Make America Hate Again

My most recent publication is ‘Lock Her Up! Angry Men and the Captive Woman in Post-Recession Horror’, in Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear, edited by Victoria McCollum (Routledge, 2019), pp. 97-108.

Since around 2010, there has been an increasing number of horror films featuring a ‘monster’ who is a white man. He is merely human with no supernatural or unnatural characteristics at all. Within this sub-set of films, there is a reiterated scenario, one that galvanizes the horror and dread of the film: a woman is discovered chained or caged in a cellar or basement. She has been captured for a variety of reasons, but, as viewers, our emotions are targeted by the simple and visceral spectacle. Emerging from men’s sense of powerlessness, which escalated dramatically after the Great Recession of 2008, this central horror trope intersects with one of the clarion calls of Donald’s Trump’s 2015-16 presidential campaign, the chant, ‘Lock her up!”, which played on men’s antagonism toward powerful women. The Woman (2011), Don’t Breathe (2016), and The Neighbour (2016) elucidate the complicated ways in which men’s felt loss of power and desire to redress and avenge that loss gets enacted within a horror trope that bleeds beyond the bounds of film. This trope, disturbingly, both captures and drives a zero-sum game of power in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

You can find Make America Hate Again on Routledge’s website.