Cinema · Genre analysis

Horror: 'B-movies and social paradigms'

ABSTRACT

Horror has always been cinema's cheapest genre, and its most honest one. Where the blockbuster answers to a marketing plan, the B-movie answers to nothing but its own low budget — and that constraint, paradoxically, is what lets the genre say things prestige cinema can't afford to: invasion anxiety smuggled in as a body-snatcher plot, class resentment smuggled in as a zombie siege, the fear of contagion, of the neighbour, of the very institution that was supposed to protect you. This post maps that other history of horror — not the jump-scare lineage, but the one running from Night of the Living Dead through the Italian giallo and beyond, where the monster is never just a monster: it's whatever a society can't say about itself out loud, dressed up cheaply enough that nobody at the studio thought to stop it.

....