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Culture Wars and
Horror Movies
Social Fears and Ideology
in post-2010 Horror Cinema
Edited by
Noelia Gregorio-Fernández
Carmen M. Méndez-García
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Culture Wars and Horror Movies
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Noelia Gregorio-Fernández
Carmen M. Méndez-García
Editors
Culture Wars and
Horror Movies
Social Fears and Ideology in Post-2010
Horror Cinema
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Contents
1 Introduction:
Culture Wars Revisited: Navigating the
Ideological Landscape in Post-2010 Social Horror 1
Noelia Gregorio-Fernández and Carmen M. Méndez-García
Part I White Anxieties: Current Challenges 9
2 Black
Bodies/White Spaces: The Horrors of White
Supremacy in Get Out (2017) 11
Hervé Mayer
3 The
Post-Truth Era and Monstrous Ambiguity in It
Comes at Night (2017), The Invitation (2015), and The
Gift (2015) 27
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns
4 “I
Can’t (Don’t) Breathe”: White Veterans and TwentyFirst-­Century Culture Wars 47
James I. Deutsch
5 The
Unbearable Whiteness of Get Out (2017) and
Midsommar (2019) 63
Donald L. Anderson
v
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vi
Contents
Part II Oppression, Abjection, and Race: Black Bodies and
Communities 85
6 “Tell
Everyone”: Abjection and Social Justice in
Candyman (2021) 87
Victoria Santamaría Ibor
7 “
Say His Name”: Candyman (2021) as a Critique of
Black Trauma Porn105
William Chavez
8 “It’s
Probably the Neighbors”: Identity, Otherness, and
the Return of the Oppressed in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019)129
Thomas B. Byers
Part III Economic Exploitation and Neoliberalism:
Privilege, Class and the Other 147
9 The
Revenge of the Serves: The Wounds of Neoliberalism
in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019)149
Fabián Orán Llarena
10 Preying
on the Other: Culture Wars Narratives in
Horror Hunting Films169
Melenia Arouh and Daniel McCormac
11 Humans
Hunting Humans: Allegories of Cultural and
Economic Divides across National Boundaries191
Pablo Gómez-Muñoz
12 “Obliteration
of the Unfit”: Disposable Other Bodies
and Economic Privilege in the The Purge Film Series209
Gamze Katı Gümüş
Index229
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Notes on Contributors
Donald L. Anderson teaches film, literature, and writing at Mt Hood
Community College outside of Portland, Oregon, where he also teaches a
course on the horror film each year. He has published on mostly Italian
horror in Horror Studies, Situations, Gothic Studies, Rhizomes, and Studies
in the Fantastic, and has contributed to the anthologies Make America
Hate Again: Trump-era Horror & the Politics of Fear (2019) and
Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad (2023). He
is also the guitarist for the long-running heavy metal band Agalloch who
have released five full-length albums and have toured throughout North
America and Europe.
Melenia Arouh is Associate Professor at Deree, the American College of
Greece, teaching courses in the Communication and Philosophy programs. Her teaching includes such courses as Philosophy and Cinema,
Aesthetics, American Cinema, and Film Analysis. Most recently she led the
validation of a new Cinema Studies BA at Deree College. Her research
interests are in film, television, and digital media, and she is primarily
interested in interdisciplinary scholarship that links film and media theory
with philosophical enquiry. Specifically, she has published articles and
chapters on mapping cinema space, aesthetics and film form, morality and
Schindler’s List, online television fandoms and toxicity, and the impact of
Hamilton: An American Musical.
Thomas B. Byers is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of
Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, where he also served as Director
vii
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viii
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
of the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society. From 2016
to 2021 he was Profesor Honorífico at the Complutense University of
Madrid. He has had Fulbrights in Denmark and Ukraine, and has been a
visiting professor at the University of Milan, the State University of São
Paulo, and the University of Paris IV—La Sorbonne, where he held the
Chaire DuPront. His publications include What I Cannot Say: Self, Word,
and World in Whitman, Stevens, and Merwin (1989); articles in
Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Cultural Critique,
Transatlantica, Arizona Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, and
other journals; and chapters in collections from Oxford, Illinois, Indiana,
Verso, and other presses. For twelve years he directed the US Department
of State Study of the US Institute on Contemporary American Literature.
