Capitalism hates us. We needn’t look far for proof. Firestorms, hurricanes, floods, derechos—capitalism is inimical to the continued existence of life on Earth. Twenty-first century investment banks may trumpet their commitments to climate policy, but the people who run so-called responsible investing units show how little they care about this destruction. In a 2022 conference presentation, the head of responsible investing for HSBC’s asset management unit said: “Climate change is not a financial risk that we need to worry about. . . . Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years? Amsterdam’s been six meters underwater for ages, and that’s a really nice place. We will cope with it.” It is precisely this lack of concern that we see in the Trump administration’s assault on the regulatory state, in billionaires constructing apocalypse hideaways, and in the global rise of fascism. Capitalism encourages those with resources to assume that they’ll be able to cope, while the rest of us burn, drown, or starve.
If we want cultural evidence of this pervasive feeling about capitalism, we need only turn to horror. Burning is a persistent feature of modern horror, from the self-immolating careworker of Rose Glass’s Saint Maud (2019) to the clothing designer trapped in the factory inferno she created in Lorcan Finnegan’s Nocebo (2022). No genre more fully harnesses the negative thoughts and feelings that pervade our moment. Why? Because horror is built around a unique kind of aesthetic judgement about what terrifies us. At its core, horror is not about being scared but about being scared with other people. That means horror is and has to be created collectively and must aim to create collective affective experiences. Horror is the result of shared judgments about what terrifies. Its pleasures come from joining with others in the recognition that these terrors are both real and communal.
It matters, then, who makes and watches horror. In the twenty-first century, horror has become an expansive and diverse genre. It’s not just Jordan Peele and Coralie Fargeat. Horror now is made by an array of women, BIPOC, queer, and trans filmmakers, including Jane Schoenbrun, Amy Seimetz, Karyn Kusama, Prano Bailey-Bond, Mariame Diallo, Ruth Paxton, Hanna Bergholm, Natalie Erika James, Kate Dolan, and Mattie Do. And it’s not just slashers and meat movies either. Elevated horror, critical horror, feminist horror, all draw extensively from film history, most especially from art film, melodrama, and the woman’s film. And that means that horror’s not just for young white men looking to escape their castration anxiety. It’s a genre that aims for an audience as diverse as its creators.
As a diverse genre about what terrifies us, horror is uniquely suited to giving the terrors of modern life narrative form. Much of contemporary horror understands itself as a critique of contemporary life, whether of work, climate change, anti-Black racism, mass culture and consumerism, patriarchy, or women’s representation in film.
To shape these critiques, contemporary horror often uses fantastic elements to create metaphors and allegories for social problems. By juxtaposing monsters, uncanny objects, and the supernatural and realistic depictions of the contemporary world, this new, explicitly critical horror makes its terrors from the defects of our conjuncture. Michael Löwy usefully terms this narrative mode “critical irrealism.” But critical irrealist texts shouldn’t be mistaken for Marxist ones. As Löwy describes in his discussion of nineteenth and early twentieth-century irrealist tales, critical irrealism doesn’t offer systemic critiques of capitalism so much as express a broader “[r]omantic opposition to capitalist-industrial modernity.” And that holds true for twenty-first century critical horror, even if its critiques have little to do with Romantic opposition to modernity. They focus instead on social inequities of race, class, and gender.
We can find this critique most clearly in the films associated with what Sheri-Marie Harrison calls “the New Black Gothic,” such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, and Mariama Diallo’s Master. But this approach has also spread across contemporary horror. Within just the last year, horror has given us films that capture the terrors of anti-trans culture (Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow), internalized misogyny (Fargeat’s The Substance), class warfare (Nick Tomnay’s What You Wish For), and the patriarchy (Michael Mohan’s Immaculate).
If horror lets us spot the forms of common sense that keep capitalism going, it doesn’t help us understand what creates these horrors. It doesn’t offer catharsis or relief. It isn’t therapeutic. It simply gives form to the negative feelings that imbue our historical moment. In this sense, horror is political without being politically useful. Its feelings can bring people together or divide them. Although they’re shared, these feelings are fundamentally unstable. If we want to understand why capitalism hates us and to create something durable out of our shared experience of the feelings that horror captures, we need reason. And, for me, that means we need Marxism.
Value form theory, social reproduction theory, eco-socialism, and the Black radical tradition help us find in the terrors of contemporary horror the common sense that keeps capitalism going: Work is punishment, but you should love it anyway. Humanity is responsible for global warming, not capitalism. You can’t stop gentrification. Everything will get commodified eventually. The family is our sole protection from the market. You have to manage your feelings as a worker. Horror gives narrative form to the dread and terror these pieces of common sense inspire. Yet we also need Marxism us to understand how capitalism’s terrors affect our work, the biosphere, our built environment, the goods and services we produce, our relationships, and our minds.
References
Abelson, Max, and Harry Wilson. “HSBC Suspends Executive Who Downplayed Climate Change Risks.” Bloomberg.com, May 22, 2022.
Harrison, Sheri-Marie. “New Black Gothic.” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 23, 2018.
Löwy, Michael. “The Current of Critical Irrealism: ‘A Moonlit Enchanted Night,'” in Adventures in Realism, edited by Matthew Beaumont, Blackwell, 2007, pp. 193-206.
Adapted from Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film by Joshua Gooch. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2025 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. This excerpt appears courtesy of the author and the publisher.
Joshua Gooch is Professor of English at D’Youville University in Buffalo, New York. He is author of Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity and The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy.
