Last night’s Hostel: Part II screening was sponsored by the Museum of the Moving Image. It was the kick-off for a month-long exhibition called “It’s Only a Movie: Horror Films from the 1970s and Today”. Not “to Today,” mind you–“and Today.” A quick look at the films selected and the descriptions offered thereof will clue you in as to why this choice was made: Sociopolitical commentary, specifically about Vietnam and/or Iraq (two wars that are, apparently, completely interchangeable) is the new rubric by which critics are judging the quality of horror films. This is obviously something I’ve discussed before, but I’m kind of stunned to see how rapidly the new CW has solidified, to the point where bien pensant cultural institutions are using it as an excuse to ignore fully two decades of work in the genre in favor of the fashionably allegorical.

It’s not that I don’t think this criticism is present in many of these films–of course it is, even if the filmmakers have now been well and duly trained, post-The American Nightmare, to cry My Lai, Kent State, and Abu Ghraib on cue. Nor is it that I think the criticism isn’t justified. Nor is it that I think it’s not an interesting avenue of exploration–you’d kind of have to be stupid to see Night of the Living Dead and not want to talk about, say, the Watts riots (or to see Hostel: Part II and not talk about the use of attack dogs in interrogations by American military personnel, for that matter).

The problem?

A) It’s reductive. Ten years ago, while studying horror films in college, I discovered that the only acceptable mode of discourse was rooted in issues of gender and sexuality. Again, that stuff is present, and pointed, and interesting. But that’s not all there is.

B) It’s incomplete. This is a fine and dandy way to “explain” the American brutal-horror cycles of the ’70s and ’00s, and close cousins of this theory involving the Red Scare and Weimar can “explain” ’50s sci-fi and German expressionist horror flicks respectively. But what about ’30s Universal pictures and ’50s Hammer horror and ’60s Hitchcock and ’80s slashers and ’90s meta-movies and The Sixth Sense and The Ring and, and, and? Who had Japan and Korea invaded when Ichii the Killer and Audition and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance were made?

B) It’s pat. It gives filmmakers easy justification for what they’re doing and critics an easy way to avoid actually engaging with what makes these films tick, for better and, as in the case of the actually-not-very-good The Host, for worse. As Jon Hastings has written, it also gives them a lame out for justifying their declasse appreciation for genre work.

C) It’s safe. If all good horror movies are about bad American policies, then if you don’t support those policies, you really have nothing to worry about. I mean, you can be scared of Those Brutes, but that’s not all that difficult, is it? I don’t like the idea that you can avoid being implicated in the horror simply by, say, voting for Barack Obama.

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