to redress and avenge that loss gets enacted within a horror trope that bleeds beyond the bounds of film. This trope, disturbingly, both captures and drives a zero-sum game of power in the second decade of the 21st century.
