Beyond The Scream by Holden Duckworth

On this episode of Beyond The Scream, Hold­en Duck­worth takes a look into the pol­i­tics of Hor­ror movies between the sep­a­rate terms of Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump. Beyond The Scream will take you into the depths of polit­i­cal and social com­men­tary trends that present them­selves with­in hor­ror movies, and how they do it. This pod­cast takes an in-depth look at Get Out (2017) and Com­pan­ion (2025) by talk­ing about race, gen­der, and AI. 

Tran­script

Beyond The Scream Episode 1

Think about your favorite movie, or the most recent one you enjoyed. What theme did you get from it? What was its mes­sage? Did it not have one? 

Depend­ing on your favorite film, this might come with a very clear or a very com­pli­cat­ed answer. An action movie about war will han­dle this idea of mes­sag­ing entire­ly dif­fer­ent­ly than a roman­tic comedy. 

So, how about hor­ror, and thrillers? What mes­sage do you get from a creepy voice over the phone, or a sum­mer camp slash­er? The truth is: prob­a­bly a very dis­tinct and polit­i­cal one. 

Hel­lo, I am Hold­en Duck­worth and wel­come to Beyond the Scream. 

Hor­ror as a polit­i­cal con­cept in lit­er­a­ture can go back as ear­ly as Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein in 1818. Then, in a full cir­cle man­ner, in film it real­ly start­ed to take shape in the ear­ly 20s and 30s with the 1931 Franken­stein movie, and orig­i­nal 1922 Nos­fer­atu. Both films uti­lized World War I anx­i­eties about dis­ease, sci­ence, and for­eign influence. 

So, what does all this mean? Hor­ror and thriller, its sib­ling genre, has always been polit­i­cal on the screen. 

Now of course, in 2025, the film indus­try has changed dras­ti­cal­ly and the media we con­sume does tend to be able to touch on more top­ics more open­ly. These two gen­res very open­ly now have polit­i­cal com­men­taries where­as the orig­i­nal Franken­stein and Nos­fer­atu may not have. Still, even movies that tend to not have clear polit­i­cal opin­ions reflect the anx­i­eties of society. 

While Jason slash­ing teenagers at a Sum­mer Camp may already be scary on its own, it reflects a fear of the new age of per­mis­sive­ness in the younger gen­er­a­tion. This exact anx­i­ety might have been the rea­son that the final girl in the 80s tend­ed to be more strict­ly moral than the rest of the cast. 

So, this is how hor­ror and thriller movies do it. They pick a social anx­i­ety or aspect of soci­ety and exag­ger­ate it into a scary crea­ture or killer. It is believed that this is a deci­sion due to try­ing to ground the film. That the audi­ence may find it more scary if they can relate to some­thing in the movie. A sub­ur­ban audi­ence may find a sub­ur­ban movie scari­er than an urban audi­ence, and par­ents may wor­ry more about the young teens on screen. 

David Tin­ker, a Senior at Uni­ver­si­ty of Con­necti­cut, and the pres­i­dent of the Husky Hor­ror Club told me all about how he feels as a fan about how hor­ror man­ages to get these pol­i­tics on the screen in between the screams. 

“It can be a par­tic­u­lar­ly– it’s one of the best ways to look at the ambi­ent cul­ture of the soci­ety of when it is made because every hor­ror film, no mat­ter whether it is good or bad, is going to show you what the film­mak­ers thought would be scary par­tic­u­lar­ly to a cer­tain audi­ence usu­al­ly com­mer­cial audi­ences or mass audi­ences, and that can tell you a lot about the kind of fears that were going around in a soci­ety at a par­tic­u­lar time or how peo­ple were think­ing at that time.” 

At any point, there is a polit­i­cal con­ver­sa­tion that comes with fears and hopes. In 2025, the Unit­ed States finds itself repeat­ing a Pres­i­dent Don­ald J. Trump as the 45th and 47th pres­i­dent. Why this is inter­est­ing is that one can see the dif­fer­ent social anx­i­eties that took a fore­front dur­ing these two terms just by watch­ing hor­ror and thriller films. 

In 2017, Trump was elect­ed pres­i­dent for the first time and many may remem­ber one top­ic more than any oth­er: The Wall. 

From the start of his pres­i­den­cy: immi­gra­tion, race, and the econ­o­my with class took the fore­front. It is not a coin­ci­dence that dur­ing his first term there was Ready Or Not, a movie about how the rich pro­tect them­selves, the series Love­craft Coun­try which saw mon­sters next to mon­strous racism, His House with Sudanese Immi­grants fac­ing ter­rors in their refuge house. 

Then, one movie stood out more than any oth­er: Get Out. 

Get Out was Film­mak­er Jor­dan Peele’s direc­to­r­i­al debut and we met with out­stand­ing crit­i­cal acclaim. It does­n’t shy away from its polit­i­cal mes­sag­ing, bor­der­ing on the explic­it side. With­out heavy spoil­ers: Get Out is a movie about a black man who is vis­it­ing his white girlfriend’s fam­i­ly for the first time. The expe­ri­ence ini­tial­ly starts off as wel­com­ing and warm, but strange inter­ac­tions with oth­er black peo­ple on the prop­er­ty leads him to believe some­thing more sin­is­ter is going on. The movie, before even get­ting into the actu­al hor­ror, unset­tles the audi­ence with microag­gres­sions, con­trol or a feel­ing of lack of auton­o­my, and racial bias. Very quick­ly in the movie, the audi­ence is prob­a­bly agree­ing with the name. 

Pro­fes­sor Hasen­fratz, an Eng­lish Pro­fes­sor at UConn who focus­es on film, shared his ideas of pol­i­tics in hor­ror and how the audi­ence may per­ceive it. 

“I do feel like in gen­der pol­i­tics– ado­les­cents that have sex are the first ones to die in hor­ror movies, and in a lot of hor­ror movies there is a last vic­tim who sur­vives. So, it would be real­ly easy for pol­i­tics to be pro­ject­ed onto that.” 

So how does this dif­fer with 2025? Hor­ror and thriller movies in 2024–25 seem to have sim­i­lar trends as well, and they’re not the same. Now there is a focus on women and AI. One of the most obvi­ous exam­ples is AfrAId with the focus on AI in the mid­dle, where AI turns killer. Megan as well does this sim­i­lar­ly, but focus­es on AI as a future com­pan­ion and then once again turn­ing killer. Then, there was Mother’s Instinct focus­ing on griev­ing moth­ers and a 1960 society. 

This mid­cen­tu­ry, sub­ur­ban soci­ety has become quite the ris­ing trend in hor­ror and thrillers. This became a trend around the time of Roe V. Wade got over­turned, with Don’t Wor­ry Dar­ling being one of the lead­ing movies on this trend. Don’t Wor­ry Dar­ling being a movie about a house­wife real­iz­ing the truth about her idyl­lic world and how much auton­o­my she has. 

Now all of this sums up into one movie: Drew Hancock’s Com­pan­ion. Com­pan­ion is a high­ly rat­ed film about an AI life-like Com­pan­ion Doll used as a sort of fake girl­friend find­ing inde­pen­dence and auton­o­my, while acci­den­tal­ly get­ting into a lot of bloody trou­ble. While set in the present, the film styles the lead, Iris, in more vin­tage style cloth­ing. This gives the movie a Step­ford Wives feel­ing. This can very clear­ly reflect a polit­i­cal anx­i­ety of not only AI over­pow­er­ing and harm­ing humans, but also women feel­ing con­trolled and not in charge of their own bod­ies due to leg­is­la­tion. These themes are not hid­den from the audi­ence, with one inter­est­ing scene where a woman con­fides in the AI that she is scared for future rela­tion­ships if peo­ple could just buy their dream part­ner. In the span of the movie, audi­ences also see top­ics of queer peo­ple and vio­lence against women. 

While it may be too ear­ly to state that the themes pre­sent­ed in Com­pan­ion will be trends for the next 4 years, I believe these are the trends that have the most force behind them and most clear­ly reflect some of the main social anx­i­eties in the Unit­ed States at the moment.

Once again, I am Hold­en Duck­worth and this was Beyond The Scream.

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