When it comes to creating horror scenarios, statesmen and -women have always out-classed the creators of fiction. Now they’ve done it once again. As in some clichéd movie script, you go to bed one night to find the next day that the world has irreparably changed. Human rights are now “privileges.” People are not considered fellow human individuals but state-owned virus-transmitters. Soon a new passport could reconstruct and reshape an underclass defined by lack of an immunity which scientists can’t even confirm. Lockdown may well last forever. At least for those disadvantaged by one of the most momentous accelerators of systemic injustice ever. No matter how much you love horror, you don’t want to live it. Still, there are examples of filmic horror conveying some of the radically changed parameters of an utterly frightening reality. Their often perplexing plots, themes and systemic critique can help reassess an unhinged present, providing reflections on and analogues for the mechanisms of a new “normal” which is anything but.
No Exit – dir. Jacqueline Audry, 1954
“Hell is other people,” goes the famous quote from the Sartre classic, which Audrey turned into a cinematic chamber play oozing casual cruelty, simmering sadism, and brutalizing boredom. The concept of hell as a tacky parlor where the protagonists are cooped up has never been more timely, especially for those caged in problematic living constellations. Superficially, the scenario of people torturing each other with vicious mind games allegorizes the physical, emotional and sexual forms of domestic violence dramatically increased by lockdown. The stuffy interior highlights the claustrophobic horror of inescapable emotional isolation and hopeless permanence.
At the same time, the mordant malice revealed in the pointed dialogue works as a twofold symbol. It marks the disregard, denial and derision with which those contentedly waiting out lockdown thanks to good health, financial funds, or a supportive bubble react to the misery of those who don’t enjoy such comforts. Simultaneously, Sartre’s psychological horror bordering on vitriolic farce illustrates how self-absorbed characters torment themselves with nullities to fill the void of their non-existence. With their empathy and conscience long dead, their physical demise ironically makes the protagonists more coherent and less chilling than they were when they were alive.
The Exterminating Angel – dir. Luis Bunuel, 1962
Surrealism seems the best mimesis for the abhorrent absurdity of sentencing a society without trial to collective house arrest. Bunuel pairs his cruel comedy’s hypothetical setting with radical realism and scorching social critique. When an illustrious dinner party congregation realizes that none of them can leave the room, the façade of civility rapidly crumbles. The ensuing intertwined entitlement and compulsive (self)victimization provide a strident portrait of the lockdown elite but also of the phony public spirit. Opportunistic obedience motivated by a desire to protect one’s own health and comfort has a history of being strategically reframed as patriotism, civic duty or altruism. Indeed, the dinner party guests are staying at the increasingly grueling gathering not out of concern for the community but rather out of an unacknowledged fear for themselves.
As profiteers of a corrupt regime (don’t forget this is Francoist Spain) the guests have internalized total compliance. This compliance surfaces now as a psychopathological peer pressure forcing them to stay. Satirical scorn hardly mellows the horror of elitist self-preservation and twisted paranoia. The working classes forming a sensational audience outside the posh prison don’t fare much better. They, too, know their place so well they can’t leave it to enter the mansion. This curious constellation of a bilateral block reflects lockdown society’s insurmountable class chasm, held up by both sides. Those who are still employed cling to their remaining freedoms, meagre salary, and reassuring routine. Effectively, pandemic risk and burden are not minimized but shifted to the lower classes, at the same time that whatever threadbare safety net they had disappears.
The Shelter (The Twilight Zone) – dir. Lamont Johnson, 1961
Rod Serling’s classic chiller about a neighborhood battling each other for one neighbor’s fallout shelter relies on the horror of its timeless message: Your community, including family and friends, would kill you over a supposed safe spot, even if their sole gain was a slow painful death. One might wonder: Who would want to exist in a world in which nuclear fallout forces everyone inside? Where every other being would be seen as possibly contaminated, where the weak and injured would be left to die alone because giving them company and comfort would be too much of a risk? Many, apparently. It’s not only the fictional characters who seem intoxicated by the idea of living through—rather than falling victim to—a historic event. Under lockdown, the plot’s horror reveals itself not only to those viewers who are appalled by the behavior of the protagonists but also to those who recognize the protagonists’ behavior in their own world.