William Chavez is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stetson
University, and studies the doom and gloom of religious imagination. His
dissertation Exorcism in America: As Practice and Spectacle examines how
contemporary exorcists negotiate the popular mediatization of their practice and how exorcism discourse is appropriated in media by marginalized
communities to identify and resist Western hegemonies. William specializes in legacy and new digital media. A scholar of American religion, folklore, and popular culture, William contributes to the collaborative
Gaming+ Project, organized by Daigengna Duoer, Keita Moore, and
Kaitlyn Ugoretz (UC Santa Barbara). Chavez appears as a gamer/guest
on the Folkwise podcast, hosted by Dominick Tartaglia (Florida Folklife
Program) and Daisy Ahlstone (Ohio State University). He serves on the
steering committee for the AAR Religion, Media, and Culture Unit and is
co-developing an edited volume with Valeria Dani (Cornell University) on
the material and ideological intersections between horror media and class.
James I. Deutsch is a curator and editor at the Smithsonian Institution’s
Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, DC, where he
has helped plan and develop public programs on California, China,
Hungary, Baltic nations, Ukraine, the Peace Corps, the Apollo Theater,
Circus Arts, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the
Mekong River, the US Forest Service, World War II, the Silk Road, and
White House workers. In addition, he serves as an adjunct professor—
teaching courses on American Film History and Folklore—in the American
Studies Department at George Washington University. Deutsch has also
taught American Studies classes at universities in Armenia, Belarus,
Bulgaria, Germany, Kyrgyzstan, Norway, Poland, and Turkey. He has
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
ix
attained academic degrees from Williams College (BA), the University of
Minnesota (MA), Emory University (MLn), and George Washington
University (PhD), and has published numerous articles and encyclopedia
entries on a wide range of topics relating to film and folklore.
Pablo Gómez-Muñoz is Assistant Professor of English and Film at the
University of Zaragoza (Spain). His book Science Fiction Cinema in the
Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns was
published in December 2022. His research interests include transnational
cinema, science fiction, space, cosmopolitanism, precarity, borders, spectacle, and climate change. He is a member of the research project “From
Social Space to Cinematic Space: Mise-en-Scènes of the Transnational in
Contemporary Cinema” (PID2021-123836NB-I00). He is also Book
Reviews Editor at Film Journal.
Noelia Gregorio-Fernández (PhD in American Studies) is Associate
Professor at the International University of La Rioja (Spain) in the School
of Social Sciencies and Humanities. She has been a visiting scholar at the
Chicano Research Center (UCLA, 2014), the JFK Institute of North
American Studies (Frëie Universitat of Berlin, 2015), and the Center for
the Study of Ethnicity and Race (Columbia University of New York,
2016). Her lines of research focus on ethnic representations in media,
Chicano cinema, and transnational models in American literature and culture. She has written about Latino ethnicity in contemporary US cinema,
American culture, and cultural identity and cinematic representation in
publications such as Atlantis, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature,
Post Script, and Cinemas d’Amérique Latine. Her second monographic
work, Una mirada al cine chicano: Robert Rodriguez en la era transnacional, was published in 2020 in the Benjamin Franklin Library collection at
the Editorial Universidad de Alcalá.
Gamze Katı Gümüş is Assistant Professor at Ankara University, in the
American Culture and Literature Department, where she received her BA
and MA degrees. Gümüş completed her PhD in the Department of
American Studies at the University of Kansas. She concentrates her studies
on immigrants and immigrant literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, ethnic newspapers, and the hegemonic power structures of
everyday US institutions. Gümüş teaches American History and Literature
at the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography, and she serves as a
member of the editorial board of DTCF Journal.
