If summer is getting you down, you can now read Jon Greenaway’s Capitalism: A Horror Story. It is all but guaranteed to make you feel differently about horror, Gothic and Witches as genres, if that is appealing.

I looked at it as the education I was going to get, and was not disappointed. For the most part. Greenaway assigns all kinds of Marxian attitudes to these categories of popular culture. Although Marx and Engels never saw the Texas Chainsaw Massacres, they might actually have read Frankenstein, and maybe Dracula, which come in for quite a lot of analysis here. Would they agree these stories leverage the unsavory state of capitalism in the buildup of their monsters? Too late to ask, I’m afraid.

What Greenaway has latched onto is the simple hook used in typical horror flicks: the unhappiness of life at a dead end job, or unemployment, a dead-end marriage, or a bizarre, dystopian government that provides for events like massacring anyone you want, one night a year. These miseries are easy to assign to capitalism. It doesn’t take much; capitalism is no heaven on Earth.

Things can always be worse, and make you want to return to the good old days, when going to work did not include physical torture, removal of limbs and organs, and so on. Horror films are all about damage to the body; monsters are all about us, in new forms.

There are plenty of references to Marx early on, but then he takes a back seat to the films and books themselves. And apparently, Gothic Marxism is a thing. There’s already a shelf of it building. Greenaway has mere expanded it to modern horror and tales of witches, also smack of fearsome feminist warriors.

Greenaway tries to make the case that capitalism is at the root of all the evils of this genre. I’m not convinced he has succeeded. He also tries to make case that these genres are actually “hopeful”, and not entirely miserable. And there he clearly fails. Or the films and books do. One or the other. The films are all about titillation – blood and gore in this case. If they don’t provide that, killing off most of cast by the end, they have failed an ever more demanding public. It would be like a thrill ride without scaring you half to death. You would feel gypped.

Greenaway explains it a more esoteric level: ”The films are not aiming for the mimetic realism of pornography, but the melodrama and abstraction of a soap opera.” Agreed. For capitalism, there is a new age label “necro-neoliberalism” to describe this genre amidst all the inequality we see all day long.

But it still leads to my main criticism: the choice of data. Horror films, Gothic films and Witches films are written specifically to scare viewers in a certain way. The scripts are adjusted for maximum sensual effect, and not any tipping of the hat to reality. To that extent, using slasher films to make an academic point about Marxism is just plain invalid.

I mean, if you were analyzing Marxism in education, would you do it by reviewing the movie Fame? All these hyper-talented kids, unaccountably breaking into Broadway-quality song and dance routines in classrooms and hallways and recess yards? How much value does that add to your argument?

Greenaway is very careful if not possessive over these films. He names directors, actors, the names of the characters they play, and setup all very thoroughly, as if it makes a difference. The fact is, I have never heard of a good 90% of them, and I am no stranger to the cinema. So whether they made it to the end of the film was of no interest to me. Death in chaos in never fair; there is no point expecting otherwise. Again, the choice of film makes all the data suspect anyway. No valid economic or philosophical decisions can be made on the basis of a survey of heavily revised shooting scripts, later edited for maximum effect.

But neither is this a film fan book. Aside from a cartoonish cover, there are no images: no production stills, no headshots of the directors or stars, no posters. It really does want to be taken seriously. But the data source makes that impossible.

The rationalizing that goes into portraying horror as hopeful lacks credibility. As close as it comes is this: “a naïve passive liberalism that depends upon the institutions of the capitalist present is entirely and completely insufficient.” for establishing a utopia.

So where does that leave us all? Readers are free to be grossed out by books, and moviegoers by films. Despite Greenaway’s thorough and highly academic approach, little more comes from this book.

David Wineberg

This book is so great! I'm a total wuss when it comes to horror movies and books, but I've had this desire to 'get over it' so I could appreciate what it's all about for a long time - I therefore went into this book hoping it might give me another angle with which to approach the genre, and it did so much more! It's a mix of literary criticism, cultural analysis, political economy and - wonderfully - polemic. It manages to have a whimsy about it whilst also being deadly (ha!) serious, and I felt both cleverer and happier having read it. Will it get me to watch more horror movies and read more gothic novels? Maybe. Has it totally transformed how I think about the genre and the imagination-disruption potential it has / role it plays in our capitalist realist culture? 100%.

Capitalism: A Horror Story discusses the ways in which the horror genre and the horror of capitalism through Marxism overlap, intersect, and produce affect for populations. A truly exciting read which explores film, literature, queerness, monstrosity, and fascism. Having both an interest in Marxist theory as well as the emergence of gothic and horror discourses and theories this truly brought together these topics with explanations and analyses that were rich with thought and academic resources. A must read for the readers of horror who also recognise the inherent horror of capitalism!

Here’s something I didn’t know I needed: critical analysis of capitalism from a Marxist perspective with an emphasis on how horror can both explain the nature of capitalism and offer hope for a better future. Very well done and engaging throughout…even doubles at times as film / literature critique as well.