This Year’s Best Horror Is About Monetizing The Monstrous
This article contains spoilers for Nope, Crimes of the Future, and Barbarian.
Living under capitalism means considering how every experience, good or bad, can be turned into content. This is different than, but not always distinguishable from, mining our experience for art. Humans have always had the impulse to create, and that impulse has often been bent toward the ends of commerce. That has, arguably, never been more true than it is right now.
Three of 2022’s best horror films, Nope, Crimes of the Future, and Barbarian, are engaged with this impulse.
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In Nope, Jordan Peele’s big-budget follow-up to Us and Get Out, this commodification of the self is localized to Hollywood. Early on, O.J. (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald’s (Keke Palmer) father Otis Sr. (Keith David) is killed when a coin falls from the sky, pierces his skull, and lodges in his brain. Though the official answer is that a prop plane was responsible for the debris, O.J. isn’t satisfied, and soon the siblings find that an alien monster shaped like a UFO is living in the mountains outside their horse ranch. O.J. and Em, like their father before them, are in the movie business (“the only Black-owned horse trainers in Hollywood”), but their craft has largely been replaced by CGI. To stay afloat, they set out to get the “Oprah shot,” footage of the creature that would be unfakeable and undeniably alien.
Nearby, Ricky “Jupe” Park (Steven Yeun) runs a Western-themed amusement park, where he puts on dangerous shows, sacrificing horses he buys from O.J. to the creature in the sky for a cheering crowd. Jupe was a sitcom star as a kid, but his chimpanzee-starring series was canceled after the primate killed
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