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October 15, 2022 - January 20, 2023
Horror fictions clashed with the way much of America wanted to understand itself.
He fervently believed the United States had a burden to carry for the world, what he referred to as a “manifest duty.” The phrase he chose consciously echoed the nineteenth-century idea of “manifest destiny,” a quasi-religious notion popularized by politicians and the press that saw the United States as chosen to civilize, colonize, and exploit the continent of North America.
The bloody wake left by America’s ascent into empire has been legitimized by the notion of American exceptionalism.
As recently as 2010, a USA Today/Gallup poll found that fully 80 percent of respondents believed the United States to be “the greatest nation on earth.” Two-thirds believed this gave the country a special mission to lead the globe, essentially Luce’s claim about the country.
Much of the conversation about “post-” or “elevated” horror (or other descriptors like “art horror” and even “smart horror”) glossed over the issue really being debated.
the question has been less about whether horror films are good and more a question of whether they matter.
There’s no way to do that effectively without pushing political buttons to overstimulate the most delicate nerve endings of personal belief, ideology, patriotism, gender roles, and unexamined hatreds.
Paul Tremblay writes that horror really works only when it “push[es] and prod[s] at moral boundaries” and forces its audience to “confront personal and societal taboos.”
we are left with the simple fact that horror tells us more about the world than we want to know. Aislinn Clarke simply calls horror “the slow, dawning realization that the worst thing is true.”
Historian and essayist Michael Parenti calls the horrors hidden by fantasy “dirty truths.” By this, he does not mean uncomfortable ideas that are debated. He means ideas that lack respectability to such a degree that you don’t mention them in polite company. They exude such an aura of unreality that they seem to besmirch even the people who tell you about them. Yet, they are still truths.
This book uses a simple definition of imperial power as the exercise of military, economic, and cultural dominance beyond the geographical borders of the homeland or nation-state.
HORROR IS the dream life of American empire.
It’s not paradoxical that an empire built on very real horror consumes horror as part of its regular entertainment.
Our dependence on various sadisms to maintain the nation’s hegemony has caused two different dreams to emerge in the American unconscious.
The first is a dream of safety and security. Most American citizens do not think of themselves as living in an empire but instead in a great nation that mostly does good things.
Another kind of horror film denies us security and comfort, even as it refuses to let us believe we are the legitimate heirs of imperial privilege. These films demand we recognize how the American dream has been assembled from the night terrors of the world.
Horror lets us know that how we expected the world to act has been indefinitely cancelled.
This is the precise opposite of entertainment as escapism, the wish to ignore reality. Michael Moorcock once attacked J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasies as escapism that encouraged a Tory view of the world. Tolkien rebuked the young Marxist, saying that “jailers always hate escapism.” Moorcock famously replied that actually jailers love escapism—what they hate is an actual jailbreak.
they do leave the theater or close their streaming app with either a feeling of the rightness or wrongness of the world. They’ve been asked to question the story they tell themselves about reality. They’ve been asked to pay attention or they’ve been told to go back to sleep, everything’s okay.
The film starts as a story about finding the family farm, the old dream of the homestead, the West that became the first frontier of the American empire. But it quickly becomes a fright tale that questions the sanity of any audience that would watch it and, by extension, the sanity of anyone who would believe the western fantasy of deserts inexplicably fecund and settlers moving peacefully across the landscapes, covered wagons like little puffs of cloud drifting along in an orderly row with the breeze of the American dream nudging them along.
the country that “perfected the concept of the ‘freefire zone’” in Vietnam and found fragmentation bombs amenable to the spirit of suburbia’s “well-kept lawns” possibly suffered a hypocrisy problem.
It’s more than a geographical island—it’s an island out of time, America’s dream of itself in the fifties, a place where you’d never know Vietnam or Watergate ever happened. Everyone is inexorably middle class and happy until the shark shows up to ruin it. But then our heroes kill it and America can go on dreaming the dream of itself.
Chain Saw and Jaws, appearing at the same cultural turn, are the twin poles of American imagination at a crucial moment in the country’s history.
