1. 1
Screams of Revolution:
Political Statements in American Horror Films
by Rachel Victoria Richmond
What is it that makes a film terrifying? Is it the shock of seeing the unspeakable? Or
could it be that within the monsters, killers, and ghouls of horror films, we see ourselves staring
back with manic eyes? In the wide discussion of film, the horror genre is often brushed aside for
more artistic works and widely considered to be a genre created solely for entertainment and not
resonance. However, since the first films were released, directors have used the horror genre to
address political and social problems in a non-obtrusive way. As film critic Terrence Rafferty
argued in his article “Secret Sharers,” horror films are about subtext and “metaphors that attack
like viruses and produce a fever of associations in our minds” (Nelson 381). John S. Nelson, a
professor of Political Science at the University of Iowa, supports Rafferty’s claim. In “Horror
Films Face Political Evils in Everyday Life,” he notes that “the gist of horror is facing evils in
everyday life” (Nelson 382). According to Nelson, horror films act as a “primer for political
action” (Nelson 382), with the main characters battling a seemingly unbeatable force that
threatens to overpower and destroy them. In dealing with such absolutes as life and death and
good and evil, the only option is rebellion. In Cinema Politica, Michael Ryan and Douglas
Kellner delve further into the importance of the horror film. While horror films express the fears
of being overwhelmed by a great evil as Nelson argues, they add that the horror film “provides a
vehicle for social critiques too radical for mainstream Hollywood production” (Kellner and Ryan
169). It is in this capacity that the horror film finds its strength and purpose during the last half of
the 20th century. Great political and social upheavals marked the 20th century as one of the most
turbulent periods in history. Wars, genocide, assassinations, and the ever-present fear of nuclear

2. 2
annihilation cast a dark gloom over America. Using the medium of horror films, directors
commented on the policies of the American government, especially during times of war, and on
America’s place as the world’s foremost superpower. The 1950s through the 1970s was the
period in which American horror film underwent a transformation from a genre grounded in the
Gothic tradition of vampires, ghouls, and effete aristocracy to a boundless universe that
encompassed everything from foreign aliens to homegrown serial killers, all with strong political
subtext.
In his essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” Robin Wood contends that
horror films in the 1930s are always set in a foreign country. Frankenstein (1931), Dracula
(1931), and King Kong (1933) are all set in gloomy European countries or exotic uncharted
islands. Wood argues that the horror films of the 1930s (those rooted in the Gothic) project the
idea that “horror exists, but is un-American” (Wood 85). He contends that horror becomes “a
country of the mind” (Wood 85), a place that can be stumbled upon, visited, and ultimately,
escaped from. Americans can inhabit this world but their foray into terror is limited to one
specific place. In these films, America is seen as the bastion of civility, while the outside world
is dangerous and untamed – as in I Walked with a Zombie or King Kong. To return to Wood’s
argument, the horror found in these places is strongly un-American. It is something that must be
tamed or defeated by the American protagonist in the name of American ideals. Such imperialist
subtext mirrors the American sentiment about foreign affairs at the time. Post-World War II,
America was seen as the savior nation by countries around the world. And it was about this point
when American foreign policy changed from isolationism to a more thoughtful form of
interventionism.
However, the Cold War soon reverted American foreign policy back. Communism and

3. 3
the specter of nuclear war forced American foreign policy back into isolationism. At the same
time, horror films of the 1950s fused with science fiction to create the “creature feature.” And
unlike the horror films of the 1940s and before, these films were set in America (or as a form of
American territory such as a base on another planet) with the protagonists under siege from alien
life forms or mutated creatures. In “Postmodern Elements of the Contemporary Horror Film,”
Isabel Cristina Pinedo notes that the 1950s films “locate the monster in a contemporary
American city, sometimes a small town, thus drawing the danger closer to home, but they retain
the exotic in the monster’s prehistoric or outer space origins” (Prince 89). Much like the threat of
nuclear attack, the threat to America comes from outside of America.
The films of the 1950s also contended with the turmoil inside of the country with the fear
of Communist spies and unjust trials. According to Brian Neve in Film and Politics in
America, “the country was in the grip of something like a national panic over the international
and domestic threat of communism” (Neve 171). Meanwhile, the House Committee on Un-
American Activities started the hearings on Hollywood in an attempt to weed out filmmakers
who were sympathetic to the Communist cause. The fear of being blacklisted in Hollywood
caused many filmmakers to take their critiques of American policy to genres such as horror and
science fiction, where most thought the films were a cheap and easy way to make a profit off of
the American people. The popularity of the creature feature meant that filmmakers could create
marketable films that fulfilled studio demands while at the same time take a political stand. In
Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s, Mark Jancovich argues that these
films “portrayed a world of stark choices, a Cold War world in which there was no room for
neutrality” (Jancovich 15). One was either in support of American ideals or against them. The
creature features had defined moral judgments and distinctions between friend and foe. Two of

