If you want to look for the politics in monster movies, a big tipoff is usually where the monsters originate. It's interesting that The Exorcist — made during another Middle Eastern crisis — starts with a curse in the Middle East. Then there's the old "Native burial ground" idea.
And now that black filmmakers have been producing their own excellent horror flicks for a while (oh how I love From Hell and Tales from the Hood), you're getting a different perspective, where the monsters are actually coming from white middle-class culture to prey on people in ghettos. So be on the lookout for more horror movies that have racial/nationalist overtones.
What question would you love to be asked, but haven't been asked yet? And what's the answer?
I've been asked excellent questions. One question I didn't want to be asked was: "Why did you talk about The Man with Two Brains in this book?" Then Ed Champion asked me that for his lit podcast on Return of the Reluctant. The answer was really just that I liked the movie a lot and I have a section about brain movies and I threw it in. I had no good reason. I kept hemming and hawing and trying to invent a good reason it was in the book and there really wasn't one.
Finally, where do you see technology taking us ten years from now?
More people making fantastic indie horror and science fiction movies and putting them online for free under Creative Commons licenses! Oh wait — that's just my wish, not my prediction.
Annalee Newitz writes about technology, science, and pop culture at Techsploitation.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!