How late capitalism is the underrecognized monster lurking in modern American horror.
鈥淪ometimes I wonder what it was exactly, that led me to pull The Dead Zone by Stephen King off of my parents鈥� bookshelf when I was in fourth grade,鈥� says Jason Middleton. 鈥淚t was the first 鈥榞rown-up鈥� novel I ever read. There were certainly parts of it that I found kind of upsetting, but also magnetic. It almost felt as if the world was opening up in a new way.鈥�
is an associate professor of English and of at the . He also directs its . His captivation by King鈥檚 novel led to a lifelong love of horror films. Although horror is just one of the film genres Middleton has immersed himself in鈥攂oth as a fan and a scholar鈥攊t鈥檚 a genre whose appeal he thinks is especially durable.
In horror, 鈥渘ormality is threatened by a monster,鈥� he says. 鈥淲hat鈥檚 so wonderfully expansive about the horror genre is that the monster keeps forming and reforming in relation to the fears and anxieties of its time. And on the flip side, normality, and the depiction of normality, keeps evolving and changing based on the historical period as well.鈥�
Work as the American nightmare
There have been some clear trends. In the post-World War II era, the monster was often a stand-in for anxieties about the atomic bomb. During the feminist movement of the 1970s, the monster often suggested anxieties about female power and female bodies.
That critique has extended into a new era鈥攍ate capitalism, a phrase coined to describe a world of globalized commodification that鈥檚 . The essays focus overwhelmingly on 21st-century horror films. Those depict a world of economic precarity and a hollowed-out middle class that make up 鈥渁 new 鈥榥ormality鈥欌�� of survival, or of just getting by. And even that bleak environment is vulnerable to new monsters that threaten what stability protagonists have been able to muster鈥攐r that they are striving to attain in the first place.
In (University of Texas Press, 2023), Middleton has joined with Aviva Briefel, who teaches literature and film at Bowdoin College, to make the case that there鈥檚 been another kind of monster lurking in American horror films all along: the post-industrial world of work.
In the essay collection, which they coedit, Middleton and Briefel suggest that ambivalence about work is a theme that has roots , when it usually came in the form of the mad scientist. In modern horror films, starting roughly in the 1970s, ambivalence evolved into a fuller critique. Middleton and Briefel describe the critique as reflecting 鈥渟ocial fears and anxieties that took root in the 1970s and 1980s in response to deindustrialization, automation, globalized labor, union busting, and rising income inequality.鈥�
An easy example is , a pathbreaking film that鈥檚 50 years old this year. Rural, unemployed slaughterhouse workers are never shown performing slaughterhouse labor, but are shown 鈥渞epeating the trained motions of this labor upon their human victims,鈥� they write.
New categories of uncompensated work
Middleton is especially interested in forms of uncompensated work, which he argues fall disproportionately on groups that are already marginalized. He isn鈥檛 just talking about such uncompensated labor as housework or family caregiving. In his own contribution, 鈥淣o Drama: Emotion Work in Midsommar,鈥� Middleton explores 鈥渆motion work鈥� in the 2019 film directed by Ari Aster.
He describes emotion work as 鈥渟uppressing and modifying, and maybe not expressing one鈥檚 own feelings in order that a spouse or partner has the kind of optimal experience that they themselves expect to have in the relationship.鈥� It has a long history in the quest of women to get by but has proven resilient even as women have achieved greater economic independence.
(2019) depicts the arduous efforts of a 20-something female protagonist, Dani, to hold onto her relationship with her distant and disengaged boyfriend, Christian. The couple attends a summer festival in Sweden that turns out to be an annual ritual of a murderous cult.
Its horrors mirror Dani鈥檚 labors in preserving her attachment to Christian. But she also attains a level of power within the cult, and the film鈥檚 cathartic ending shows Dani ending the relationship by sacrificing Christian.
It鈥檚 actually a breakup story, Middleton explains. But in showing the slow, laboriousness process in which Dani comes to recognize Christian鈥檚 neglectfulness, it鈥檚 the inverse of many lighter breakup films. 鈥淚t鈥檚 kind of the horror movie version of a breakup film like Eat Pray Love or Under the Tuscan Sun,鈥� he says. 鈥淭he semantic elements are mostly the same鈥攖ravel, exotic location, meeting different people, food, all of these things. But whereas in those films, the work of a breakup is frictionless and fulfilling and idealized, Midsommar uses the horror genre to instead express the work of a breakup as just agonizing, laborious, and painful鈥攁nd ultimately, in the end, cathartic.鈥�
The horror of stagnation鈥攁nd of leisure
The essays in the collection also demonstrate how the experience of economic precarity can differ along racial lines. Briefel鈥檚 essay, for example, is subtitled 鈥淭he Hard Work of Leisure in Jordan Peele鈥檚 Us.鈥�
鈥淚n a 2019 interview for Vanity Fair, Jordan Peele explained that one of his objectives in the film Us was to represent Black leisure,鈥� Briefel begins. 鈥淵et relaxation is a major source of horror in the film.鈥� shows a Black family living with a constant threat of merely letting their guard down.
In another essay, Mikal Gaines, an assistant professor of English at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, coins a subgenre of 鈥淏uppie horror,鈥� which reworks the conventional home-invasion thriller. (2008) is an archetype, Gaines explains, of a subgenre that 鈥渟eems to say that entry into a rarified class status historically reserved for whites must be paid in blood.鈥�
For many white Americans, however, the threat is losing what they have鈥攐r living with the dread of having already lost. Middleton鈥檚 colleague at Rochester, Joel Burges, finds in David Robert Mitchell鈥檚 2014 film a depiction of 鈥渢he precarity of white working-class identity.鈥� The film shows a group of young adult friends in a desolate and stagnant postindustrial Detroit. It鈥檚 a reworking of the stalker films of the 1970s and 鈥�80s, explains Burges, like Middleton, an associate professor of English and of visual and cultural studies. It Follows adheres to the slasher convention of punishing people for sexual acts. Sexual encounters between the characters鈥攎en as well as women, in this film鈥攊nfect characters with 鈥淚t,鈥� a stalker who lurks after them, and takes changing forms, but always of mangled middle- and working-class white bodies.
In these bodies, however, Burges found something beyond the slasher convention in which sex equals death. In It Follows, the work of getting by literally takes place mostly in low-level, dead-end service occupations that fill the young adults with dread to have. There鈥檚 emotion work, in other words, in surviving the bleak landscape through which 鈥淚t鈥� stalks victims. 鈥淒read is slow,鈥� Burges writes. 鈥淚ts menace bears down on you with steadily intensifying pressure that never relents.鈥�
Horror films in the post-COVID era
When Middleton and Briefel got started on their project, COVID-19 was sweeping across the globe. No one knew at the time just how much the pandemic would transform the world of work. Have these changes started to play out in horror films? And if so, how?
Says Middleton: 鈥淪omething that I noticed during the last few years is that some really interesting horror movies take place not only entirely in a house, or entirely within an enclosed space, but entirely just a person and their laptop. For example, (2021). The whole film is just from the perspective of an isolated teenage girl on her laptop, as she鈥檚 on it every night to do these internet challenges that grow increasingly dangerous and threatening as she does them.
鈥淚t鈥檚 just the horrific experience of being on the internet on your laptop all the time.鈥�
