The 10 Best Political Cult Horror Films Ever

Peacenik tends to avoid gory horror films but Peacenik is surprised that Peacenik has only seen Night of the Living Dead in this list. What have you seen?

Social commentary shows up in the unlikeliest places. Here, our list for the most awesome films that double as political allegory.

November 12, 2010

In a new book about John Carpenter's Orwellian masterpiece, They Live, author Jonathan Lethem does some well-deserved justice to the film -- if it’s not the best-ever social commentary out there, it’s at least one of the most fun to watch. But They Live is far from the only movie to shed light on society’s woes. Directors have a long tradition of using horror as an allegory for what we most fear. Here are 10 awesome films that analogize, encapsulate -- and, in some instances, predicted -- true-life political nightmares.

1. Night of the Living Dead (1968). A classic among classics, George Romero’s debut feature not only influenced every quality cult/B-movie to come, he developed a template for political commentary in horror films that both he and his disciples follow to this day. Released in 1968, its slow pacing set the tone for the paranoia that gripped the nation the following year and never left, and the utter humanness of the voracious zombies was a reminder of humankind’s capacity for horrific acts.

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Puke Time

Peacenik says...Kunstler seems a little down this morning. Having witnessed the primary win by Christine O'Donnell can have that effect. Oh Yeah, Palin is the early leader for the Republican nomination for President too. Peacenik was kind of down on Peacenik's self this morning; then Peacenik saw neanderthal candidate Rob Ford—Toronto's quasi-Tea Party candidate for mayor—has a big lead in the polls. And our anti-science, anti-knowledge Prime minister continues to defend his census mayhem. And he continues to defend buying fighter jets the country doesn't need and can't afford, without taking competitive bids or doing any research. These days, it's the dumber the better. Yes, reading current events truly does bring on Peacenik puke time.



By James Howard Kunstler
on September 20, 2010 9:05 AM

Our county fair put me in mind of that American classic, Moby Dick, this year. So many white whales among the try-pots bubbling with rendered blubber, where crews of savages from all corners of the world toiled to bring forth batter-dipped Mars bars, Pop Tarts, corn dogs, funnel cakes, and other rarities of the deep fryer... and then the whales ventured a little further down the midway where they mounted the engines of swirling cosmic death, and were flung about in the centrifugal pods of fate on the ingenious mechanical arms of innovation, until their sickened souls gave forth with a mighty spewage of corn byproducts that rained down upon the moiling innocents below....

Like most metaphors, this one limps a bit, as did Captain Ahab himself, with his whale-bone peg-leg. But when everyday life gets detached from reality, metaphor is all you've got left. And in this ridiculous, sickening culture, with its toxic stream of electronic simulacrum politics sucking all the oxygen out of the collective brain-space, the mind is left wandering numbly across a kind of wilderness where twisted sign-posts point to mutant evangelists, freakish ideologies, false prophets, deadly miracle cures, phantoms on horseback, angels with bat-wings, and the ghost of Spotted Elk lying dead in the snow with his stiffened arm beckoning the way to extinction like Melville's Ahab corded to the hump of his sounding white whale. Oh, America, pull your head out of your electronic ass while you still can! And look out below!

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Scary People, Scary Times

Yes the scary people are coming out of the woodwork in the U.S.A., aided and abetted by right wing media. The most wild accusations about Obama, whether he was born in the U.S., whether he is a socialist, whether he is a muslim, whether he is a christian, etc., etc., all get major play. Is Obama afraid of the scary people? Peacenik thinks so. Obama is afraid to put solar panels on the roof of the White House for fear of offending the nutjobs. Obama is afraid to fight for extended unemployment benefits. Obama is afraid to fight for social security. Obama is afraid to fight for fair taxation. Obama is afraid to close Guantanamo. Obama is afraid to end the wars and bring the troops home. Yes the scary people are in charge. It is laughable that someone who has offered so little to the public discourse, such as John Boehner, can rise to be the Speaker of the House. But when the president is a scardy cat, when the supposed leader of the progressive movement is a scardy cat, this is what happens. Sarah Palin as president, becomes imaginable.

By James Howard Kunstler
on September 13, 2010 7:24 AM

In that order. The scary people have already started coming out of the woodwork. The times lately have been mostly uncertain, but soon they'll turn scary, too, as it becomes clearer that the people running things in the USA have no idea what's going on or what they're going to do about it -- and what's going on is an involuntary permanent re-set of the terms of everyday life, from a wet-dream robotic "consumer" techtopia to something more like the first chapter of Tobacco Road, with a family of half-wits reduced by hard times to fighting over a sack of turnips in a roadside ditch. That's the story-arc anyway, and lots of people won't like it. But the theme of dwindling resources is not a pretty one.
The most striking feature of the current scene is the absence of a coherent vision of our multiple related predicaments and how they add up to a valid picture of reality. To be precise, I mean our predicaments of 1.) energy resources, 2.) vanishing capital, and 3.) ecocide. This inability to decode the clear and present dangers to civilized life is a failure of leadership and authority without precedent in the American story.

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Is the Conservative Movement Losing Steam? Posner

I sense intellectual deterioration of the once-vital conservative movement in the United States. As I shall explain, this may be a testament to its success.

Until the late 1960s (when I was in my late twenties), I was barely conscious of the existence of a conservative movement. It was obscure and marginal, symbolized by figures like Barry Goldwater (slaughtered by Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election), Ayn Rand, Russell Kirk, and William Buckley--figures who had no appeal for me. More powerful conservative thinkers, such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, and other distinguished conservative economists, such as George Stigler, were on the scene, but were not well known outside the economics profession.

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Richard Posner provides an interesting overview of the conservative movement. The movement may be at its lowest ebb, but the consequences of 30 years of conservatism will dominate society for years to come. Peacenik is looking for the resurgence of conservatism. Will societal collapse fuel it? Who is going to get blamed for current depression? Common sense says the conservatives should be blamed. Peacenik has Peacenik's doubts.