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x
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Hervé Mayer is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Cinema at
Paul-­Valéry University, Montpellier 3. His research focuses on the construction of power and political identities in US-American cinema. He is
the author of Guerre sauvage et empire de la liberté (2021) and La
Construction de l’Ouest américain dans le cinéma hollywoodien (2017) and
co-editor of Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global
Western Film (2022).
Daniel McCormac holds an MA in Journalism and Media Management
and a BA in politics. He is an assistant professor at Deree, the American
College of Greece, where he teaches courses on the History of
Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations. His teaching covers
such areas as the history of media, multimedia journalism, and public relations communication techniques. He also works as a PR communication
consultant, training corporate executives in public speaking and consulting them in areas related to the development of media communication
strategies and tactics. He previously worked as a print and television journalist and editor, and his professional experiences fostered his academic
interest in identifying and understanding how frames are used in public
discourse to persuade audiences or confirm their pre-existing attitudes and
beliefs; in examining how competing frames interact with each other; and
in exploring the ethical issues that surround the use of frames in media and
politics.
Carmen M. Méndez-García is Associate Professor of American
Literature in the Department of English Studies, Universidad Complutense
de Madrid (Spain). Her doctoral dissertation, The Rhetorics of Schizophrenia
in the Epigones of Modernism (2003), was based on her research as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001 and 2002. She was also a participant in the 2010 Study of the United States Institute on Contemporary
American Literature at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, funded by
the Spanish Fulbright program and the US Department of State. Her
research and teaching interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-­century
US literature, postmodernism and contemporary fiction, the countercultures in the U.S., spatial studies, gender studies, medical humanities, and
minority studies (especially Chicana studies).
Fabián Orán Llarena holds a Masters in North American Studies (2013)
and a PhD in English Studies (2016) from the University of La Laguna.
He works at the University of La Laguna as an assistant lecturer in the
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xi
Department of English and German Philology. His research interests lie in
the fields of American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Film Studies, with a
focus on contemporary American film and its engagement with cultural
debates concerning post-9/11 politics, the rise of right-wing populism,
and the crises wrought by the Great Recession. He is likewise interested in
Marxist and post-Marxist thought and affect theory. He has been a visiting
scholar at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of North American Studies
(University of Alcala, 2018) and at the JFK Institute of North American
Studies (Frëie Universitat of Berlin, 2022).
Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (PhD in Arts, PhD candidate in
History) works as a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA),
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina), where he teaches courses on
international horror film. He is the director of the research group on horror cinema “Grite” and has authored a book about Spanish horror TV
series, Historias para no dormir (2020). He has edited books on
Frankenstein’s bicentennial, on directors James Wan and Wes Craven, on
the Italian giallo film, and horror comics. He is editing a book on Hammer
horror films and another on Baltic horror.
Victoria Santamaría Ibor is a doctoral candidate at the University of
Zaragoza. She graduated with honors in English Studies from the
University of Zaragoza and was awarded with an honorary mention for
her final degree project. Recently, Victoria published the paper ‘“I Eat
Boys’: Monstrous Femininity in Jennifer’s Body” in the journal BabelAFIAL from the University of Vigo. She is writing her thesis on spaces of
abjection in horror cinema from 2008, research that has received funding
from El Gobierno de Aragón. Her research interests include: horror
cinema, abjection, spatial theory, precarity, gender, and otherness.
