Author: Heather Roberts | PhD Candidate in Screen Cultures and Curatorial Studies, Queen’s University, Ontario

Am excerpt:

When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and fiancée Lauren Sánchez held their lavish three-day wedding celebration in Venice recently, it wasn’t just a party — it was a spectacle of wealth, reportedly costing between US$47 million and US$56 million.

Critics highlighted the environmental toll of such an event on the fragile, flood-prone city, while protesters took to the streets to condemn the wedding as a tone-deaf symbol of oligarchical wealth at a time when many can’t afford to pay rent, let alone rent an island.

The excessive show of opulence felt like the opening of a horror film, and lately, that’s exactly what horror has been giving us. In films like Ready or Not (2019) and The Menu (2022), the rich aren’t simply out of touch; they’re portrayed as predators, criminals or even monsters.

These “eat-the-rich” films channel widespread anxieties about the current socioeconomic climate and increasing disillusionment with capitalist systems.

In a world where the wealthy and powerful often seem to act with impunity, these films expose upper-class immorality and entitlement, and offer revenge fantasies where those normally crushed by the system fight back or burn it all down.

The article dives into it further

  • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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    3 days ago

    Not a horror, really, but this one is great:

    Parasite

    I took a couple friends to see it while working at a film fest.

    One was so wrong about the intent and theme of the movie it was scary. Tried explaining it. Turns out they’d been listening to a lot of rw media.

    They thought the film was about poor people being leeches - parasites.

    From the writer/director

    The capitalist… is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labor. Capital is dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.[53]