The horror film is a very political genre: a political history of liberal, countercultural horror.

Here’s Why Your Favorite Horror Movies

 Are So Left-Wing

by Asawin Suebsaeng

The horror film is a very political genre,” writer/director Guillermo del Torosaid in an interview with Time magazine in 2011.

He was speaking from a place of experience. Del Toro’s creature-filled Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) showed the horrors of Franco-era Spain. In his cable-TV series The Strain, a ruthless, politically well-connected businessman is as much a villain as any of the tyrannical vampires. Even del Toro’s big-budget, robots-versus-monsters action flick Pacific Rim (2013) doubles as an anti-pollution story.

Del Toro admittedly approaches his craft from the perspective of a leftist—and when it comes to filmmakers operating within the horror genre, he’s far from the only one. The godfathers of modern horror cinema were almost entirely liberal peaceniks.

“If you meet all the people who make horror films, you discover they are very nonviolent, they’re politically active and knowledgeable, and anti-war,” writer/director Mick Garris says in the 2009 documentary Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film, with examples including heavy-hitters and luminaries George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, David Cronenberg, Stephen King, Joe Dante, Clive Barker, and Roger Corman. “They have opened themselves up to all of these possibilities, and it’s the people who repress them who are the ones you have to look out for.”

One of the more obvious specimens of political horror is Romero’s groundbreaking 1968 zombie movie Night of the Living Dead. Critical appraisals frequently highlight the film’s subversive reflection on the decade’s civil-rights struggle and unrest over the war in Vietnam. (For instance, it starred Duane Jones as the hero—at a time when it was unusual to cast a black actor as the lead in a film with an otherwise white cast.)

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