4. 4
the most iconic of these films are The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Invasion of the
Body Snatchers (1956).
The Thing from Another World (1951) centers a U.S. Air Force crew that discovers an
alien life form that crash-landed on Earth 50,000 years ago. The crew uncovers the alien and
moves it back to their base site, unaware that the alien feeds on human blood. The crew, cut off
from the rest of civilization, must defeat the alien before it kills them and finds its way into the
larger population. The film’s themes of paranoia, invasion, and isolation define the Cold War
era. And in the end, it is the military with the use of American ingenuity that defeats the alien
life form. The Thing can be read as an anti-Communist story in which the alien, that wants to
breed and conquer the planet, is much like the Soviets that threaten the American way of life.
Kendall R. Phillips writes in Projected Fears, “The Thing is driven not by passion or sentiment
but by the desire to expand and conquer” (Phillips 55) in the same way as both Communism and
Capitalism. The terror of the film comes from the question of if this alien was the last of its kind.
Director Howard Hawks links the idea of future alien invasions to nuclear attacks from foreign
(Communist) countries. The Thing’s iconic last lines echo the 1950s “Duck and Cover”
warnings. “Watch the skies, everywhere,” says one of the crewmembers, “Keep looking. Keep
watching the skies!”
Five years after the release of The Thing from Another World, director Don Siegel
unleashed his paranoia masterpiece Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The film follows a small
town doctor who uncovers an alien invasion in which townspeople are being replaced by
identical replications grown from giant alien pods. The “Pod People” look and act like regular
human beings but lack emotion. The aliens’ ultimate goal is to kill and replace the human
population. One of the most interesting parts of Invasion is the reaction that humans have to the

5. 5
Pod People. The hushed whispers about who could be an alien and the concerns made by family
members about strange behavior sounds eerily like the backroom conversations taking place
across America. The fear that a neighbor could be a Communist sympathizer drove many to
lodge complaints with the police. Soon the American camaraderie that carried the nation through
World War II was thrown away for suspicion and fear of coworkers, friends, and even family
members.
Interestingly, Invasion leaves room for interpretation. On one hand, Communism is seen
as the institution that must be feared (the loss of autonomy of the Pod People) but McCarthyist
paranoia is also taken to task. In Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom, Adam Roberts wrote:
Indeed [the film] can be read both as right-wing McCarthyite Communists from
an Alien place are infiltrating our American towns and wiping scaremongering—
out their American values, and the worst of it is they look exactly like
Americans—and as left-wing liberal satire on the ideological climate of
conformism that McCarthyism produced, where the lack of emotion of the
podpeople corresponds to the ethical blind eyes turned by Americans to the
persecutions of their fellows by over-zealous McCarthyites. (Roberts 80)
The question then becomes, what separates us from them? The depersonalization in Invasion
offers an interesting counterpoint to The Thing. In The Thing, the humans are distinctly separate
from the aliens. However in Invasion, there is the possibility of someone becoming the thing
they fear overnight. The ambiguity in Invasion shows a slow trend towards the postmodern
horror film standard of moral and political ambiguity that would arise in the late 1960s alongside
another American crisis – the Vietnam War.
The xenophobic horror films of the 1950s focused on the dangers coming from outside

6. 6
America. What once was contained in other countries in the movies of the 1930s and 1940s
threatened to invade America during the 1950s. However, in these two decades, America was
still seen as the perfect society that must be defended or defected to. The pro-American horror
films relied heavily on the idea that the government would protect the people from aliens,
monsters, and rogue scientists. Invasion of the Body Snatchers ends with the protagonist (Dr.
Miles Bennell) in a hospital after he has explained the alien invasion to a psychologist. No one
believes him until a man is brought into the hospital after a car accident. The psychologist
discovers that another vehicle in the crash was transporting the pods in Dr. Bennell’s story and
the psychologist calls the FBI in order to stop the spread of the pods. There is nothing to assume
that the invasion was stopped but the studio wanted the audience to walk away feeling that the
U.S. government once again protected the people from the outside threat (Jancovich 74).
However, this implicit trust in the power of the U.S. government would implode in the late
1960s.
The 1960s began as a time of national rebirth. Slowly, the United States gained
a “renewed interest in domestic issues” (Neve 211), racism was being openly addressed with
civil rights rulings, and under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy, the country seemed
ready to move beyond the fears of the past. With the American rebirth came the hippie
counterculture that “rejected materialism, […] militarism, rationality, and Western religions and
creeds” (Becker 44) yet embraced “a love of humanity” and pacifism (Becker 45). Yet the world
in which both the average American and counterculture existed (albeit on the fringe) would fall
apart on November 22, 1963 with the assassination of John F. Kennedy Jr. In the years to follow,
Malcolm X, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. would also be murdered. Under the
direction of Lyndon B. Johnson, the Vietnam War would spin out of control, resulting in

