There’s no denying that politics has lately gotten more horrific. If you, the hapless protagonist in the American story, are just minding your own business, it appears about half your neighbors may nonetheless think you deserve to be shot, and the other half may want you deported or eaten by alligators. Good neighbors don’t do those sorts of things to you, obviously. They don’t raid your pot stash with guns and battering rams that might get your kids killed, either.
So, it’s only natural that horror movies, especially of the quiet, slow-burn variety, lately feel more true to everyday life than do pleasant romcoms, historical epics, or espionage stories. The “slow dark” turn in horror movies began in earnest around the early-2010s, presciently arriving just before Trump, Covid paranoia, constant surveillance, streaming-aided social isolation, and social-media-amplified simmering omnidirectional hostility. But already, and as usual faster than one anticipated, films from that period now seem almost quaint and pleasant—cozy—even when depicting things like murderous rituals in dark forests.
At least the forest was quiet, and the menaces in it often old and familiar, like a vine-encrusted statue. You might be sacrificed to some shapeshifting evil god disguised as an elk by the end of the movie, but it was preceded by a vacation getaway in tree-filled surroundings or some alone time in an old mansion. In the past few years, though, I think it’s harder to pretend the threat is far away in some isolated place. We expect panic in the middle of the city now and creepiness in very normal, modern neighborhoods, possibly aided by technology rather than ameliorated by it.
The Netflix movie They Cloned Tyrone (featuring Star Wars’ John Boyega plus two past Marvel actors, Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris) is one of many stories that has started from the left-liberal premise that the problems of black neighborhoods are caused by stealthy, calculated interference from outside forces, especially white corporate forces and a few mad scientists, here repeatedly cloning a man who has to live and die and live again as a casualty of drug gang violence and other ills. It’s like an extended episode of the fantastic satirical animated series Boondocks, acknowledging black social problems to a degree that makes the material almost conservative but pleading for solutions, even revolutionary ones, in a way that makes callously writing off a chunk of the population morally impermissible.
You can’t blame troubled communities for getting paranoid, and I’m reminded that just recently near Central Park I overheard a group of young people in which one female said she told her mother she was reluctantly going to get a Covid booster, to which her wary male friend replied (I think), “Well, I’m just sayin’ that means a couple years from now, there’s gonna be another version of you walkin’ around.” Out of such conversations and worries are movies like They Cloned Tyrone born.
I sense another horror-idea-born-of-social-problems looming on the horizon, too. There’s a story making the rounds—mostly on obscure sites rather than mainstream media, so who knows if it’s rooted in fact—about a young woman named Quianna Reeves (not to be confused with the hero of The Matrix) going into a Cracker Barrel in Detroit for a job interview, being asked strange questions by the manager (who she suspected was racist) about her vaccinations and organ donor status, then losing consciousness and waking up in the back of a refrigerated truck bound and gagged, headed to a major Oklahoma fast food meat distribution plant, the driver (after happenstance led to police pulling him over) claiming to be unaware she was in there.
It can’t be long before Jordan Peele or someone realizes systemic elite white cannibalism targeting blacks is too richly ironic a premise to leave unfilmed, right? It’s probably safe to say that fast food chains such as McDonald’s don’t want urban legends spreading suggesting that they’re serving human meat, though.
The corporation with the most reason to fear the black-inflected vampire movie Sinners, by contrast, is probably Disney/Marvel. With Sinners, Marvel director Ryan Coogler and Marvel actor Michael B. Jordan managed, among other things, to produce a medium-budget blockbuster black vampire movie for Warner Brothers (set in the world of 1930s blues musicians) while over at Disney/Marvel, they’ve been struggling for some reason for over a decade to complete their planned Blade reboot with Mahershala Ali.
How hard is it to make a vampire movie? Very hard, perhaps, if the rumors were true that you’re a company determined to twist the film into a feminist tale of Blade retiring from vampire-fighting to make way for his same-named daughter. That plot has allegedly now been repeatedly revised because it wasn’t working and Ali wasn’t happy with how few fight scenes he had. The speed with which Marvel has gone from triumph to embarrassment is startling.
But then, the superhero business should’ve learned some lessons about how quickly things can fall apart from the speed with which American comics were eclipsed and outsold by imported Japanese manga starting in the 1990s. They’ve had a generation since then to prepare for eventualities like the Fantastic Four movie making less money this year than the Japanese animated franchise film (made for only $20 million but earning a half-billion and counting) Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba—The Movie: Infinity Castle. Yet here we are, probably no wiser.
So, the real power of slow, dark things and small, Asian things is that they can provide as much pleasure as the usual gigantic corporate art projects, and that’s all that matters to audiences in the long run. Only if the bogus labor theory of value were true (as commies like NYC mayor-to-be Zohran Mamdani imagine) would audiences keep feeling they were getting more out of films that cost a billion to make and market than out of cleverer ones that cost a mere $500,000, so long as moviegoers get increasingly adept at finding the latter—and they will.
It may not look it from all the residual glitz attached to L.A., but audiences are increasingly aware that they can ignore the giant P.R. machines and mass-audience lemming flocks to sample whatever obscure wares they damn well please. For the old corporate and political organizations that would rather see us die than go off to do our own thing, that must be terrifying.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey