Nobody puts baillee in the corner

I knew going in to Spiral it would be a hard watch, but I didn’t expect it to break my heart as badly as it did. For those who don’t know, Spiral focuses on a gay couple who move to a rural suburb with their daughter, and it seems their new neighborhood might not be as idyllic and accepting as it initially appears to be. What really got me about it this movie wasn’t the horror aspect but the social commentary; the LGBTQIA+ community is treated exactly the same in 2020 as it was in 1995. 

Marriage equality was a giant step in the right direction, but it’s being threatened. Again. Social workers in Texas can use being LGBTQIA+ as a reason to turn people away. Members of the trans community, especially black members of the trans community, are being openly murdered. Why is it so hard to fathom something like this happening now? 

Take the horror aspect out of the equation for a second. Would you genuinely be surprised to hear about a gay couple being murdered? In a rural part of the country? Where traditional ideas run blood deep? Does any part of that seem far-fetched? To me, it doesn’t. Not for a second. There’s an incredible amount of hate in this country. A hate for people of the black community, the LGBTQIA+ community, a hate for anyone who is different. Just…hate. And it breaks my heart. That’s the importance of movies like Spiral though. We need movies like Get Out to throw the racism that still runs rampant in this country back in our faces. We need movies like Candyman to show us the socioeconomic discrepancies between white and black communities. We need The Stepford Wives to show us that sexism is still very much alive (and this movie was released in 1975). 

We need movies like this. We need to be shown how none of this is okay or alright or acceptable. We don’t deserve the luxury of subtext; we need to be shown exactly what is wrong in this world and the very real consequences of harboring all of this hate. Horror is the perfect genre because you can choose whether to take a realistic approach or toy with the supernatural without losing your message in the process. The horror of humanity is seeded at the root of every horror movie. Jason Voorhees died from neglectful camp counselors, and it unleashed the darkness within him. John Kramer became Jigsaw because his wife was attacked by the drug addicts she tried to safe, and they lost their baby, so he gave into the deranged parts most of us could never think of. Candyman was tortured and murdered for having a relationship with a white woman. That’s why horror is such a good conduit for social commentary. 

There’s already so much hate and evil out there, it’s easy to draw inspiration from what already exists. I think that’s what makes social commentary in horror movies truly horrific. You don’t have to have a murderous cult or a ghost to really cut someone to their core; sometimes, you just have to show them what they already know to be true. 

The End.