7. 7
immense American casualties, a draft, and no strategy. In “A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror
Films and the Politics of Ambivalence,” Matt Becker argues that the “possibility of significant
progressive social change [was] undercut by immense social traumas” (Becker 43) thus resulting
in “political powerlessness and political disengagement” (Becker 43). Members of the pacifist
counterculture grew bitter and angry with the state of the nation and their lack of power to
change it. Soon extremist groups such as The Weather Underground responded to the political
problems with violence, as America was doing overseas in Vietnam. The repressed anger felt by
the counterculture and harsh critiques of America’s bloody war became apparent in the
contemporary horror films Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Last House on the Left
(1972).
George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead ushered in the era of the contemporary horror
film, a more uncompromising and complex style than had been seen before. Gone were the clear
distinctions between right and wrong, “us and them,” or America and the outside world. As the
new wave of horror films would show, America could breed its own evil. Romero’s Night of the
Living Dead depicts a zombie attack on an isolated farmhouse in which a group of survivors
fight to stay alive. Night stands out for its extensive use of gore and the realistic way in which
violence is represented. Shot mostly handheld, the “almost-documentary style of filming in Night
made the horror all the more graphic and immediate” (Phillips 82). Everything in the film was
shot on location with the setting stark and minimal as to give the audience no distance from the
film. Romero removed the humor from the film and imbued the characters with realistic faults
and reactions.
Night of the Living Dead shows a world thrown into complete chaos, where not even the
government can save the people. Romero broke from the idea of the government as the savior (as

8. 8
in the 1950s) and instead had all military and law enforcement in the same state of shock and
confusion as the survivors trapped in the farmhouse. The failure of the government to help the
people from the attack mirrors the sentiment of the late 1960s. At one point in the film,
the “hero,” Ben states that the government will “tell [them] what to do.” Yet help never comes.
Instead, “military and scientific officials seem more interested in bickering about explanations
[…] than providing for the survival of the citizenry” (Phillips 97). With the government
ineffective, the survivors must rely on themselves to fend off the horrors that lurk outside the
farmhouse.
In the entire film, the only rational person is Ben – the film’s default hero and the only
African-American character. It is Ben who keeps the other survivors safe and it is Ben who is the
last man standing at the end of the film. The final sequence in Night of the Living Dead is fraught
with controversy over Romero’s intended meaning. Ben, the autonomous survivor and intelligent
center of the film, is shot dead by a roving band of men (reminiscent of a southern lynch mob)
who are under the direct order of a local sheriff. Ben’s body is dragged out of the farmhouse and
onto a bonfire where he becomes indistinguishable from those he was fighting against. Many
read racial significance into this final scene (it is difficult not to when it is shown in grainy black
and white photographs, much like those taken by the Ku Klux Klan during their murderous
sprees) yet nothing is made of Ben’s race the entire film and Romero has argued that Ben was
never written with a race in mind. In the end, the posse that kills Ben tries to reestablish
the “social order that has been destroyed” (Wood 116) during the zombie siege. The posse
represents a new power structure that kills out of duty “without remorse or hesitation” (Phillips
98) to preserve a certain way of life. However, Romero leaves the audience asking the question
of the future intentions of the posse, who threaten both the zombies and the survivors and if they

9. 9
can hold this new structure together.
The zombies in Romero’s Night move beyond the simple ghouls of earlier horror films.
Instead, the zombies are frightening because they are us, we are the monsters. Romero depicts
the zombies as normal people and thus equates normality with monstrosity (Kellner and Ryan
180). Finally, it would seem that the horror film had made the leap from the outside invader to
realizing that humanity itself can be capable of monstrous acts. Tobe Hooper, director of the
seminal horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, said of this late-1960s revelation, “It became
really clear what was going on in the world, that the real monster is man […] and the real
problem at that particular time was people against people” (Becker 51). In Night, the survivors
battle not only the zombies but also each other for power and control. This strife serves as a
microcosm of the cultural war raging in the late-1960s and for America’s war in Vietnam and
a “full-scale criticism of American values” (Phillips 83). And as with other horror films of this
time, Romero ends Night of the Living Dead on a pessimistic note. With Ben (the voice of
reason) dead and the posse roaming the land, there seems to be no end to the chaos and the real
horror is “that there is nothing we can do that will make any difference at all” (Becker 42).
Matt Becker contends in his essay “A Point of Little Hope” that the “extreme violence,
pessimism, and general horror” of films such as Night of the Living Dead and The Last House on
the Left stood in “stark opposition to the hippie ideals of love, optimism, peace and pacifism”
(Becker 51). The love of all mankind that was the key belief of the hippie movement soured into
the fear of their fellow man. The pacifist beliefs many groups held turned extreme and it seems
as though violence was the only answer, thus turning the counterculture into a mirror of the
American government with its policies of war. The horror films of the late 1960s and 1970s
turned the idea of American moral superiority on its head. Wes Craven, the director of Last

