“Attack of the Demons” or Why You Shouldn’t Attend Halloween Music Festivals in Small Towns with Lots of Caves and Bats

Horrors films have often been viewed as reflections of what’s cooking up the most paranoia in society at the time of their release. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) has forever been designated as a political allegory on Americans’ fear of Communism.

Ernest Matjijs in his lengthy Cinema Journal essay, “AIDS References in the Critical Reception of David Cronenberg” (2003), notes how The Fly (1986) caused numerous reviewers to make the disease tie-in. The “Horror” segment of Todd Haynes’s Poison (1991), with a scientist creating a fatal epidemic after swallowing his own experimental sex serum, was never meant to be otherwise.

Indie rocker Natalie doesn’t want her music-critic boyfriend dead but . . . .

Then earlier this year we had Amy Seimetz’s She Dies Tomorrow about a contagious thought that causes its victims to be quite sure they only have 24 more hours to live. This causes the antiheroine to ponder what style leather jacket she’d like to have her dead body made into. This clearly, whether intentionally or not, is one of the…