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Culture Wars Revisited:
Navigating the Ideological Landscape
in Post-2010 Social Horror
Noelia Gregorio-Fernández
and Carmen M. Méndez-García
When Jordan Peele’s Get Out made its big-screen debut in 2017, it was
met with instant, widespread praise among worldwide audiences for its
creative blending of horror conventions and social commentary. As part of
the horror film trend commonly known as “social horror” (Heba 1995;
Kronja 2016), Get Out championed the filmic representation of sociopolitical ideologies in the United States at a time when horror codes and
N. Gregorio-Fernández (*)
Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Internacional de La
Rioja, Logroño, Spain
e-mail: noelia.gregorio@unir.net
C. M. Méndez-García
Departamento de Estudios Ingleses, Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
Madrid, Spain
e-mail: cmmendez@ucm.es
1
N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture
Wars and Horror Movies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_1
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2
N. GREGORIO-FERNÁNDEZ AND C. M. MÉNDEZ-GARCÍA
sociocultural issues acquired recognized critical distinction. Parallel to
current divisive sociopolitical disagreements, contemporary horror movies
are emerging as a reproduction of what dominates popular culture and the
current political framework: culture wars.
Identity politics and social media are more than ever polarizing Western
civilization and, specifically, the United States, now deeply divided in their
fundamental political views. The clash between social conservatives and
progressives in American society, described as “culture wars” by sociologist James D. Hunter (1991), is as much a reality today as they were in the
past. Beginning in the 1960s, the United States experienced a partisan
conflict over cultural issues such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, immigration, and ecology, which is actively exported as a model to
other cultural spheres such as contemporary cinema. According to theses
on the present-day existence of culture wars, a number of significant battles can be identified in contemporary cinema as “new fronts in the culture
war” (Castle 2013), thereby giving reasons to revisit the culture wars
debate. Since the 2010s, American politics has been increasingly spoken of
in terms of culture wars, even though, as Roger Chapman has argued,
cultural battles raging on American soil are “nothing new” to the history
of the land and its peoples (2010, xxxi). New culture wars have accrued to
traditional ones, such as those hinging on feminism, migration, the rights
of racial minorities, and manifestations of so-called American exceptionalism. Old and new culture wars polarize American public opinion and often
lead to full-on conflicts acted out in the streets or in courts of law, in the
mass media, and in governmental and intergovernmental bodies. Twenty-­
first-­century culture wars include those concerning the #MeToo and the
Black Lives Matter movement, immigration, class, white masculinity, religion, and socioeconomics, together with more recent ones relating to the
COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election and the subsequent attack on the Capitol. In the last decade, American culture wars—
not to mention proxy wars connected to larger culture wars—have
multiplied and branched out, so much so that, recently, The Atlantic’s
Helen Lewis declared that “the world is trapped in America’s culture war”
(2020), suggesting that American culture wars have even expanded around
the globe. According to Lewis, this is partly explained by the rewards
involved in social media consumption and the advertising revenue of massively popular American conflicts on all sorts of topics, regardless of
whether a given topic is of immediate or tangential interest to the local
environment.
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1
INTRODUCTION: CULTURE WARS REVISITED: NAVIGATING…
3
What is interesting about the current American culture wars, besides
their current viral status, is their intimate connection with the horror
genre’s sociopolitical nature, which can be discerned in new manifestations of the culture wars phenomenon which deserves our critical attention. The widespread social discontent with recent political actions has
been connected to recent horror films, specifically those filmed in the
2010s and onward, which can be taken to be examples of a critical framework that attempts to understand the social divide in the current US society. Yet, even more expansively, culture wars feed off the bountiful terrain
of horror: #MeToo and notions of consent, the Black Lives Matter movement and the oppression of Black Americans, immigration, class, the so-­
called “crises” of white masculinity, religion, and society are central to the
stories told by the genre. As Murray, Rabin, and Tobias argue, “horror
films are usually a better gauge of what’s making the country anxious than
opinion polls are” (2006). In this respect, horror film examples have often
been considered to be cultural products with left-wing, rather than right-­
wing, tendencies, thus presenting themselves or being interpreted as
biased narratives. However, now that the blue-red divide is more evident
than ever in American society, and as a result of the current sociopolitical
map, we can find a more conservative position in several post-2010 horror movies.