Panic buying, hoarding, vaccine line-cutters, and overburdened hospitals have proven that people wouldn’t even relinquish a pack of toilet paper to anyone in need, let alone a respirator. The normalization of ruthless self-rescue only entered a new phase with the roll-out of vaccines of which poorer nations will mostly get the leftovers. Have we just been so conditioned by countless disaster movies in which were are asked to root for upper middle class, heteronormative, mostly white, able-bodied, first-world protagonists? Do we not even flinch at the thought that our safety costs someone else’s life? Near the end of The Shelter, one protagonist muses that they have managed to destroy their community without a bomb. In a similar manner, our real-world communities will continue to suffer from the effects of survival mode. The same discreet horror awaiting the protagonists as they silently head for their homes is in store for the post-Covid19 world: living, working, remaining side-by-side with those whose comfort, safety and in some cases profit was built on the exclusion, suffering, and devastation of others.
Dogtooth – dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009
Fright-inducingly farcical, the intimate mingling of horror and humor in Dogtooth depicts a perverted family unit, walled up in their neat middle-class home. The parents have set the preposterous rules for their kids, who have been raised in complete ignorance of the outside world. The grown children’s position mirrors that of the many people who have been placed under disability by their governments while being kept in the dark about the situation. Just like the father declares a tame house cat to be a most dangerous beast, simply existing is now perceived as extreme endangerment of others. While one daughter resorts to self-mutilation to meet the requirements for escape, the inhabitants of Lockdown Land have no such option. They are promised their confinement depends on the health care system’s capacities—an objective the government can make unachievable by continuing their austerity policies which damaged the health care system in the first place.
Instead of confronting those who created their adversity, both the children and those living under lockdown take it out on one another. Despite its disastrous consequences the parent’s methodical madness is never denounced, enshrined just like the lockdown as sole solution. Lanthimos’s prospective psycho trip exemplifies the cruelty, counter-effectiveness, and craziness of an excessive preventive protection which makes the lives of those protected sheer torture. Knowing that words shape reality, the parents ascribe new meanings to idioms, extending their control over the kids’ reception of their distorted world. An idiomatic redefinition is also underway under lockdown as excessive online media consumption, isolation, and detention are reframed as happy, healthy normality, freedom of choice and consent. Retrospectively, Lanthimos’s deceptively harmonic hell, with occupants groomed into callous complacency, is an eerie anticipation of lockdown’s existential horrors.
Five Characters in Search of an Exit (The Twilight Zone) – dir. Lamont Johnson, 1961
The horror of emptiness can only be conveyed by emptiness. Thus, the five characters of The Twilight Zone’s nightmarish take on Luigi Pirandello’s mind-bending stage play are trapped in a dark void. Detached from all and everyone they knew, the miserable puppet protagonists have been literally and figuratively cut off. The same can be said for the individuals whose lives have been crushed by a system placing them in harm’s way, allegedly out of sudden deep-felt concern for groups it has routinely bypassed and neglected. By re-imagining the episode’s characters as puppets, the plot takes a sinister turn towards psychological horror with obvious political overtones.
Revealed only to the viewer, at the end, the ultimate horror of the forlorn figurines’ situation is that they are disposable. Designed to be toyed with and discarded at will, they’ve now been thrown away and won’t be mourned. The puppets can expect no sympathy and, more tellingly, can hardly feel any, each remaining alone with their pain. Outwardly surreal but psychologically accurate, the scenario captures the horror of realizing one’s own insignificance to others and valuelessness in a calculation that doesn’t take human suffering in account.
1984 – dir. Michael Radford, 1984
With the Soviet Bloc gone, these days the horror of Orwell’s bleak vision hits much closer to home. Cut off from all prerequisites for physical and mental health, many people quickly turned to spying, snitching and public finger pointing. Apparently, nothing eases personal discomfort more than witnessing others’ misery. While the comrades of the Orwellian Oceania cheer at the public executions of supposed traitors, the people of Lockdown Land cheer at concepts such as the denial of medical treatment for dissidents or permanent deprivation of human rights for those not vaccinated. There are plenty of Covid-related “Newspeak” misnomers such as the classist “lockdown fatigue” which reinterprets the devastating damage done to the most vulnerable as mildly enervating surfeit. Complaints about the public being “recklessly endangered by freedom” basically paraphrase Orwell’s infamous party slogan “Freedom is Slavery.”