To understand this is to understand the nature of the American empire and its citizens’ profound lack of interest in confronting that reality. It’s different from every imperial power that’s come before it. It pretends not to exist. It’s willing to use lethal violence or to celebrate it uproariously, and then to forget it, to imagine its consequences are less important than they are. The public goes along—except when they suddenly don’t—but then reveal once more their genius for moderation, simplistic thinking, and unwillingness to face the truths of the world that gives them the iPhone and
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Horror films have dealt with the memory of America’s imperial beginnings by turning to the trope of the haunted Indian burial ground,
Both Colin Dickey and Shea Vassar describe how, somewhere at the edge of white awareness, there lurks the realization that American capital built an empire on the remains of the dead.
So the bleak world the United States built after the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 not only wreaked havoc around the globe. Americans, the working class, people of color, any dissenters, all suffered as their nation-state became a global leviathan.
A few months before the Great War began in 1914, National Guard troops and a private paramilitary force deployed by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (part of the Rockefeller empire) machine-gunned and burned to death whole families of striking workers who lived in a tent city raised outside the company-owned town of Ludlow.
Living as a citizen of the empire means never having to think about it. Meanwhile, living as a subject, or victim, of the empire means never being able to forget it.
Before leaving Vietnam, Savini saw American soda being sold in traditional villages to and by the American armed forces. Coca-Cola, that’s the reason his country sent him to South Asia, he later suggested.
By May 1, 1975, more Vietnam veterans committed suicide than died in the war itself.
The mad dance of Leatherface holds some appeal. As have the promises of a con artist who represents a parasitic class that destroyed entire social and cultural worlds with their mind-numbingly relentless financial monoculture. Yet, like a good horror film, he gives them an outlet to expend their rage and feel their fears.
Few noticed that the salvation of a corporate entity created a crisis at the dinner table and the gas pump for workers whose wages stagnated while inflation exploded. Almost no one, certainly not Iacocca, noted that Chrysler’s salvation came from a government bailout.
The sheer savagery of Krueger, combined with his supernatural origins, set him apart from the slasher films that came before. Tobe Hooper’s postindustrial serial killers deep in the heart of Texas are probably much more frightening. But a decade later, it was Fred Krueger’s origin story and its implications that raised a chill on America’s collective spine.
despite the general impression most middle-class Americans shared in the eighties and nineties, crime against property in America declined rapidly. It became increasingly unlikely that you’d die at the hands of a stranger made “feral” by “the inner city.” However, between 1980 and 2008, families, friends, and acquaintances murdered one another with prolific enthusiasm, accounting for far more death than “gang-related” murders. During this period, nearly 80 percent of murder victims knew their killer and almost 42 percent of female homicides came at the hands of a romantic partner.
Readers who combined a general openness to unsubstantiated claims and felt helpless to understand the tumultuous twentieth century formed a large majority of both Lindsey’s and Däniken’s readership.
In their uncertainty and political immaturity, the baby boomers became seekers who didn’t know where to look, examples of how many of those who wander are actually just really lost.
American fundamentalism exerted significant influence in the South and Midwest for most of the twentieth century. Adherents tended to be rural and lack formal education, marginalized even in moments of American prosperity.
Inaccurately, Rosemary’s Baby would later be noted, or perhaps blamed, for a flood tide of interest in all things occult. The roots of such fascination are deeper and even more peculiar. The alleged “rise of Satanism” owed much to religious conservatives like Lindsey, who believed, as one of his book titles insisted, that Satan Is Alive and Well on Planet Earth.
America’s geopolitical foes are the bad guys even in the apocalypse. America’s unqualified support for the state of Israel grew out of this period.
Conflicting, contradictory, and counterintuitive ideas didn’t matter. The religious right’s worldview fit with Reagan’s message of traditional virtues and America the omnipotent.
The return of this subgenre of horror, the Caribbean zombi suddenly as popular as George A. Romero’s apocalyptic hordes, didn’t reflect on American politics. It represented a new funhouse mirror of the dark carnival that legitimized and justified racism at home while weaponizing American power abroad.
Anxiety about empire played a larger role in the Satanism scare than historians, modern folklorists, and sociologists have conceded in the past.
America also gave South Africa a bad case of the satanic panic. Not surprisingly, it appeared in a highly racialized form.
The deluded ideas of QAnon have the DNA of Hammond’s claims, particularly his insistence that satanic kill squads kidnapped, programmed, and sometimes sacrificed kids on American army bases. These same groups, Hammond told therapists, also made money from drugs and arms sales.