This volume is devoted to exploring this current political divide in the
United States in the culture wars arena and its complex and timely commentary on twenty-first-century US social relations. Within the context of
different culture wars, the horror film genre in the second decade of this
century has been re/claimed to shore up (cultural) identity/ies; it has
been traded upon to serve sociopolitical agendas; it has been retooled and
repurposed, in past and contemporary environments; and it has been
revised as part of new cultural projects, more recently in even transnational
arenas. At times, post-2010 horror movies have taken sides, aligning with
the cause of one or the other social group; at other times, they have challenged all parties involved, thus complicating a specific culture war,
whether its rationale or a single iteration of it; and at others still, they have
wrestled with the premises, instantiations, and implications of culture
wars. While performing in the foregoing capacities, the horror genre
encompasses an inclusive range of narratives, variously and variably inspired
by and based on sociopolitical division in the United States today.
Moreover, the genre has come to involve a diverse array of approaches to
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4
N. GREGORIO-FERNÁNDEZ AND C. M. MÉNDEZ-GARCÍA
and patterns of revisiting, treating, retelling, and rethinking the horror
film genre, drawing meaning from culture wars.
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, horror was claimed to be
the perfect medium for re-presenting 9/11 and its aftermath. Robert
J. Thompson, in a 2001 The New York Times article by Rick Lyman, tried
to imagine the forms that horror films would take to adapt to the new
global context, declaring that “to deal with this … [the horror film] is one
of the most versatile genres out there, and it is now perfectly positioned to
cop some serious attitude, to play a role where it’s not simply a date movie
but going further back, to the 1950s, where you have the horror movie as
metaphor.” It is significant, then, how these “metaphorical” stories of
9/11 went through visual narratives of horror. In this way, in the first
decade of the twenty-first century, a wave of horror films was classified
under the label of “torture porn.” Since David Edelstein coined the term
for a New York Magazine article a few years after 9/11, many critics have
speculated that these movies reflected iconic images, anxieties, and sadistic
fantasies that emerged from the War on Terror. Torture Porn in the wake
of 9/11, thus, tackled a series of tough philosophical, historical, and aesthetic questions that responded to the context in which they were created
and drew from older tropes. Similarly, in our approach to the following
decade (2010–2020), we pretend to demonstrate that the horror genre
must be understood as part of a sociopolitical phenomenon largely rooted
in a long tradition of the American political stage, that of the culture wars.
This volume builds on existing literature produced in the last years on
the phenomenon of political instances and culture wars within the horror
genre. Among this examples, we can find Russell Meeuf’s White Terror:
The Horror Film from Obama to Trump (Indiana University Press, 2022),
an exploration on how racial, political commentaries were represented
during the Obama era and gave rise to the Trump presidency; Victoria
McCollum’s edited volume Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era
Horror and the Politics of Fear (Routledge, 2019), in which the horror
genre adapts itself to the transformation of contemporary American politics with a renewed potential for political engagement in a climate of civil
conflict; Dawn Keetley’s examination of polarized politics in Jordan Peele’s
Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State UP, 2020), devoted to the film’s
roots in the horror tradition and its complex commentary on the twenty-­
first-­
century US race relations; Adam Lowenstein’s Horror Film and
Otherness (2022), which studies new meanings of horror and why it matters for understanding social Otherness and ongoing metamorphoses
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INTRODUCTION: CULTURE WARS REVISITED: NAVIGATING…
5
across “normal” self and “monstrous” Others; and Kendall Phillips’ A
Cinema of Hopelessness: The Rhetoric of Rage in 21st century Popular
Culture (2021), a discussion of political thinking in the international context around the first decades of the twenty-first century.
The widespread social discontent with recent political actions has been
connected to recent horror films, which can be taken to be examples of a
critical framework that attempts to understand social divisions today. In
this volume, we ask ourselves the following: How can we create a framework for the analysis of conflicting and divisive sociocultural representations in contemporary horror cinema? Are American horror films becoming
more polarized in their representation of social values? Have movements
such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter contributed to making this trend
even more salient? Which conventions of the genre challenge traditional
values and ideals within twenty-first-century horror cinema? By what
means are these movies taking sides in the current culture wars? This volume aims to turn the spotlight on commonly believed myths about the
American sociopolitical reality, with chapters about neoliberalism, social
justice, socioeconomic dispossession, and critical race, claiming that the
current US society is deeply divided in its fundamental political views.
