Ninety years of horror: nine films that reflect society’s changing anxieties

A lot of films from this period seem to be influenced by the political backdrop at the time – the rise of fascism in Europe, with exiles arriving in the US. These social forces all came together to produce this weird hybrid of European folk tales and Gothic novels, using the latest technology.

2. Cat People

(1942, dir: Jacques Tourneur)

Directed by émigré Frenchman Jacques Tourneur, this film [about a fashion illustrator fixated on the idea she has the ability to become a panther when aroused] has an extraordinary visual style, cleverly using shadows to evoke a sense of melancholia, of mourning for exile from Europe. It also features a very explicit Freudian narrative about sexual anxiety and sexual repression.

The following year, Tourneur made another amazing film called I Walked with a Zombie – which sounds incredibly melodramatic and silly, but is actually a poetic evocation of the last days of the colonial era in the Caribbean. It was made less than a decade after the end of the US occupation of Haiti, home of the zombie trope.

3. Godzilla, King of the Monsters!

(1956, dir: Terry O Morse and Ishirō Honda)

This Japanese film was made in the aftermath of the Second World War: in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and more than six years of American occupation [which ended in 1952].

In one sense it’s a really stupid film, with a man in a rubber monster suit jumping up and down on what’s clearly a model of Tokyo. But it’s also hugely evocative of the postwar trauma of Japan – of people who’ve just had the atom bomb dropped on them and who’ve been occupied by foreign forces.

Of course you’re going to have a giant lizard rise up and stamp all over you – it’s a perfect expression of that angst.

4. Psycho

(1960, dir: Alfred Hitchcock)

This film has an amazing reputation for its explicit, violent imagery, but it’s also a powerful evocation of a moment in US history. There’s a sense of constraint, repression and conformity explored in some of the most famous horror imagery of the period.

The explanation of Norman Bates’ motive for his serial murders is so extraordinary, and so explicit in its investigation of sexual trauma and perversity, that it marked a threshold moment in mainstream cinema.

Horror films are always pushing the envelope. Sometimes they overstep the mark, and sometimes moral panic ensues; sometimes it’s about breaking taboos and reaching a new level of representation.

5. Night of the Living Dead

(1968, dir: George Romero)

This famously gory film transformed zombies from subservient, slave-like stumblers into ravening hordes driven to devour human flesh. It was released during one of the most extraordinary political moments in postwar US history: the era of civil rights, of student revolution, and of Vietnam War protests.

And it was radical in so many ways, not only because the main character is played by a black actor who, in one amazing scene, takes command of the last surviving humans, dominating the white male patriarchy.

The film was picked up immediately by black cinemas, which showed it alongside slave B-movies, but it was also shown in loftier cultural contexts, including being screened by the Museum of Modern Art.

The closing titles roll over a series of black-and-white stills. clearly echoing the lynchings of the 1910s and 1920s. Director George Romero was deliberately picking up on that kind of iconography, indicating how explosively political his film was.

6. Rosemary’s Baby

(1968; dir: Roman Polanski)

This film is important for breaching the old Hollywood Hays Code, which had restricted representations of sex and violence since the 1930s. As a mainstream studio-produced film, it therefore marked an important cultural breakthrough for horror movies.

But it’s also a film about patriarchy, the restrictions placed on women in the 1960s, and the sense of a conspiracy against them, at a time when so-called Second Wave Feminism was burgeoning.

Mia Farrow plays the titular Rosemary, a heavily pregnant woman who has been caught in a patriarchal web. It’s a film that effectively produces horror out of social fears and restrictions placed on women.

7. The Exorcist

(1973, dir: William Friedkin)

This film provoked a major sensation for its extreme, grisly representation of the demonic possession of an adolescent girl. Adapted from a book by an author from a conservative background, it depicts the Catholic church’s confrontation with a demon, questioning whether faith can win out over evil.

But it should also be understood in relation to the 1970s crisis around abortion, and women’s right to control their own bodies. This was the year of Roe v Wade, when feminism was becoming mainstream, when abortion was a major political issue.

A whole raft of films were made around then that reflected anxieties around pregnancy and young girls’ agency. In addition, The Exorcist starts with an acrimonious divorce, and the horror that follows seems to echo the monstrosity of the trauma of that separation for the young daughter.

8. The Evil Dead

(1981, dir: Sam Raimi)

Now viewed as an uproariously funny horror classic, on its release this film [which sees a group of college students beset by demonic forces in a remote cabin] was reviled by conservative commentators as an utterly depraved movie.

It was one of the first of the so-called ‘video nasties’ that sparked a moral panic in the early 1980s. Around that time, video players became widely affordable, and a loophole in UK law meant that films released direct to video weren’t classified by the British Board of Film Censors, so anyone could watch them.

That sparked a big moral panic, and the Director of Public Prosecutions banned dozens of films. It was part of what we would now call a ‘culture war’ between conservative and progressive forces in society.

Then, in the 1980s, the Video Recordings Act imposed a strict code of censorship, and the moment was over. There’s nothing in that banned list we wouldn’t watch now; some films, such as The Evil Dead, are celebrated as classics, while others are seen as art-house triumphs. So it was purely a cultural moment of panic rather than a reflection on the films themselves.

9. Get Out

(2017, dir: Jordan Peele)

This was released in 2017, at the start of Donald Trump’s presidency. It reflects the sense in which the politics of race in the US could be tackled through satire and the tropes of the horror film. It’s a kind of Invasion of the Body Snatchers updated for the present.

Black American writer-director Jordan Peele explored a popular and ridiculous horror cliché – that the black guy always dies first – but also made a brilliant rewrite and reversal of The Stepford Wives (1975).

In the original, a nice white suburb is revealed to host a conspiracy of men replacing their wives with subservient robots. In Get Out, a black guy from the city meets his white girlfriend’s parents – and discovers a conspiracy where the elite white one per cent are stealing the bodies of black men. It’s an amazing satirical exploration of white privilege, Black Lives Matter and so on.

This article was first published in the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine