movies—the thermometers of anxiety in popular culture—featured alien invasions, parasitic occupations of the brain, and body snatching: It Came from Outer Space or The Man from Planet X. But by the early 1970s, the locus of anxiety—the “object of horror,” as Salecl describes it—had dramatically shifted from the outside to the inside. The rot, the horror—the biological decay and its concomitant spiritual decay—was now relocated within the corpus of society and, by extension, within the body of man. American society was still threatened, but this time, the threat came from inside. The names of
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