The Chainsaw, The Clown and The Myth of Apolitical Horror

They’ll tell you, with confidence, that horror isn’t political. They’ll say it was you watch a chainsaw-wielding maniac with a mask of someone else’s flesh chase a half naked women through the backyard of an economic collapse and tell you there’s no politics that lie within that.

The sentence always arrives as neutrality, but it’s a lie that benefits power, a cop out for lazy writers and directors to not address or put any meaning behind their work. Watch the suffering without context, violence without origin, terror without responsibility. The entire concept of the commentary that horror is not a direct societal mirror is absurd — it’s the fabrication that’s spun to enverat the genre.

Believe that fear exists, that it’s fully formed. Divorce the jump scare from the world that made it. To diminish the societal background of horror films is to claim that the point of horror is for it to exist simply for the gore of it all — to relish in the impending doom and adrenaline-inducing jump scares that exist in our minds when the films are done — leaving us empty and hollow, at least that’s what is projected onto us.

But, peel back the latex and prosthetics, and you’re left with a reflection of our social anxieties, cultural shifts and fears. Whether overt or coded, horror does not just flirt with politics: It feeds on it.

It has never been about the monsters. It has always been about what makes them.

Monsters as Social Autopsies:

Every era manufactures a monster as a mirror, and through this, we go through countless horror figures. Each mask of a different viewpoint, each a manifestation of deep-seated anxieties about how the world around us is built up. We thrive in monsters. Some literal. Some metaphorical. All terrifying.

1922. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” is the first film representation. The plague Nosferatu brought to Wisborg was an echo of the political climate in Germany. His disease was framed as invasion, a contagion that wa sa mirror of the harmful stereotypes of Jewish people. The rats killed swiftly, without remorse, and left no mark.

Eradication.

The film absorbed the antisemitic hysteria of Weimar Germany, and it gave us horror.

Flash-forward half a century to 1974 to see the monsters that wear human skin. Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is not about a family of lunatics who just happened to wake up evil one day. It’s about economic abandonment: The slaughterhouse shuts down, the labour becomes obsolete, the American dream rots like meat on a hook, so what happens when a system discards people and leaves them to starve?

They eat whatever they can get their hands on to survive.

Hooper and Henkel didn’t need to give Leatherface a manifesto. The rusted tools and decayed infrastructure spoke for him. Of course, the monster lives among us. We put him there.

The human race: the real monsters.

Jordan Peele didn’t pretend the metaphor was accidental with ‘Us’. The reveal of the tethered wasn’t a twist; it was a socioeconomic divide all along. The shocking turn of events is finding that there’s an entire marginalized group of people desperate to be seen, forced into a mirrored life without ever touching what the above has.

Liberal Horror and the Violence of Politeness:

Racism wears a smile, it votes blue, it hosts fundraisers. Peele’s ‘Get Out’ never dictated hatred. All he needed to do was dissect the violence behind liberal comfort. The Armitages didn’t burn down churches, they didn’t worship Satan: they voted democrat. This movie took liberal ideology and turned it on its head: they said they’d vote for Obama for a third term if they couldn’t, but that wouldn’t stop them from living in a Black person's body like a Gucci sweater.

That is horror updated in a modern setting. No slurs. Just entitlement, consumption, and the never-ending belief that admiration excuses ownership.

The same truth is in ‘The Night of the Living Dead.’ Ben survived the beginning of an apocalypse, the undead, only to be killed by a white posse. The zombies didn’t get him: society did. It ended with a monster, just not the monster you thought it was going to be.

This was understood by Candyman decades ago. The sequel only makes it more explicit. Candyman was never a singular ghost. He was never one victim. He was any Black man brutalized by the system. Say his name and history answers.

Trauma, Inheritance and the Curse of Being Alive:

But daddy, my sorrow. Mental health awareness? No thanks. ‘The Babadook’ isn’t a monster; it’s depression. It doesn't end with victory; it ends with management. Grief doesn't vanish, but it does develop in a world where we are not allowed to feel it — a world where if we lose someone, we must rejoin the masses as fast as we can to make sure the world is in order.

‘Smile’ and ‘Smile 2’ is about how unaddressed trauma will eat you alive, the world won’t help you, and you have to suffer with your own demons.

‘It Follows’ punishes sex like it’s a symptomatic disease. It puts a spotlight on the fear of anything spreading from it, a fear of death, and it simply says, “good luck with that.”

And then there is ‘Hereditary’, which is honest enough to say the truth out loud. You were doomed before you were born. You cannot escape generational trauma. Mental health is passed down through genetics, and the world isn’t going to do a single thing to figure out why.

Feminine Rage and the Audacity of it All:

Horror has always punished women for existing.

‘Carrie’ punished a woman for being a woman. Menstruation. Sexuality. Repression. Carrie burns because the world taught her that shame is holy and rage is unforgivable.

‘Jennifer's Body’ knew exactly what it was doing. Jennifer was a teenage girl, consumed, sexualized, sacrificed and yet somehow still the monster. She was blamed for surviving the way the men left her. Men use and discard women like they’re nothing, but when Jennifer did it, she was the villain. Sure her way was murder, but - whatever works. Power is only moral when it flows in a certain direction.

Then Ti West gave us the holy trinity of feminine politics: X, Pearl and MaXXXine. Pearl is not insane because she kills; she kills because she is trapped. Ambition was her sin. Maxine didn’t want that life, she had to go into it to survive. It made her hard and strong, and she still worked to break out of it.

The fury of femininity is not subtle. It can’t be.

Nihilism in a Clown Suit

Which brings us to Art.

Terrifier and its sequels insist on meaninglessness. Damien Leone claims Art only exists to hurt — he has no motives, no tragic background. It gives “I’m not like the other horror directors, I’m a cool guy.”

And yet - Terrifier exists in a media ecosystem soaked in desensitization. The violence is escalated to stay visible. Women brutalized as a spectacle. There’s suffering without consequences. If horror reflects its era — and it does — then Art is nothing more than late-stage capitalism with greasepaint.

There’s nothing apolitical about that. That’s pure nihilism, and the Terrifier series reeks of it: violence, gender and class struggle. No reason. No justice. No escapes. Sounds a bit too on the nose for systemic oppression. He could have at least done something with these films — he could have made a true point, he could have the conviction to take something to new frontiers, but he opted to stay in the middle of the political landscape so we could all have a cuddle.

That’s not apolitical.

That’s being a coward.

That’s marketable nihilism.

If horror has always been a reflection of our deepest fears, then what does it mean when a horror director claims his movies mean nothing?

Horror does not need to ask permission.

Leone wasn’t the only director who dodged the truth. The famous John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper, Eli Roth and James Wan have all downplayed the political and societal aspects in their movies.

The thought of fear is drawn from the world we live in, and the world we live in is soaked in class struggle, gendered violence, racism, mental illness, and systemic decay. Horror cannot escape politics because it’s born from the anxiety of our society.

Horror does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in us. In our economy, in our lives, and whether or not a director or writer intended for it to have a deeper meaning is futile. It’s always going to reflect the period it was made in, and that’s where it doesn't need to be written with political intent - it just is, and the genre will keep slicing up society and holding up the bloody mess for everyone to see it.