Will COVID-19 Change the Face of Horror?

For clues, look to the Great Depression.

by Lindsay Lee Wallace

According to horror scholar Nöel Carroll, each era of modern history has its own distinctive type of terror, known as a “horror cycle.” This theme is liable to “emerge in times of social stress” and, in doing so, capture the prevailing anxieties of the moment. In the fraught 1950s, it was a fear of invasion based on Cold War worries and McCarthyism, which led to films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, Don Siegel). The 1960s, bookended by the assassinations of the first Catholic president John F. Kennedy, and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., fed a wave of religious anxiety that inspired the 1971 publication of the William Peter Blatty book upon which The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin) would be based.

At least one predominant anxiety of our current moment is clear. We’re living through a once-in-a-century pandemic that has utterly altered the shapes of our lives and has been so severely mismanaged by our government that a return to “normal” flickers only vaguely on the horizon. Unemployment rates have been in the double-digits for months and continue to grow every day, with the promise of further economic strife as the federal stimulus benefits are phased out. 

Horror in our current era is more socially-reflective than ever before, with movies like It Follows (2015, David Robert Mitchell), Get Out (2017, Jordan Peele), and Candyman (2020, Nia DaCosta) playing on the cultural fears and realizations of our moment. But how will the developments of the last months—in particular the pandemic and attendant impending recession—affect horror going forward? The 1930s may hold a clue. 

The Depression era was characterized in horror films by the phenomenon of sympathy for the monster. The movies of the time, such as King Kong (1933, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack) and Frankenstein (1931, James Whale), presented monsters that initially came across as frightening, but eventually captured the audience’s hearts—or at least swayed them slightly.

The movies of the Depression presented monsters that initially came across as frightening, but eventually captured the audience’s hearts—or at least swayed them slightly.

As King Kong teeters atop a building, clutching his beloved in his massive grip, the audience can’t help but feel a pang of sympathy for the beast. He is so out of his element, raining down destruction on a city he cannot understand, and ultimately just trying to be with the woman he misguidedly loves. (Of course, her perspective on being the object of his desire, and a pointed conversation about this “ape-monster” abducting an innocent young white woman, would take at least another few decades to come about). As Frankenstein’s ill-fated creature shambles through his un-asked-for life, seeking love and finding only hatred, viewers can identify with the hopeless struggle of existing in a world where one does not belong—is it so hard to see why he might eventually turn to violence? 

When times are hard, we find ourselves ready to break down at the slightest encouragement, to identify with those who are as visibly downtrodden as we feel. The trials of the 1930s were all-consuming, altering our existence and leading people to establish habits—like distrust of financial institutions— that they would carry with them for life. Even today, those who lived through that time still believe that they could find themselves ripped without warning from the lives they know. Now, they’ve been proven right. 

Reasonably, therefore, the “monsters” of this time are more like desperate transplants from worlds that once made sense to them, now marooned in an unfriendly place they do not recognize, like the character of Cleopatra in the notorious ode to ableism Freaks (1932, Tod Browning). People were scared of ruin, of being strangers to the homes they had lost, and aliens to the society they could no longer function as a part of. They saw themselves in the monsters on their screens, and in a way, it was comforting. Films that follow the narrative of a misunderstood but supposedly “monstrous” figure are likely in our future.

Another moment to look to for hints? The peak of the polio pandemic, from 1916, through the Depression, until the advent of a vaccine in the 1950s. While there is always something happening to stir and stimulate the fear of death, whether it be a natural disaster, or a news cycle of global murder and violence, times of widespread disease are also known to awaken it with a vengeance. 

Our diseases were well-named and documented, though at times invincible all the same. They loomed large in our imaginations, and haunted our creations.

Death from the 1930s through the 1950s was paradoxically both prominent and increasingly hidden. We were no longer faced with mysterious, untraceable plagues—now our diseases were well-named and documented, though at times invincible all the same. They loomed large in our imaginations, and haunted our creations. Beginning in this era, many people found solace in their continued ability to react with disgust and terror at the deliberately cultivated scenarios presented by horror.

The story The Fly is such a prolific example that after being published as a short story by George Langelaan in 1957, it saw film adaptations in 1958 (Kurt Neumann) and 1986 (David Cronenberg), both of which also spawned sequels. The latter iterations also ruminated on illness, by making reference to the AIDS epidemic. As long as people could still recoil from the screen or page,  they knew they had not yet become completely desensitized. In many ways, the focusing of sympathy on fictional narratives has also been an easy escape hatch for people who feel overwhelmed by the suffering in the real world around them.

Another notable effect of depersonalization? Body horror, which reduces the sacred self to spare parts. Since its inception, U.S. culture has promoted aggressive individualism even as the corresponding “bootstraps” ideology has been disproven, and the country has been taken down in international and domestic esteem peg-by-peg. (This is true now in particular, and is especially clear in the self-interested ideology of those who see mask requirements, meant to curb the spread of COVID-19, as an infringement on their personal liberties.)

The American Dream is one of individual aspiration. When dashed, it can render the concept of individuality fragile. Not only are you not special and not destined for greatness through hard work—your personhood can be reduced and confiscated, as well: the body as nothing more than a slab of meat. This is the root of body horror and slasher films, which depersonalize the human form by portraying extreme brutality and unimaginable bodily transformations through violence. The Mummy (1932, Boris Karloff), with its bandaged and reanimated villain, captures both medical fears and loss-of-individuality fears, channeling them together into one terrifying story. Striking the same nerve as The Fly, The Mummy has also spawned numerous successful elaborations and remakes.

Today, we are afraid not only of the past, but of the future. We have decades of horror behind us, inspired by fears that never died, many of which have only grown stronger in the present day. As Carroll said, “the horror fiction of the present… refers back to earlier times, to classic monsters and myths, as if in a gesture of nostalgia,” and carries them right through to the present, picking up new fears along the way. The shockwaves from the pandemic and recession will radiate into the future and affect horror for decades to come–and to anticipate what that might mean, we need only look behind us.

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