Genre fiction like Horror/SF always says something even when it doesn't seem to say anything—maybe ESPECIALLY when it doesn't seem the writers had anything other than "Boo!" in mind.
The original ALIEN seems on the surface to be nothing more than "a haunted house in space", but is equally importantly about corporate greed and how the working class pays with their lives for the short-term gains of their corporate overlords. The sequel ALIENS makes the anti-corporate message clearer when sole survivor of the first movie Ellen Ripley openly states to Weyland-Yutani Middle Manager Carter Burke, "I don't know which of you is worse—at least they (the Xenomorphs) don't try fucking each other over for a percentage!"
Sometimes what the genre says isn't something we are especially proud of—the Fu Manchu stories, and those of other Asian supervillains, are so blatant in their anti-Asian racism (and the film version almost never cast Asian actors as their main characters), that to modern audiences the message sounds as ugly as Donald Trump yelling, "They're eating the cats! They're eating the dogs!"
I have never been interested in horror movies, but these analogies to colonial capitalist invasions has got me thinking about their usefulness.
Well done.
Genre fiction like Horror/SF always says something even when it doesn't seem to say anything—maybe ESPECIALLY when it doesn't seem the writers had anything other than "Boo!" in mind.
The original ALIEN seems on the surface to be nothing more than "a haunted house in space", but is equally importantly about corporate greed and how the working class pays with their lives for the short-term gains of their corporate overlords. The sequel ALIENS makes the anti-corporate message clearer when sole survivor of the first movie Ellen Ripley openly states to Weyland-Yutani Middle Manager Carter Burke, "I don't know which of you is worse—at least they (the Xenomorphs) don't try fucking each other over for a percentage!"
Sometimes what the genre says isn't something we are especially proud of—the Fu Manchu stories, and those of other Asian supervillains, are so blatant in their anti-Asian racism (and the film version almost never cast Asian actors as their main characters), that to modern audiences the message sounds as ugly as Donald Trump yelling, "They're eating the cats! They're eating the dogs!"