Focusing on representations of neoliberalism and racial politics that pervade contemporary horror cinema, this volume explores the ideological
polarization in US society as portrayed in horror fiction narratives
and tropes.
The three sections in this edited collection (volume one of the “Culture
Wars and Horror Movies” project) comprise categories such as the exploration of racial debates, in which Blackness and whiteness take the center
of the stage, economic exploitation, and neoliberalism, with the chapters
in each section approaching the subject matter from various angles so that
multiple and diverse opinions and views emerge. Part One, entitled “White
Anxieties: Current Challenges,” addresses concerns pertaining to whiteness, its representation in horror films in the second decade of the twenty-­
first century, and its accommodation to culture wars readings. Herve
Mayer opens the section with a chapter that sets out to examine the racial
politics of Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) in terms of the exploitation of
Black bodies and the racialized power dynamics in social spaces in a predominantly white sociopolitical environment. The Manichean ethos that
defined “good” and “bad” under Donald Trump’s presidency is the central focus of Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns’ chapter, which explores
white America’s anxieties as derived from the uncertainty of the political
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6
N. GREGORIO-FERNÁNDEZ AND C. M. MÉNDEZ-GARCÍA
climate and the fear of the outsider, or the “Other,” in It Comes at Night
(Joel Edgerton, 2015), The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015), and The
Gift (Joel Edgerton, 2015). The next chapter in the section, by James I.
Deutsch, sheds light on the reinforcement of white supremacy in the context of culture wars by exploring a cycle of horror films: Don’t Breathe
(Fede Álvarez, 2016) and Don’t Breathe 2 (Rodo Sayagues, 2021), starring a white Gulf War veteran. By focusing on the notable absence of
African American characters, Deutsch suggests a possible reading of the
film connected with George Floyd’s death and the “Can’t Breathe” protests of 2020 as the continuation of earlier culture wars in the United
States. Donald L. Anderson closes this section with a reading of Midsommar
(Ari Aster, 2019) in terms of white monstrosity, revisiting classic theories
of the viewers’ experience and the gaze, and confronting the limits of
white liberalism in the United States and the violent representations of
whiteness in the American consciousness.
Part Two, entitled “Oppression, Abjection, and Race: Black Bodies and
Communities,” groups chapters in which issues of racial oppression,
already anticipated in the previous chapters in the collection, take center
stage. Victoria Santamaría Ibor investigates abjection and social justice in
the new Candyman (Nia Da Costa, 2021). By focusing on the polarized
social divisions in the current culture wars context, the chapter explores
the portrayal of the abject space in Candyman as the result of the racism
and marginalization by a society in which gentrification is used as a cover
for a history of continuous racial discrimination. William Chavez’s chapter
expands on the previous commentary, by analyzing how Candyman (Nia
Da Costa, 2021) uses Black horror and Black trauma as a way of transcending the persistent hostility of American society, building on the cultural and social significance of the earlier Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992)
movie. By interpreting the monster’s reconstitution as a popular expression of Afro-pessimistic thought, this chapter argues that the film’s ambivalence toward the propagation of Black historical horror is a reflection of
present and historical cultural anxieties. Ending this section, Thomas
B. Byers’ chapter focuses on Us (Jordan Peele, 2019) as an active agent in
the culture wars debate, representing the repressed history of the
oppressed. By deconstructing the “us versus them” opposition and particularly in its use of the uncanny figure of the “neighbor,” Us stands out
as a reformulation of how much the forging of the nation itself as e pluribus unum (from many, one) depends on the ruthless denial of the many,
in this case, the racialized Other.
