Laying bare our collective deep-lying, half-acknowledged fears and phobias, horror has always been, to quote critic Fredric Jameson, a “socially symbolic” genre.
Contemporary horror, particularly since the breakout success of Jordan Peele’s race and class nightmares Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), has frequently flaunted its social-allegory credentials. Recent years have seen films allegorise spousal abuse (The Invisible Man, 2020) and dating-app predators (Fresh, 2022), among numerous other hot-button cultural issues.
Speak No Evil, by director James Watkins (a remake of Christian Tafdrup’s 2022 Danish film of the same title) also explores contested cultural terrain. Here, the focus is on the seething resentment between rootless corporate cosmopolitans and a rural working-class, condemned to entertain tourists with their rustic “authenticity”.
