The lights are off. You are cuddled under your favorite blanket, and the brilliant glow from your laptop screen illuminates your dimly lit room. Your heart rate quickens and your eyes stay fastened to the scene as you watch the protagonist run through the woods—gasping for air as her flashlight struggles to emit a splinter of light. Yet, something about the movie feels more than mere fiction. Horror is more than vampire and voodoo; it is often regarded as political.
Horror films frequently reflect the societal fears of their time, using monsters as instruments to represent them. Our films’ “monsters” often transcend cheap thrills, as they reflect preeminent societal fears—whether race, class, gender, science, or religion, among other things. As an audience, we choose whether to sympathize with or reject these monsters.
Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) use monsters to reflect the anxieties of the 1930s. Both films were created during the peak of the eugenics movement, which encouraged the procreation of those with socially ordained “desirable” traits. Directors portrayed Dr. Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula as monstrosities with undesirable traits to isolate those who deviated from eugenic definitions of “normal.” Dracula is created from blood-mixing that transforms him into a cross between a human and a vampire, reflecting eugenicist fears of impurity and mixed-heritage. Frankenstein’s Monster has an “abnormal” brain meant to provoke thoughts about disabilities.
Syracuse University Professor Kendall Phillips, who specializes in communication and rhetorical studies with a concentration in popular film and culture, explained how Frankenstein’s monster’s monstrosity is subjective, allowing the audience to empathize with him.
“[Frankenstein] is the story of this poor creature who doesn’t get it… he’s just a misfit in the world,” he said.
Frankenstein’s monster’s complex character prompts us to think about what it truly means to be human, allowing us to see the intricacy of human nature.
“That’s part of what horror lets us think about, particularly through presenting it with this really intense, violating, transgressive, frightening environment,” said Phillips. “It kind of shocks us out of our normal ways of thinking about the world.” He also explained how broader social norms and viewers’ emotional relationships to characters impact overall perceptions of the “monster.”
Horror continues to project social and emotional anxieties onto its villains today—especially through the examination of larger sociopolitical evils. For example, Jordan Peele’s Get Out uses common horror tropes to criticize systemic racism. Peele uses body appropriation, a form of biological horror that features the physical or psychological occupation of a victim’s body by an outside force, to illustrate the appropriation of Black culture. The main antagonists of the movie, the Armitage family, lure in Black victims to plant the brains of elderly White individuals into the victims’ bodies, leaving a small piece of their original consciousness so that they are trapped in the “Sunken Place,” a paralyzed state for Black characters, while their body is taken over by a White person. In this way, the Armitage family and their wealthy inner circle can benefit from Black lives and exploit their physical characteristics. By portraying the Armitage family as the antagonists of the film and showing the literal horror of their actions, Peele’s Get Out is an undeniable critique of systemic racism.
Yale freshman and actress Demi Singleton ‘29, who starred in Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard and The Godfather of Harlem TV series, describes why she believes horror is especially effective at addressing politics.
“Horror works when discussing politics and culture because fear jumps the line. By this, I mean: your body reacts before your defenses do,” she said. “Horror loves metaphor: a house can be a system, a monster can be a rule we never chose, a curse can be history refusing to stay quiet.” Singleton’s comments demonstrate how horror is a powerful tool for political commentary because of its ability to appeal directly to viewers’ emotions.
Finn Crumlish, a second-year Media Arts and Culture student at Occidental College and horror enthusiast, detailed how horror can address political themes in ways that other genres cannot.
“I think horror movies are able to explore elements that connect more to feelings than other films. In film studies, people talk about the ‘body genres’—melodramas, pornography, and horror—because they aim to provoke a visceral reaction in the audience,” he said. “These genres have sometimes been looked down on as ‘lower class’ for that reason, though I don’t agree.”
Singleton further makes a point about how horror excels at presenting political ideas because our bodies react before our defenses do. According to a 2022 study from Tulane University’s School of Science and Engineering and Tufts University’s School of Medicine, drawing upon insights into the brain’s electrical activity and memory formation can explain how we encode fear. It starts with norepinephrine, the neurotransmitter that alters the electrical discharge pattern responsible for controlling our emotions, in turn helping us process fear. This shifting pattern stimulates the brain’s state of enhanced arousal, which leads to the formation of “fear memory,” or the brain’s ability to keep and salvage fearful memories. Therefore, when we watch a horror movie with political commentary, whether it be explicit, like in Get Out, or underlying, like in James Demonaco’s The Purge, our “fear memory” leaves us to ponder these ideas long after the end credits.
Northwestern Professor Spencer Parsons, a filmmaker and a professor of Film, Radio, and TV Studies, described why he still chooses to produce films that do not reflect his views.
“I’ve made movies in the past [with content I] disagreed with, not a statement of how I want the world to be, but of an emotional experience I think is interesting to share,” he said. “It’s not therapy, but it’s interesting for me to find, how did I make this thing I don’t necessarily even agree with? And is that a responsible thing to put out into the world?”
