We have all watched, through our fingers, people eating things that make our skin crawl. Kangaroo testicles on reality shows. Anthony Bourdain eating a live cobra heart. Those “special” offal dishes in Portugal that don’t have a name. But what really terrifies people, what keeps them awake and sweating through their sheets at night isn’t what’s on their plates. It the things crawling around in their subconscious, just waiting to rip through the screen in a darkened cinema.
To carry on the metaphor, horror movies are the offal of cinema. Those organ meats that polite society disdains but secretly craves. And just like the best organ meats, they tell you a lot about the culture that produces them. You want an idea of American society in the 50s? Don’t go to the history books. Put on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Want a handle on the paranoia of the Cold War? The giant, radioactive ants of Them! spell it out in huge and unsubtle letters. 
The thing about horror that academic types occasionally miss while they’re pulling apart the male gaze or whatever else is this: horror is honest. Unapologetically and brutally honest. It’s the drunk uncle at Thanksgiving telling you yes, the turkey really is that bad. The Prestige Dramas are out there pretending to be deep about the Human Condition™ while horror is down there in the basement and showing you exactly what you’re afraid of, with no apology or chaser.
Every new generation gets the monster they deserve. The monsters are of course us. They always have been. But they are us reflected back through the mirror at the funfair, amplified and distorted until finally we see what we’ve been trying so hard not to see.
Think about the 1930s. Europe is on the downhill slide to fascism and the Great Depression is destroying countless lives. What does Universal Pictures put out? The Mummy, Frankenstein and Dracula. They weren’t just guys in makeup. It was the ancient power that wouldn’t stay buried. The scientist who played God with horrific consequences. The aristocrat who refused to die. The subtext was barely buried. It was text with a small layer of greasepaint.
Frankenstein’s Monster wasn’t just some corpse that had been reanimated. It was every poor bastard put together with stolen parts from the Industrial Revolution. Every worker broken down and built again for someone else’s profit. Every worker told they were less than a person by a society that needed their labor but didn’t want to ever see their face. Mary Shelly knew exactly what she was doing when she wrote it and James Whale knew exactly what he was doing when he filmed it.
And Dracula? Well, the good Count was everything. The embodiment of the Old World that wouldn’t die. The parasitism of the aristocrat made flesh. Sexual repression and hunger wrapped up in a nice cape and evening wear. He was the “other”, the immigrant that the Good Christians were terrified would corrupt their daughters. And it’s always about the daughters, always about controlling the sexuality of women with frightening external threats. Casting Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian immigrant as a Transylvanian Count wasn’t subtle, but it was genius.
Skip ahead to the 1950s, and suddenly everything is radioactive. We have giant ants, spiders, humans, giant everything. The atom had finally been split and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki showed us the results. That particular genie wasn’t going back in the bottle. So movies were made about our guilt and fears, along with the creeping realization that we had just created something we couldn’t control.
But the real insidious stuff? It wasn’t the big rubber monsters, it was the invasion movies. The gold standard here is Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It works so well because it plays both sides. Ask a liberal what it’s about, they’ll usually tell you it’s about McCarthyism, suburban Americas demand for conformity and the death of individuality. If you were to ask a conservative, at least way back then, they’ll tell you its about the enemy within, the infiltration by communists and how your neighbor can turn against you. And the thing is they’d both be right. That’s the magic trick good horror pulls. It holds up a mirror cracked in just the right way to show everyone their fears.
The horror of the pod people is that they look just like us. They talk like us and have our memories. But something crucial is gone. They are hollow, replaced with something that can imitate humanity but never get it quite right. Tell me with a straight face that’s not about our anxiety of conformity. Losing yourself, whether to the suburbs, a corporation or the party line. Convince me it isn’t the fear we all have that one day we will wake up realizing we’ve become what we always swore we wouldn’t.
The 60s and 70s came along, and wow horror got nasty. The masks came off and it became personal and intimate. The monsters weren’t from outer space anymore, or a distant castle in Transylvania. They came from the house next door. They were in all of us.
Movies like Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Last House on the Left. No fairy tales anymore. They told us that the real horror is human, and the call is coming from inside the house. The killer is the kid next door, or the babysitter’s boyfriend.
George Romero had this sussed before anyone when he made Night of the Living Dead. Which wasn’t really about zombies, although, yes still zombies. It was racism and the Vietnam War, and the utter failure of authority to protect anyone. He showed us what happens when the center cannot hold, and society collapses. The zombies were nothing more than a catalyst, showing us who we really were when the chips were down.