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1
INTRODUCTION: CULTURE WARS REVISITED: NAVIGATING…
7
Part Three, “Economic Exploitation and Neoliberalism: Privilege,
Class and the Other,” builds on how the racial anxieties explored in the
previous section are connected to issues of class and privilege by focusing
on a series of films that explicitly express ideological and moral views
related to economic neoliberal patterns. Fabián Orán Llarena’s chapter
examines violence and the wounds of neoliberalism in Jordan Peele’s Us
(2019). This approach goes beyond racial examination by reflecting upon
inequality, systemic violence, and the relationship between white middle-­
class liberalism and the Black community during the Obama era. Melenia
Arouh and Daniel McCormac turn our attention to manhunting films,
revisiting The Hunt (Craig Zobel, 2020), a movie that, using social horror
as a genre, expresses the current ideological polarization between conservatives and liberals within the context of the culture wars. Similarly, Pablo
Gómez-Muñoz focuses on the first three films in The Purge franchise
(2013–2016) and the film The Hunt (Craig Zobel, 2020), studying the
socioeconomic discourses that these films develop, arguing that they
respond to contemporary fears of neoliberal elites and transnational economic exploitation. In Gómez-Muñoz’s transnational reading, manhunting films reframe culture wars and emerging concerns about the ability of
global elites to engage in corrupt practices across borders and to mold
foreign spaces. To end this section and the volume, Gamze Katı Gümüş
revisits The Purge film series (2013–2021), reflecting on how the elimination of the “undesirable” elements in American society present in the
series questions ideas such as consumerism, white supremacy, the limitations imposed by capitalism on BIPOC individuals, immigrants, and the
homeless; and the return of eugenic thinking as a solution to the problems
created by capitalism itself.
All in all, this edited volume analyzes the ways in which the ideology of
culture, also known as “culture wars,” has made its way into post-2010
horror film. Looking at horror films through this perspective, we can identify real-life connections between the worlds of horror and politics, with a
growing fascination with the filmic representation of right-wing figures
and narratives while we observe an accentuation of racial, economic, and
social problems. Navigating a polarized society in their representation of
social values, twenty-first-century horror films from the 2010s onward
contribute to creating a framework in which conflicting and ideological
issues are discussed. The diversity in the eleven chapters in the volume,
and the variety in the topics and films analyzed in the light of current
sociopolitical events, underline the vibrancy and complexity that
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Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
8
N. GREGORIO-FERNÁNDEZ AND C. M. MÉNDEZ-GARCÍA
characterize the study of the horror genre in sociopolitical terms and specifically under the auspices of culture wars. The chapters also situate the
films in a very specific time and place, both that of when the fictions are set
and that of the sociohistorical and regional contexts of their making, distribution, and reception. In conclusion, the value of this edited volume
lies in its potential to generate debates given the many perspectives it
introduces, which reflect the reconfiguration of the United States and its
position in the sociopolitical order. Taken in its parts and as a whole, this
volume aims to help scholars, professors, film students, and those interested in the interplay of sociology, politics, and the arts to understand the
sociopolitical polarization displayed in contemporary horror movies.
References
Castle, Maria Alena. 2013. Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your
Freedom. Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press.
Chapman, Roger. 2010. Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints and
Voices. New York: Routledge.
Heba, Gary. 1995. Everyday Nightmares: The Rhetoric of Social Horror in the
Nightmare on Elm Street Series. Journal of Popular Film and Television 23
(3): 106–115.
Hunter, James D. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York:
Basic Books.
Kronja, Ivana. 2016. “Social Horror”: A Critical Analysis of Ideological and Poetic
Function of the Motive of Victim in the Contemporary Serbian Film. Temida
19 (2): 309–329.
Lewis, Helen. 2020. The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War. The Atlantic,
October 27. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/
internet-­world-­trapped-­americas-­culture-­war/616799/
Murray, Noel, Nathan Rabin, and Scott Tobias. 2006. “What Monster Could
Have Done This?”: Horror Films for Left-Wingers / Horror Films For RightWingers. The A.V. Club, October 25. https://www.avclub.com/what-monstercould-have-done-this-horror-films-for-1798211549
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