While Oceania is treated to TV-screened “Two Minutes Hate,” Lockdown Land is constantly fed warnings in menacing militaristic terms. Big Brother’s propaganda is echoed in omnipresent posters, ads, and public appeals calling for “discipline” and “solidarity” to the state. Fear-fueled conviction of the justness of lockdown overrides any concern about its repercussions. Creeping in comes the horror of lockdown love. It took a disturbingly short time for people to get cozy in a world made of a laptop screen and four walls, where concern exclusively for oneself and maybe one’s bubble is widely accepted, no decisions need to be made, other nations might as well not exist, and all formerly urgent environmental and social issues are wiped out by one all-consuming threat. The most sinister idea of this horror is that for those affected it equals love. Like the devotion felt by John Smith who needed time and trauma to finally admit his love – not for the party or a person but for that comfortingly constant, controlling construct Big Brother.
The Obsolete Man (The Twilight Zone) – dir. Elliot Silverstein, 1961
As Rod Serling says in his stylized admonition about the indispensability of artistic culture: “This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one.” Fast forward to the present where the workforce is divided into “essential” and “non-essential” workers, the most non-essential being – artists. The elimination of cultural life by state decree is part of a reality hardly better than the one faced by Meredith Burgess’s protagonist in The Obsolete Man. A librarian, he is condemned to death for being “obsolete” by a totalitarian regime which erased libraries and books on the basis of their “uselessness.” The narrative connection of attacks against art to attacks against humans is not an exaggeration. Controlling and imposing bans on art has been symptomatic of repressive systems like Francoism, Nazism, Khmer Nationalism, and Stalinism.
Rigorously limiting the ability to access, create, and display art via classist, racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory schemes is a historically-chronicled preventive response to art’s disruptive power as a primary agent of empathy, in constant opposition to institutionalized force. Suggesting an online-presentation was an adequate substitute for a real art experience is like suggesting a snapshot of a meal would feed the hungry. Prohibiting the crucial direct experience amounts to the same psychological deprivation as a straightforward ban. The shared horror of The Obsolete Man and lockdown life is a humanist deadening and an ideological stupefaction. Luckily enough, Burgess’s librarian may choose the form of his execution, which seems more like a mercy because who would want to live in a world like that?
Nothing in the Dark (The Twilight Zone) – dir. Lamont Johnson, 1962
Rather than exuding horror, this spooky philosophy play illustrates the causes and effects of this compelling emotion, addressing the different kinds of horror lockdown produces. An elderly woman living in constant fear of a visit from Mr. Death is determined to elude him by staying locked up in her lodging. The predominant fear of non-being breeds subsequent horrors of isolation, angst, imprisonment, and emptiness. The plot’s hidden horror is that of a bitterly ironic self-fulfilling prophecy: To avoid death, she stops living. Likewise, the value of human life has regularly been hypocritically cited in order to justify acts against humanness: torture, human experiments, animal testing, life support against the patient’s wishes, bans on reproductive choice.
The protagonist’s refusal to deal with anxiety-provoking existential fears symbolizes society’s tabooing of death. Significantly, the death taboo now stands out more powerful than ever, with no major discourse emerging about death or its social and political implications. To the contrary, disassociation, evasion, and statistics even serve to reinforce the taboo, escalating the horror the sudden concreteness of death holds for some. While the protagonist’s compassion ultimately overcomes her thanatophobia, reality confronts us with a first-world society reacting as if it just lost its immortality, which it still hopes to buy back somehow. At least the protagonist learns what might be the most essential of lockdown’s many brutal lessons: The means to avoid death at any cost can be worse than death itself.
Lida Bach is a professional movie journalist and critic from Berlin, having been published and publishing in numerous online media. She has also written for Horror Homeroom on “10 Classic Films to Unlock the Uncanny” and on contemporary uncanny horror. You can check out her website, Cinemagicon, and find her on Twitter.
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