THE HORROR FLICK It’s What’s Inside (2024) is a bit of an eyeroll, just like a lot of films in this genre, but it’s still fun. One of the opening shots lingers inside a rustic mansion. Timi Yuro’s ‘What’s a Matter Baby’ plays overhead as a group of young, attractive and perpetually online people lounge about. In her low drawl, influencer Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey) says to a friend, ‘You’re like the perfect blend of artsy and exotic.’ Beside her, self-proclaimed entrepreneur Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) quips ‘You should tag her in one of your Instagram stories,’ while Reuben (Devon Terrell), dressed in a geometric button-up and pearl necklace, pours wine for the group. He pauses, gazing meaningfully at Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), tattooed and just back from a yoga retreat in Bali. Meanwhile, protagonist Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) – aka the outsider, the ‘avocado enthusiast, as she’s known on socials – watches the chaos unfold from the sidelines. See what I mean about the eyeroll?

Then the film veers sharply: the characters begin to switch bodies. The metaphor isn’t hard to guess. If I had to hazard one, I’d say it’s a film that interrogates performance, the blurry boundary between selfhood and curation, and all that comes with it. It’s a fun concept, though not necessarily a new one. I’d lump it in a growing sub-genre that goes by many names: postmodern, progressive and socially aware horror.

Tackling societal issues and politics in horror is, of course, nothing earth-shattering. Horror has long been grounded in political allegory – always passionate, often cheap and gory – to push against cultural boundaries and confront the ugliest sides of humanity: misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, classism. Jordan Peele took aim at liberal racism in Get Out (2017), Bong Joon-ho explored class in Parasite (2019), and even The Purge series has evolved from standard home-invasion fare into an interrogation of institutional violence and America’s carceral populism.

What is new about this breed of horror is that its creators – often politically progressive themselves – turn the lens inwards, expressing the language, ideology and aesthetics (Instagram and stick-and-poke tattoos, apparently) of the political left to skewer themselves. As someone with two stick-and-poke tattoos and a love of avocados, I’d always felt exempt from the genre’s spotlight – until now. Just like in any good horror movie, no one is safe.

HORROR HAS ALWAYS cycled through villains that reflect the anxieties of its era: the 1920s gave us monsters such as Nosferatu (1922) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) that mirrored xenophobic fears. In the 1950s, Cold War paranoia birthed creatures such as Godzilla and the pod people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) – projections of nuclear terror and ideological infiltration. By the 1970s, horror had turned inward: the slasher genre, among others, mined patriarchal fears around female sexuality in films such as Carrie (1976) and Black Christmas (1974).

Then the 2010s ushered in a horror renaissance: Jordan Peele, Ari Aster and Robert Eggers gave us ‘elevated horror’ that interrogated identity, trauma and structural injustice. That wave hasn’t disappeared, but its cultural dominance has dimmed. As the political climate darkened, particularly after Trump’s first election, so did horror. Pre-Trump anxieties surfaced in films such as Assassination Nation (2018), with its hyper-stylised digital witch hunts and moral panic, while President Evil (2018) literally featured a killer in a Trump mask.

Comedy and horror have always gone hand in hand – paired like avocado and sourdough toast – but post-Covid, there’s been a noticeable tonal shift towards silly horror: M3GAN (2022), The Menu (2022), Fresh (2022) and even the latest Final Destination instalment, Bloodline (2025). Obviously, we all need something (or someone) to laugh at that takes our minds off how bleak the world’s become. Most of these films rely on an ‘us versus them’ dynamic: a group of rag-tag teens versus a machete-wielding killer; a wholesome family against a ghost (or demon, if they’re unlucky and/or exist within The Conjuring universe). But this new kind of horror points an accusatory, bloodied finger elsewhere, exposing hypocrisies, narcissism and moral sanctimony, all delivered with a sharp, facetious edge. What was once ‘us versus them’ has evolved into a more unsettling paradigm: ‘us versus…wait, what?’

In Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022), the influencers are the problem – or rather, their self-cannibalisation. When one of them ends up dead after a party game goes wrong, the group descends into a deluge of buzzwords and blame: ‘That’s so ableist’, ‘You’re silencing me’, ‘I’m an ally’. They’re so fluent in therapy speak and online outrage, you’re not sure who the killer – or the biggest victim – is.

Australia’s Sissy (2022) follows suit, lampooning wellness culture, mental health branding and shallow online feminism. The film’s protagonist is a lifestyle guru preaching healing and empowerment while smouldering with repressed rage. Many of us – particularly us Gen Z or Millennials – instinctively fear (and mock) this co-opting of social justice language for clout. So the film asks: what happens when progressive values are wielded performatively? Saltburn (2023), though not strictly horror, embodies similar resentments: working-class scorn for liberal elites, delivered with baroque aesthetics and a pinch of nihilism.

