4 Horror TV Shows Where the Subtext is the Story
On fear, politics, and metaphor in horror television
Horror has a mixed reputation as a genre. Some hear horror and immediately think of caricatured, hyper-sexualized teens running through the woods, covered in blood, arms swinging wildly, running from a masked slasher with a vague backstory. Some think of auteurs past like Alfred Hitchcock, or auteurs present like Jordan Peele. Some think of mind-bending experimental films like Suspiria or The Lighthouse. Some think of cheap jump-scares or gratuitous gore. The reality is, horror contains all of these. It’s a broad genre that ranges from camp to arthouse, trashy to lofty.
In my opinion, horror is at its most interesting when it is used as a vehicle to explore the dark corners of the collective conscience. Horror is, at its core, an exploration of fear. Trends in horror films track with trends in social anxieties. Inside Edition writes that in 2020, the film Contagion jumped from #270 to the #2 most-watched film in the US. Piracy streaming sites saw visits for Contagion increase by 5,609%. As a real-world virus brought death and chaos, people turned to the story of a fictional virus for catharsis. In 2016, Vox writes that home invasion films dominated, reflecting the xenophobic fears of white Americans. As a turbulent election year emboldened openly racist rhetoric around the “invasion” of immigrants, mainstreaming the white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory,” the box office hits portrayed affluent people being victimized by violent, faceless intruders. Teen Vogue has an excellent article chronicling how zombie movies have transformed throughout the decades, evolving from its Haitian roots as an allegory for slavery into fear of nuclear war in the 50s (Creature with the Atom Brain), civil rights in the 60s (Night of the Living Dead), and consumerism in the 70s (Dawn of the Living Dead). Horror has always been a lens into people’s fears and insecurities, and how they intersect with the present moment.
In the past several years, television has been graced with a few excellent horror series. The shows listed here are all solid horror stories when taken at face value. But the most interesting part about them is the subtext, the metaphor, the story under the story.
Midnight Mass
A working-class, heavily Catholic, small island community is shaken up when a young new priest arrives. Father Paul brings a renewed energy to the downtrodden, insular town, but everything is not as it seems. The town is beset with both tragedies and miracles. As the violence escalates, it becomes clear that the priest has brought some kind of ancient and malevolent power with him. One that he can’t control, despite his best intentions. But his dogmatic fervor leads him to believe this power must be divine. He and his fanatical followers ultimately wreak death and destruction upon the community.
On a personal level, this series rocked me. As an ex-Catholic, I was impressed at the sincerity of how the church was portrayed, in a way that was both loving and critical at the same time. While the story is supernatural, the subtext is very real: religious absolutism leads to valuing institutional power over morality. The tragic antihero of our story really believes he’s doing what’s right for his people. Because he encountered a supernatural creature while on a pilgrimage in the Holy Land, he assumes this new power must be holy. But the character who embodies this dark satirical undercurrent the most is the woman who props him up. A passive-aggressive busybody with a bloodthirsty need for control, Bev Keane witnesses Father Paul’s first true act of violence and convinces him that he’s been chosen by God. Violence is a means to an end as far as she’s concerned, and she will do anything for proximity to power. Propping up a male authority figure and raising him into a cultlike figurehead echoes the corrupt power dynamics that can unfold in real religious institutions. Despite all this, Midnight Mass isn’t overly cynical or cruel. The congregants act from a place of sincerity and faith, but are lead astray due to the dogmatic belief that their church can do no wrong. If you are in the process of deconstructing your own religious upbringing, proceed with caution.
Scavengers Reign
Space voyagers shipwrecked on a foreign planet must fight to survive in a wilderness teeming with alien life. This adult animated sci-fi series quickly turns into horror as the violence of untamed nature brutalizes the human survivors. Beyond the physical horror typical of a man-vs-nature survival thriller, and a heavy dose of body horror, there is an angle of psychological horror as well. All these elements coalesce into a vibrant and harrowing story, balancing devastating violence with moments of beauty and hope. Scavengers Reign should be lifted up as an example of what’s possible when animation is taken seriously as a medium.
