Capitalism Hates You

Marxism and the New Horror Film

Joshua Gooch

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Hardback

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English

University of Minnesota Press
11 March 2025

Film theory & criticism; Film & movie: styles & genres; Popular culture; Political science & theory; Economic systems & structures

What contemporary horror films teach us about the cruelties of capitalist society

Capitalism Hates You uses the horror film genre as a tool to diagnose and expose the hostile conditions of life under capitalism. Through incisive critical analyses of popular films such as Get Out, Drag Me to Hell, Hereditary, The Babadook, and many others, Joshua Gooch draws connections between Marxist theory and contemporary narratives of psychological unease.

Gooch highlights the work of women, trans, and nonwhite filmmakers to show how the remarkable diversity of twenty-first-century horror cinema can provide an expansive catalog of capitalism's varying forms of oppression. Studying films that interrogate such urgent topics as gentrification, climate change, and reproductive labor, he demonstrates how contemporary horror films give affective shape to the negative undercurrents of our present socioeconomic system.

Capitalism Hates You argues that these films and their material conditions can deepen our understanding of essential concepts in contemporary Marxism, from the theory of value and changing forms of commodification to the labor of social reproduction, the abolition of the family, and the necessity of ecosocialism. Synthesizing various strands of Marxist thought, Gooch sheds light on the growing field of socially conscious horror films, examining how they pinpoint and exaggerate latent feelings of dread and discomfort to reflect the ills of society.

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By: Joshua Gooch
Imprint: University of Minnesota Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm, Spine: 14mm
ISBN: 9781517917968
ISBN 10: 1517917964
Pages: 280
Publication Date: 11 March 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Joshua Gooch is professor of English at D'Youville University in Buffalo, New York. He is author of Dickensian Affects: Charles Dickens and Feelings of Precarity and The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy.

Reviews for Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film

""The Seduction of Space is brilliantly conceived and fills a clear gap in the field of queer French film studies, namely the priority of sexuality and its links to questions of space and spatiality, relationality, and queer visual cultures more broadly. Stylishly and intelligently written, energetically argued, and eminently readable, this is sophisticated critical work of the highest order and an invaluable contribution to queer film theory and queer critical studies.""--David A. Gerstner, author of Queer Imaginings: On Writing and Cinematic Friendship ""Recalling and twisting to perverse effect the title of Henri Lefebvre's landmark work on the production of space, Jules O'Dwyer's magnificent The Seduction of Space explores the role of queer sexual desire in the production of spatial relations. O'Dwyer engages intimately with French queer film culture to produce a pioneering book that interweaves French cinema, film theory, queer studies, and spatial thought.""--Sarah Cooper, author of Film and the Imagined Image