And so who were we? Well, we were the people who shot Ben, the African-American hero who survived the whole night only to have his head blown off as soon as order was restored. The final image of Ben’s body being dragged to the bonfire with meat hooks while a posse of rednecks cheer wasn’t a horror ending. It was reality wearing horrors clothes. That was 1968 America with the makeup wiped away.
The horror of the 70s was genius in that it understood a fundamental truth. You didn’t need scary monsters when people were so good at being horrific all on their own. The Sawyer family of Texas Chainsaw Massacre weren’t demons. They were the embodiment of poverty and rural decline in America, what happened when the economic miracle never appeared. Leatherface wasn’t born a monster, he was a working-class kid doing what he had been taught by his family in the only economy left to him. It’s deeply messed up, sure, but then again so is capitalism when you follow its logical conclusion in places the boom forgot.
The 80s rolled around, high on cocaine and optimism and Morning in America bullshit, and horror changed yet again. Now it was mostly the slasher flick, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, along with their endless sequels and imitators. On the surface, they were simple enough: horny teens get slaughtered for their sins, and the final girl survives due to her virginal pureness.
But if you dig a little deeper, and yes I know we’re talking about Friday the 13th, we can see the anxiety underneath. These movies were about punishment, a generation of kids being punished for wanting to have fun. Exploring their sexuality and not being paranoid enough. The sins of the parents were visited on the kids, and in Jason’s case, literally.
With Freddy Kruger, it was even more explicit. A child-murderer, burned alive by vengeful parents, he came back to kill their kids in their dreams. Here was the past that would not stay buried, and their guilt manifested. He was the fear every parent has that their past sins, failures, moments of mob justice, will come back and be taken out on their kids.
Of course the real monster of 80s horror was the disease Hollywood barely mentioned but which haunted every horror movie of the era: AIDS. The thing that turns sex from rebellion into a potential death sentence. An invisible killer that may already be inside you, caught from a person you trusted. David Cronenberg, never one for subtlety, made it explicit in The Fly. The fear of contamination we have, and the body betraying you. The fear of connecting and being intimate.
With the turning of the new millennium, more anxieties came along and horror again adapted. All of a sudden, we were afraid of technology. The Ring and its cursed videotape. Yes, analogue technology that could kill you. Pulse and the murderous internet connectivity. Our tools were starting to turn against us, and the things we had brought into our home were now toxic.
But the real shift came after 9/11. And how could it not? Americans had been attacked at home and the rules instantly changed. Nothing felt safe, and torture porn was born. Or at least, became mainstream. Movies like Saw and Hostel were soaked in post-9/11 anxiety and guilt over Abu Ghraib. They were about the torture America was doing in its citizens names, then sanitized and sold back to the people as entertainment.
If you want to understand how Americans were processing the enhanced interrogation news, don’t bother with the Senate reports, watch Hostel instead. Watch Americans being tortured abroad with joyful abandon, with director Eli Roth using the camera to make you complicit in the viewing. These movies were confessions dressed up as exploitation.
Along came the home invasion craze after that. You’re Next, The Purge, The Strangers, none of these were subtle. And how could they be? They played into our fear that nowhere was safe and our castle could be breached. A strong thread of class anxiety runs through them, as it’s always a nice house being taken over, the victims middle-class or wealthy. They were filled with the fear that the people you step on, or ignore, that one day they will come for you.
The Purge made this literal, with one night a year when any crime is legal, the poor are hunting the rich and our nice veneer of civility is suspended. It was the funfair mirror showing the growing inequality in America. The heavily militarized police, gated communities and homes turned into forts. The fear that the pressure was slowly building, until one day it couldn’t anymore and would explode.
And that brings us to today. What are we afraid of today? Everything, it seems. Like everything else, horror has fragmented, split into a myriad of sub-genres and micro-trends. But some things keep bubbling to the surface.
We’re afraid of cults. Midsommar, Hereditary. We’re afraid of ending up trapped in someone else’s reality, losing all our autonomy to a person or group that seems benign at first, but turns out to be insane. I wonder, in this age of Q-Anon and online radicalization, where this fear comes from?
We are still afraid if technology. M3GAN, Black Mirror, and so many others. We are terrified of AI, and creating something that is smarter than us but doesn’t share the same values. Surveillance makes us afraid of being watched, and our data being used against us. We’re afraid of disinformation and deepfakes, not being able to trust what it is that we see.
We are afraid of a genetic, hereditary destiny, trapped by our own bloodlines. Movies like It Follows, and Hereditary again, they are about inheritances and curses you can’t escape. And we are all anxious about what we’re passing down to the next generation. Climate change and debt. Trauma and an utterly corrupt political system. We are afraid that we have already condemned our children.