I wrote about this series in my “Subversive Television” piece, as I think it’s utterly transformative. The theme running underneath all the spectacle is a question with enormous gravity: what is consciousness? In a time when technology developments are accelerated and billionaire tech boosters are (dubiously) claiming to be on the verge of creating sentient AI, it’s a question weighing heavy on people’s minds. The human interlopers in Scavengers Reign are constantly having their ideas of sentience challenged. A robot character fuses with organic matter and begins expressing agency and boundaries for the first time. A biologist tunes into the symbiosis of the local flora and fauna. A captain becomes a host to a mysterious parasite that changes his behavior without completely overtaking his mind. An intelligent creature bonds with a human through telepathy and hallucinations, and the two develop a toxic codependent bond with devastating consequences. Survival stories often frame nature as a brutal but dispassionate enemy, one that humans need to dominate in order to live. But the vibrant ecosystem in this world refuses to be tamed. Life here is intelligent, interwoven together, as if the planet itself were one organism with a soul at its center. The story at the heart of Scavengers Reign is an exploration of what consciousness could be.
American Horror Story: Red Tide
FX’s cult-followed, decade-long horror anthology series has run the gamut from camp to cringe to iconic. “Red Tide” is a compact horror tale that spans just half of one season, the better half of season 10 “Double Feature.” Set in the winter off-season of the sleepy New England city of Provincetown, “Red Tide” is The Shining with vampires. A screenwriter moves his family to the seaside town to quietly chip away at his latest project, where he's swept up into the insular world of Hollywood artists with local winter homes. There he discovers a dark secret; these successful artists all take a drug that unlocks their deepest creative potential, but turns them into blood-sucking killers. They feed on the local vagrants and drug addicts, callously waving away any moral concerns with the cruel rationalization that “no one will miss them.” Though our hero tries to resist, he eventually succumbs to the siren song of greatness, and so does his young daughter, a child prodigy obsessed with mastering the violin. Chaos and death ensue.
American Horror Story often grapples with the corrupting allure of power, wealth, and fame. “Red Tide” takes this theme deeper, to a more intimate place. It asks: how far are you willing to go for art? While money and influence might be seen as superficial vices not worth the cost of one’s soul, utter devotion to art at any cost is often praised, even (and especially) after death. Picasso is not primarily remembered as a misogynist abuser, but as a legendary artist, to the point where his name is synonymous with calling someone a master painter. Present-day Hollywood is also famously fraught with abuse. The temptation in “Red Tide” is the promise of greatness, the fulfillment of one’s true potential. If you have a masterpiece within you, are you willing to make any sacrifice to bring it into the world? The story is further complicated because the performance-enhancing drug in this world only works on people with innate creative abilities. If someone of mediocre skill takes this drug, they are reduced to mindless, shambling creatures. This makes the decision even more complex; sacrificing everything just to prove you’re good enough to “make it.” Although it was no more graphic than previous seasons, “Red Tide” left this artist (me) feeling far more unsettled than I bargained for.
Attack on Titan
This Japanese anime skyrocketed to global fame, to the point where Parrot Analytics crowned it the most in-demand tv show of 2021. In a post-apocalyptic fantasy world where most of humanity has been wiped out by humanoid giants, the surviving population has retreated into walled cities. Mobilized after the death of his family at the hands of these monsters (the Titans), Eren Jaeger joins the military to explore the wilderness beyond the walls and destroy all the Titans for good. The animation in Attack on Titan is vivid and unapologetically gory. The entire series is fraught with political strife, and each season delivers gripping twists and revelations. By the end of the series, audiences are treated to one of the greatest heel-turns in television.
As the world expands for both the characters and the audience, what starts as a seemingly black-and-white struggle for the good of humanity becomes increasingly more complicated. By the time we zoom out enough to discover the majority of humanity living on a nearby continent, it’s clear that hatred has poisoned each side of the conflict. The thesis of the series becomes crystalized: political fanaticism and war are two sides of the same death spiral. In the early seasons, the zealotry of Eren and his compatriots seems completely justified. As more knowledge is revealed, Eren’s hatred only deepens, until the final season where he leads a warpath dead-set on genocide. The opposing army on the main continent are also motivated by hatred, persecuting an ethnic minority to near extinction and complete isolation. The ending of the series is not a happy one, with the finale implying that the cycle of war continues indefinitely. The French filmmaker François Truffaut once said, “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” While that may be true, Attack on Titan certainly comes close to it. The horror and futility of war are on full display, doomed to be repeated for eternity.
Yessss sci-fi totally holds up well in this lens too! It’s been a while since I’ve seen a good zombie movie, but I do really love them. Red tide is a quick watch, it’s only six episodes .
Yes to all of this! It's exactly how I approach watching horror. I'm always asking myself, "What are we afraid of?" The answer is (almost) never the scary thing on screen. I do the same thing with sci-fi too.
I also have to say--I love love love zombie movies. I've seen at least 30 of them haha. So I'm very glad you included a few beloved classics here. :)
P.S. Adding "Red Tide" to my to-watch list immediately!