Crumlish explained how, because horror is not as respected as other genres, a more diversified set of voices can emerge from it. In fact, only eight horror films have been nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and it has been regarded by critics as a form of “low art.”
According to an article from NPR, “Horror in particular has had this reputation as sort of second rate: second rate skill levels, cheap scares, lots of gratuitous blood,” says Tananarive Due, an author who teaches Black horror and afrofuturism at UCLA.
The peculiarity of the genre and how audiences perceive horror films allows directors to experiment with new ideas that films in more socially acceptable genres cannot.
Moreover, because the purpose of horror films is to evoke fear, disgust, and shock from the audience, horror filmmakers can experiment with topics not traditionally presented in romance, drama, or comedy.
“Because of its very nature, horror lets us confront dark subject matter in a way that feels approachable, transforming complicated emotions into characters and stories,” remarked Crumlish. “I think that makes horror uniquely well-suited to discussing politics in ways that other genres can’t.”
One movie that explores explicit political themes in an approachable manner is Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025), which reflects the realities of Black Americans during the Jim-Crow Era South. The setting allows Coogler to showcase historical elements such as chain gangs and the importance of the Delta Chinese, who, in Sinners, form close relationships with the Black characters in a time when the two groups were pitted against each other by society. Sinners also illustrates the eerie elements of the deep South. Moreover, Coogler takes a spin on the popular horror character of the vampire to show themes of loss, grief, and cultural appropriation, exemplified through the movie’s main antagonist, Remmick.
Some might argue that movies like Sinners and Get Out are the exception to horror, not the rule. However, just because a horror film does not engage with politics as explicitly as the two aforementioned movies does not mean that the genre is not political. Cold-War era movies such as Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and Christian Nyby’s The Thing From Another World (1951) utilize aliens as a motif to explore paranoia during the time period.
“Even when politics aren’t the focus, horror still conveys political ideas,” said Crumlish.
He finds this especially applicable in slashers, a subgenre of horror in which a human killer stalks and kills several victims. Additionally, slasher films frequently feature teenage victims who engage in premarital sex, use illegal drugs, and drink alcohol.
“There’s long been debate about whether slasher films are conservative, punishing characters for ‘bad’ behavior, or whether they actually reflect more sexually liberated attitudes and give young audiences a way to engage with taboo subjects on screen,” said Crumlish.
While the slasher genre illustrates a bit more nuance, other genres highlight certain ends of the political spectrum more clearly. For example, many argue that exorcism and satanic ritual films, the most infamous being The Exorcist (1973), represent more conservative ideas. In the film, a demon takes over the body of the main character, a 12-year-old named Reagan, and she is unable to be cured through traditional science and technology and must be healed by the Catholic Church. The Exorcist can be seen as a call to rely on religion as opposed to science and technology, a sentiment that juxtaposes scientific and medicinal progress achieved during the 1960s.
In contrast, modern films such as Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), a blend between comedy, horror, and ultimately a critique of American capitalism and misogyny, represent more liberal ideas.
“There’s, to me, a clear critique. Not just of masculine behavior; it’s a critique of society, of the world of exploitation and consumption and greed and reduction of people…” described Harron in an interview with Letterboxd.
Additionally, many “lone girl” movies, like Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man (2020), feature female protagonists who have to navigate survival and transform difficult situations. The male characters often get killed early on, leaving the female protagonist to fend for herself. While not overt, this setup can be interpreted as liberally charged through illustrations of female empowerment.
This increase in the representation of women in horror films frames a broader discussion about representation within the genre. And yet, some voices are still absent.
Singleton gave examples of themes she would like to see explored more in the genre.
“When thinking of issues I would like to see explored more deeply, a few come to mind, like Black girlhood in all its contradictions; climate grief and storm displacement (as someone with familial roots in New Orleans, that’s personal); algorithmic bias and surveillance—the feeling of being watched and still misunderstood,” wrote Singleton. “And I’d love to see more Afro-Caribbean folklore on screen. There’s a whole cosmology we rarely tap into.”
Parsons described how, in the future, he sees the genre integrating the rise of artificial intelligence, stating that “new technology is always scary,” and noted that Frankenstein, one of the original science fiction stories, is also a warning about technological responsibility. Dr. Frankenstein creates The Monster, then ultimately abandons him because he cannot control his creation. The Monster is subsequently abused and tortured by Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, Fritz, and is purposefully given an abnormal brain, which then causes him to act brutishly and terrorize others. Frankenstein is a prime example of what happens when humans, driven by hubris, create a new technology and fail to recognize its potential effects on the world.
Both Singleton and Parsons’ commentary allow us to see how horror will continue to develop in the future, not only to scare us, but also to reflect the fears of the past and the present.