Despite their relevant themes, these films are rarely regarded as intellectual or especially profound. Saltburn, as Alissa Wilkinson wrote, is ‘a movie whose form is so deliberately jocular that its content is not and never was the point.’

AHS: Cult (2017), set in the aftermath of the 2016 US election, was in many ways a precursor to the satirised depictions of progressives that would follow. The season centres on Ally (Sarah Paulson) and her partner, Ivy (Alison Pill), two social justice warriors with a trendy sustainable restaurant who are utterly devastated by Trump’s win. Their hypocrisies – like Ally’s protest vote for Jill Stein over Hillary Clinton – are quickly spotlighted.

Ryan Murphy’s characters received their fair share of critique outside the show, mostly for being clichéd: ‘too judgy, too mean’, according to one critic. Which is true. The show does veer close to caricature, which risks reinforcing the moral panics or stereotypes they’re meant to parody. In our current Trump era, satire and self-examination can easily be misread as evidence of liberal hypocrisy or, worse, co-opted by reactionary audiences keen to watch the left tear itself apart. As Matthew Farthing writes, ‘When satire is aimed at the powerless, it is not only cruel – it’s vulgar.’ For now, contemporary political horror is continuing to poke fun at those who can take it: the rich or the upper middle class, the online, the ostensibly ‘good’ people with blind spots. This inward turn marks a shift from fear of the outsider to interrogation of the insider, skewering the cognitive dissonance of those who view themselves as progressive while remaining complicit in the structures they claim to oppose.

And it’s not like we haven’t been poking fun at the right for ages. In the early 2000s, a lot of horror villains were rural caricatures: uneducated, incestuous, violent. Films such as The Hills Have Eyes (2006), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remakes and Wrong Turn (2003) played into this trope, which is why director Eli Craig’s Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2010) parodied it. In Craig’s film, two friendly hillbillies are mistaken for killers by a group of paranoid college kids who assume – because of the flannel and backwoods drawls – that the hillbillies must be the villains. It was a film ahead of its time in exposing just how deeply the horror genre relies on cultural binaries: rural equals danger; urban equals safety. For me, it marked a noticeable shift – an inversion of a classic horror trope. Because, surprise, surprise, in the end, it’s the college kids who turn out to be violent.

Fast forward a decade, and The Hunt (2020) executes a reverse bait-and-switch: liberal elites hunt working-class conservatives for sport. It’s a film of Democrats versus Republicans, but with the latter as unlikely heroes (though the final message is that we’re all as bad as each other). If Tucker & Dale challenged liberal bias, The Hunt exploited conservative paranoia. So maybe there is still a bit of ‘us versus them’ going on.

In this regard, there are definitely questions worth asking. Who does this satire or representation really serve? Is it critique or mockery? Does framing the left as hypocritical or laughable create – momentarily or systemically – old patterns of division? Who’s profiting?

THE ANSWERS ARE, of course, complicated.

Many of these films are witty and insightful. Bodies Bodies Bodies offers a darker commentary on our obsession with performance and distraction in the face of real crisis. Director Halina Reijn describes it as a cautionary tale about ‘the narcissism of our times’.

On the other, more cynical hand, how much of this new wave is trend-based? In ‘How Hollywood Lost the Culture War’, Matt Brennan argues that the entertainment industry – functioning as the Democratic Party’s de facto PR arm – has largely abandoned bold, disruptive storytelling in favour of safe, focus-grouped narratives. The result is what Brennan calls an ‘impoverished picture’ of both the progressive future and Hollywood’s cultural relevance. Instead of producing work that envisions structural change, Hollywood increasingly employs performative liberalism, more invested in symbolic or surface-level gestures than in political substance. In this context, horror of this ilk, even if it is meant to be satire, risks becoming another popular aesthetic.

There’s also the argument that in this Trump era, terms such as ‘woke’ have become such overused, weaponised buzzwords that they now serve as easy fodder for outrage. At this point, ‘woke’ is less a meaningful concept and more a tool for stoking moral panic; political fractures make for easy clickbait. Seeing our disillusionment and contradictions reflected back at us, dramatised for effect, is undeniably provocative, and that provocation drives engagement.

Still, not all engagement is inherently negative. If the intention is to foster critical thinking, then this discomfort might be productive. As Rithika Ramesh writes in The Craft of Political Horror: ‘the reform of political and social institutions requires the discomfort of its most privileged spectators. It is this discomfort that sparks action.’ Looking over this new wave of horror and reflecting on its predecessors, it seems no one is as deeply critical or eager to interrogate its own hypocrisies as the progressive left.

Of course, not everyone will feel uncomfortable or even particularly concerned about this new sub-genre and its representations. For many, it’s just comedy: stylised, self-aware, a good time. But that’s what makes it all the more fun: the ability to laugh while also considering the mess beneath the performance. If there’s a takeaway here, it’s that we’re all complicated, all a little hypocritical and, at times, a bit insufferable. That’s the real horror story.

Photo by Rythik on Unsplash