Warning: Minor Spoilage

There is a reason why horror movies which seek to repulse and terrify leave you with a feeling of relief that is more than just getting to its end. As a general rule for a movie studio operating under a standard script, when the protagonist is being pursued by a malignant entity, two things can be guessed immediately: one, that the protagonist will (mostly) escape and two that they will suffer along the way. This way, the only thing at stake for an audience is the degree to which the protagonist is tormented. Just as the tagline for such a movie might read something along the lines of being too scary to watch but too compelling to look away, there is also a real life equivalent if the old saw about art imitating life (and vice versa) holds.

Philip K. Dick’s “Martian Time-Slip” posits that a building or structure can take on human characteristic of mental illnesses, and while this is not an idea exclusive to the book, it is a well defined example of the idea that a body of many organisms composes one larger organism. Horror movies in particular hold to this idea that places can absorb “negative energies” from past, tragic events like carcinogens, corrupting a house so that it becomes inhabitable. There has been much writing on what this means as a reflection of the American psyche. Many like Wes Craven have commented on the horror genre's ability for “release”. Other studies show how horror movies act as sublimation for national fears, most notably in “Night of the Living Dead” and “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” as metaphors for invasion.

Relative to their blockbuster counterparts, horror movies in the year 2016 reliably brought in viewers. The constant recycled story of an unstoppable entity/force that is constantly one step behind you is seen time and again. To overgeneralize one aspect of American culture today is to say that it has given away to apathy, a general atmosphere of acedia. Aldous Huxley links an increase of this feeling to “terrible event[s]” like World War I, irreversibly changing the environment of the globe. America has grown out of these “terrible events” becoming a world hegemon after World War II and the Cold War. But these could be considered “just” wars and positive nationalism was increased by the feeling of stopping a defined evil. But then came Vietnam and the Columbian Conflict and the Gulf War, until 9/11 occurred. It was noted in "Torture and Positive Law: Jurisprudence for the White House" that at this time: “with the growth of the ethnic-loyalty state and the security state in the twentieth century, the emergence of anticolonial insurgencies and other intractable forms of internal armed conflict, and the rise of terrorism, torture has returned”.

With the discovery of the CIA’s meddling in South America, government manipulation of foreign societies, and secret torture centers like Abu Ghraib there has been a hard-to-swallow realization that America's image of a "city upon a hill" is perhaps suspect. Groups from Amnesty International to the Catholic Church have condemned these practices (waterboarding, etc.) put into much use after 9/11 saying “Torture, which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity...”. This “satisfying of hatred” has been used to justify torture before. Raul Gomez Treto notes in "Thirty Years of Cuban Revolutionary Penal Law" that after the revolution:

“those who were in Cuba then are well aware that if the revolutionary government had not at that moment applied severe legislation against the few hundred torturers, bombers, and other brutal criminals long employed by the Batista regime, the people themselves would have taken justice into their own hands-as happened during the anti-Machado rebellion and thrown the society into chaos. It was only the population's confidence in the government's effective and cautiously selective administration of "revolutionary justice" that kept the society in order”.

Chris Marker’s documentary “Sans Soleil” suggests that Japanese penchant for ultraviolent content in media is a sublimation, or a way of dealing with past violence that, much like American cinema, deals with hard issues by distancing itself, placing itself behind a fiction to quantify hard emotions. If we follow the connection between the body and its people, the American public should have internalized the actions of their government committing human rights abuse by waterboarding and abusing their enemies. Thus we feel indirectly involved for crimes committed by our government under our larger, umbrella representative lable: America.