10. 10
House on the Left, realized that “Americans weren’t always the good guys and that things that
we could do, could be horrendous and evil, or dark, impossible to explain” (Becker 49). Craven
called his film “a howl of anger and pain” (Becker 58) against the actions being taken by the
U.S. government in Vietnam.
The Last House on the Left is Craven’s take on Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring, in
which a young girl is murdered and her father takes revenge on the killers. In Craven’s version,
two best friends are brutalize, tortured, and murdered by a gang of psychopaths who then take up
residence in one of the victim’s homes. The parents of the murdered girl eventually find out that
the people staying in their house are the killers and they exact bloody revenge on them in
retaliation. The parents are average Americans who live in the suburbs, the girls are burgeoning
children of the hippie movement, and the killers seem to be castaways from the New Left
moment. In Shocking Representation, Adam Lowenstein argues that Last House “emphasizes the
continuity between its depictions of brutality and the ordinariness of everyday life” (Lowenstein
118). Craven said that he patterned his filming style after that of the newsreel footage from
Vietnam because it “seemed to have a lot more immediacy and truth to it than anything else”
(Becker 55).
Last House has the moral ambiguity that is a trademark of the postmodern horror film. In
the film, the parents can be seen as both victims and perpetrators. Because of the violence that
has wrecked their lives, the only way they know how to respond is with violence. Craven offers
a very powerful reasoning behind the chaos prevalent during the late 1960s. By bringing the
violence of Vietnam home to American suburbs, audiences could see up close what the U.S.
government was doing to others across the world. In Last House on the Left, the murder of the
flower children (Mari and Phyllis) signified the death of the hippie movement by the radical

11. 11
New Left movement seen in extremist groups like The Weather Underground. In the end, there
is no satisfactory resolution to be gained from Last House. There are no heroes to be found in the
parents for their revenge and the evil they sought to dispatch has fused within themselves.
Due to the success of the postmodern horror film in the 1970s, the genre moved from
something seen as being on the fringe of filmmaking to the forefront. Soon horror movies
became widely marketable through the shock value of blood and gore. However, the message
behind those horrific images was lost and the smart political subtext of the postmodern horror
film seemed to recede back to the periphery. Both Wes Craven and George Romero continued on
making films yet only Romero has stuck to the formula that served him best. His Living Dead
series remains one of the most popular in all of film and he has influenced generations of new
horror film directors who wish to imbue their films with more substance. Romero, along with
other horror film directors between the 1950s and 1970s, shaped the way that audiences not only
viewed the potential of horror film but also how they viewed America itself. Robin Wood
contends that the horror film has succeeded in carrying political messages because the genre
itself is about repression and the American people repress their fears of the outside world. Adam
Lowenstein agrees with Wood’s argument and adds that horror films succeed because of
a "shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical
time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined. [...] The film's horrific images, sounds, and
narrative combine with visceral spectator affect (terror, disgust, sympathy, sadness) to embody
issues that characterize the historical trauma" (Lowenstein 2). With the world again teetering on
the edge of chaos, horror films are returning to the revolutionary narratives that propelled it to
the forefront in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s with new filmmakers empowered by world events and
new national traumas.

12. 12
Works Cited:
1. Becker, Matt. “A Point of Little Hope: Hippie Horror Films and the Politics of Ambivalence.”
Velvet Light Trap. 57. 1 (2006): 42-59.
2. Jancovich, Mark. Rational Fears: American Horror in the 1950s. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1996.
3. Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the
Modern Horror Film. Film and culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
4. Nelson, John. “Horror Films Face Political Evils in Everyday Life.” Political Communication.
22. 3 (2005): 381-386
5. Neve, Brian. Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition. New York: Routledge, 1992.
6. Phillips, Kendall R. Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture. Westport, Conn:
Praeger Publishers, 2005.
7. Prince, Stephen. The Horror Film. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
2004.
8. Roberts, Adam. Science Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2006.
9. Ryan, Michael, and Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1988.
10. Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press,
1986.