The Horror Film as Social Allegory (And How it Comes Undone)

Abstract

Two films of the 1960s suggest similar dynamics of patriarchal civilization, and of the challenges on the horizon brought by the arrival of feminism, with Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique appearing in 1963. The redneck posse, led by a local sheriff, is quickly developed as at least as lethal and loathsome as the zombies. The idea of apocalypse has been central to American fiction, and has returned to the horror film with a certain insistence. The notion of apocalypse is a religious discourse derived from perhaps the most fantastic book of the Bible. The horror film's degeneration became most notable with the slasher cycle of the 1980s, which not incidentally coincided with the enormous reaction of the Reagan years. Torture porn has become a synonym, as such things tend to occur in nitwit popular journalism, with any form of bloody horror cinema deemed equally worthless.

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