Most anyone can point out the patterns of a generic horror movie. The audience watches as the protagonist is chased by an entity, some people die along the way, but then the main characters find some way to defeat/escape it. It is this main cycle where the audience is able to funnel their guilt, projecting themselves into the main character. In this mindset of the audience who has internalized the country's guilt, as long as the main character is beat up a little, or suffers in atonement, they feel they’ve paid their dues and the guilt/monster can be put away/defeated. This is made fun of in Joss Whedon’s “Cabin in the Woods” which comedically reduces this trope to a formulaic sacrifice to offer up to the Ancient One who protects the “status quo” of the world much like consumers pay their money to those who provide ways to look at the world in a static view, so that it remains unchanged or can be controlled (by a Western audience). But if we had real control, fear of what might confront our artificially maintained environment in home invasion films would cease to scare. And so there is the fear that one day, forces outside our control may demand accountability for criminal actions (countries who want reparation for past exploitation or those illegally tortured at a black site for instance).

Why is it, that so many horror movies ask us to condemn those "deserving" to die: those characters who are just too stupid (i.e. has sex in the middle of the woods at night) or believe they alone can stand up to the monster, are killed in such as way designed so you don't feel very bad about it. In many instances, the killer is someone who was wronged in the past: from the veteran with PTSD in “Don’t Breathe” to Jason bullied as a child in the “Friday the 13th” franchise. These types of characters are usually allowed to seek “righteous revenge” on those who did them wrong, like on scientists and abusive parents, but the protagonist (tied to the point of view of the audience) almost always escapes. This point of view allows the audience to suffer along with the characters, in detached fashion, and carry out cathartic self flagellation by watching the monster seek their revenge by murdering innocents and non-innocents alike. A xenophobic American audience creates an Other they can tie into a victim seeking appeasement--indeed, many times like in “The Woman in Black”, a body needs to be returned to the grave or a wrong needs to be righted for the entity to go away.

There is a certain weariness in “The Walking Dead” that arises as the characters realize that no matter how many zombies they put down, more will always be there. Characters are constantly depressed by what they did in the past and wonder they can atone for it. National identity gone, they numbly "walk" from town to town tied together as a group by the desire to survive being "eaten" alive by their "guilt". In the same way, America as a body today is disillusioned by the past, its members encompassed by the body are aware of what the body has done in their name, seeking new Others like terrorists and immigrants as scapegoats, which reflects back into our entertainment, releasing us from these pressures. When the public's reaction to nationalism is a sardonic "yeah America", the cathartic cycle of horror movies allows an escape in its invitation to actively participate with the main character in outrunning a defined fear. We just sweep the dirt under the rug, projecting the reality of the ‘American Dream’, an idea critiqued by the famous opening sequence of “Blue Velvet” in its juxtaposition of an idyllic suburban yard with hordes of insects crawling underneath.

Pretty much what this comes down to Is a question if it's okay that America becomes a monster in the process of "pursuing justice" against terrorism. It is a question that has been asked by many scholars and movies such as the “Dark Knight” trilogy in particular, where Batman relies on increasingly extreme methods to extract information from enemies. It would seem from such examples that yes, you may bend the rules as long as you don’t go too far. However critics like FBI questioning expert Joe Navarro find that torture muddies the nation. Groups like Amnesty International have cited Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s “Torture: Cancer of Democracy” as “undermin[ing] democratic values”. The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims identifies generational effects on and “traumatization” of whole societies of victims, leaving a question as to the equal and opposite force for the perpetrating country. Going back to the haunted house analogy, if America is a house absorbing all of these "negative energies" from committing torture and murder on foreign citizens, the public who are its inhabitants have to suffer in its new corrupted state or be "haunted" by resulting ghosts of the past. But if past wrongs can be righted, the house can be restored to is natural state.

The American need to punish its enemies while keeping its hands clean is taken as an abstract idea and compressed into the movie format, where the fear of guilt can be quantified and beaten. During the summer when school is out and times are easy, thoughts compound and feelings that had been distracted by jobs and homework bubble up to the surface. Like in “Poltergeist” the sins of the past rise up in a suburban front yard due a housing company illegally built on a burial ground to cover costs. How many bodies has the government buried? How many unmarked graves? And if America as a body is perpetrating these atrocities, what does that do to its parts. We are only as complacent as our knowledge allows, and while recently there has been actions made to reconcile with this history, is it enough?