Spooky season is here again, populated by ghosts, ghouls, witches, and all manner of eerie creatures who haunt the edges of our collective consciousness. But for American adults, two-thirds of whom report fears that we’re living in a recession that official numbers obscure, the shadows at the door are much more economic than otherworldly.
Recessions and depressions have produced some of the most popular horror and thriller movies in cinematic history. Our economic and social anxieties are reflected in the art we create and enjoy, and the popularity of different types of characters are associated with differing economic conditions. Horror films and tropes provide a fun-house mirror in which our self-perception is mutated by our unspoken fears.
The Great Depression brought us the iconic Universal monster movies. Dracula reflected our fears of the immigrants we’d welcomed in, a government which might suck the economic blood from the nation, as well as unease about aristocracy and international bankers, with the Transylvanian count arriving in England to infect others with a grisly old-world curse and drain us of life-giving resources.
The effete and educated Dr. Frankenstein in his sharply tailored suits assembled a monster of castoff body parts who stumbled about, frustrated and angry, in ill-fitting clothes of the working class. Frankenstein’s monster, like the American working class who lined up to see him, hadn’t asked to be created, and wanted only to be left alone. But torch-carrying mobs beset them. Oppressors attack their attempts at autonomous existence.
Embodying Collective Fears
In the 1950s, when a high percentage of Americans thought the Soviet Union would use an atomic weapon against the United States, science fiction and schlocky movie monsters like Godzilla, The Blob (both products of radiation testing), and the 50-Foot Woman emerged. Susan Sontag wrote in 1965 for Commentary Magazine that the role of imaginative dystopian horror in the Cold War period was to “normalize what is psychologically unbearable.”
Legendary horror author Stephen King put it more simply: “we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.”
The early 1970s witnessed a leap forward in horror filmmaking: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973) put a grisly-but-compelling face on the oil crisis as well as the economic privation that seemed to stalk rural America amid factory closures. The era’s rise of the welfare state in the US, accompanying economic pressures, and oppressive governments in Asia gave us George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, which created the iconic characteristics of modern zombies. Zombies are a mindless, endlessly hungry hoard, steadily moving but devoid of any real freedom of movement, devouring the minds and wills and resources of individuals in its path. Movie-going audiences and the middle class felt helpless to outrun the growing debt, and zombies took on the identity of mindless consumers, powerless as individuals but terrifying in mass. Unemployment, underwater mortgages, and distant financial instability seemed to stalk us with threats of contagion. The film’s characters took refuge in, of all places, a shopping mall.
The undead or walking dead also remove moral condemnation from the horrific idea of slaughtering humans. Zombies’ inhumanity, despite human forms, helped us make sense of mass slaughter abroad. For a generation scarred by images of Vietnam, it served a purpose and provided a warning. The ultimate threat of zombies is not only that they transform us from “citizens of the world into survivors,” but that we can be stripped of our individuality and zombified, ourselves.
Zombie movies are not really about zombies, anyway. They’re about resistance, survival, and escape. For the hero, and the audience, there is cathartic payoff in vanquishing the threat. The films offer us the masochism of fear, but also the redemption and reward of dispatching the stalking brutes just in time. Zombie-movie protagonists, whose stories we really go to see, mark themselves out as stubbornly human in the face of inhumanity. We triumph as individuals by killing off the collective menace which threatens to consume our….Brains.
Haunting Anxieties
From the 1980s to the 2000s, we indulged our anxieties about what hid behind our neighbors’ lace curtains on suburban Elm Street, in the ‘Burbs, the Stepford Wives, and Disturbia. The origin of our national fears came in from the rural hills and settled in our culs-de-sac.
After the 2008 housing crisis, Americans entered an age of being haunted by their homes, quite reminiscent of the 1970s. The Blumhouse film company alone released 16 haunted house films in the eight years following the subprime mortgage crash, most notably the Paranormal Activity and Insidious series. Horror protagonists, generally white, middle class, comfortable families in suburban homes were stalked by demonic and supernatural entities that threatened everything peaceful, private, and secure about home ownership.
Economic fears are not the only collective anxieties reflected in our choice of scary cinema. The Poltergeist films (1982, ‘86, ‘88, and 2015) demonstrated, among other things, fears of communication technologies, which we think we control until they start controlling us. Periods of high public concern about immigration (not necessarily periods of actually high immigration) are correlated with alien movies, home-invasion films, and faceless strangers lurking in familiar places (Them and The Strangers). The perceived breakdown of the nuclear family (sometimes just a reflection of increasing opportunities and independence for women of child-rearing years) gave us family horror like Orphan, Carrie, and The Omen.
Why the Zombies Keep Coming
The persistence of zombie narratives in particular should give economic minds pause. We are well into the second decade of our current Zombie fascination, with The Walking Dead beginning its 11-season run in 2010 and World War Z debuting in 2013. We’re still going strong with Evil Dead Rise last year, added to the dozens of recent contributions to the genre.
Zombie narratives herald not just economic uncertainty, but public preoccupation with forces beyond our control that threaten to devour us. We might well ask why Hollywood keeps making zombie films, but would do better to ask why we keep going to see them, and how we might better address the creeping fears that our autonomy and individuality are being consumed by the hoard.
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