Our fears and the films that portray them

Many films are made to reflect the fears that people have.

People's personal fears

-Spiders: Arachnophobia (1990)
-Clowns: IT (1990)
-Capitalism: 
-Child abuse: Chappie (2015)
-Declining Health (of oneself or others):




Societal fears:
-Immigration: The good lie, District 9
-Terrorism: London has fallen,
-Disorder: The Purge
-Environmental Crisis: Al Gore's "An inconvenient truth"
-Our safety: Contagion (2011)
-Dominance of A.I and Robots: Terminator (1984), Deus ex Machina
-Resource Scarcity: Mad Max, The book of Eli
-Financial Crisis eg: The Great Depression:Laddaland (2011)


The significant characters of some films are often used as metaphors for others too. 

Dracula is a metaphor for the capitalist system. This is because he is a member of the middle-upper class who drains away the life of others, reflecting how capitalists drain away the health and wellbeing of their own workers. You could also say that he symbolizes the spread of STD's. When Dracula sucks one's blood they can become vampires, like him.

"Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." -Karl Marx  




Xenomorphs from the movie Alien are made to ressemble phallic objects. The way that they reproduce is by implanting "face huggers" onto the hosts. From this, an infantile version of the specimen bursts out of the host's chest which kills them in the process. Later in AVP:Requiem, it changes to the method of releasing eggs directly into the host's body. This then emphasizes the fears of pregnancy by using the Alien's appearance and it's breeding characteristics.


Godzilla, a very iconic and well known character was made as a metaphor for the use of Nuclear weapons. Contextually, Godzilla was born because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 along with a H-bomb testing later. In the early films, he was painted as a destructive monster, reflecting the destructive nature of Nuclear Warfare.