What Rough Beast?

I polled my students today for their favourite genre of film. I was surprised. I had expected “action/adventure” to win going away. It always had before. Instead, this time, there was a heavy preference for horror. This has changed just in the past year.

But then, you can see the growing popularity of horror everywhere. This is not just a local thing. Zombies, vampires, Hunger Games; it’s the current fad
.

Interesting, because the golden age of the horror film was 1931 (Frankenstein) to 1946 (Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein)—a period that corresponded to some real-life horrors. The Great Depression, but probably more significantly, the rise of Fascism/Nazism. It was the fear of events in Europe, some say, that caused the hysteria around Orson Welles’s production of The War of the Worlds in 1938. At another time, no one would have taken it seriously. There was a sense of foreboding in the air, a sense that all hell was about to break loose.

The paranoia dissolved in laughter as the Second World War was won.

Art is like our dreams; it reveals what we are unconsciously pondering. Right now, we have a lot of misgivings about the future, just as we did then.

I think we all know something is about to happen.