Today, we’re afraid of isolation and being alone together. The pandemic films are just now starting to emerge, trying to process what we all went through. But the horror of isolation was there long before COVID hit, in movies like Bird Box or A Quiet Place. These were movies in which any connection meant death, where something as basic as looking, or making some noise can kill. They were metaphors for our society, alienated and split, then made literal.
Over the years, I’ve worked in a kitchen or two, and I learned you can tell a lot by a restaurant by looking at its garbage. The quality of their binned scraps, what they throw away or repurpose. Horror movies are the garbage of cinema, and I really mean that as a compliment. They’re what we’re ashamed off and what gets thrown out. They reveal our fundamental truths more honestly than what we plate up on the good china.
Important dramas, Oscar-bait movies, these are carefully served to the critics. Horror is the staff meal in the back, what we eat when we’re alone made from things we’d rather not ask too closely about. And like any good dish of offal, we have to confront what we’d rather not. We can no longer pretend the animal didn’t have any organs. There’s no way to forget that tripe is stomach lining, sweetbreads are thymus glands and blood sausage is exactly that. With horror, you are forced to look at parts of society, and yes yourself, that you’d rather ignore.
The best horror movies act as a time capsule for anxieties. What a culture fears in that moment is preserved and generations ahead can dissect it. A hundred years from now, when film students want to understand the fears of early 21st century America, they won’t be watching the comedies or dramas. They’ll understand racial anxieties in the Obama-Trump era by watching Get Out. Our ambivalence about female power and religious fundamentalism is all there in The Witch. Watching Parasite, yes it’s a horror, and they’ll see our class fears.
So why do we look for these things? Why hand over our money just to be disturbed and frightened? Why consume this organ meat of cinema?
It could be it’s the only honest conversation we have about what scares us. Maybe laughing or screaming with a lot of strangers in a darkened cinema is a form of communion. We tell each other that we’re not alone, we’re all afraid of the same things. Watching fictional horrors can help up deal with the real ones in our lives. And there is something cathartic in seeing our deepest fears realized, and knowing we’ll survive.
Or maybe, and I think this is closest to the truth, maybe we watch horror movies for the same reason people want to eat the strangest and most challenging things they can. Confronting the uncomfortable can expand your humanity. If we turn away from the difficult things, it makes us smaller. Engaging with them makes us larger.
How often are horror movies described as a feast of fear? And like any feast, its best tackled with others. They’re the equivalent of sitting around the fire in our cave, warning each other about predators. They map our collective fears and help us process the unthinkable.
Each society gets the monster they deserve. To understand that society, ignore their newspapers and politicians. Watch its horror movies. See what its afraid of and see what it can only express through metaphor and special effects. Observe and see what they’ll pay to watch in the dark.
Because, at the end, horror movies aren’t just about being scared. They are about everything else, our politics and prejudice. Our failures and evolution. The monsters are the delivery system and the fear is the spice. We are consuming ourselves, reflected back at us in the most unflattering way. And that is more valuable than any beautifully lit story about the human spirit. That’s a real meal. You can chew on that.
The next time some bore tells you they don’t watch horror, that they’re too scary or gross, just know that they’re really saying they don’t want to look closely at the world they’ve built. They want pasteurized entertainment, safe for all the family.
You and me? We know better. The best dishes are the most challenging, they make you think twice before taking that first bite. We know to face the uncomfortable thing and examine it. It’s how we grow.
Horror cinema is a pressure release valve on society. Its primal scream therapy. It helps us work through our shit without burning everything down. They are necessary and more honest than most things that are produced.
And just like a properly aged cheese, or a good fish sauce, they can smell bad and look worse. But they’ll add a depth of flavour to our experience that nothing else can match.
The monsters are, and always have been, us. And the sooner we learn to accept that, the sooner we can look them dead in the eye and then just maybe start to understand what we’re really afraid of.
Maybe even do something about it.
Probably not, though. Probably we will go on making movies about our fears. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe acknowledging it is the point, and the feast of fear is a reward itself. Either way, pass the offal. I’m still hungry.
- About the Author
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Adam Page is a freelance writer, specialising in film and literature with essays and opinion pieces. He has a particular love for all things horror-related, being published in HorrorFam, FilmEast, MovieMarker among others. He is an Undergraduate, studying English Literature and Language, and enjoys taking movies apart, discovering the themes and techniques used to make cinema the incredible medium it is. If he isn’t writing an essay, he is usually found rewatching a movie, notebook in hand and annoying anyone who is sitting close by.