HMN 2025: why horror movies are taking purpose on the ultra-wealthy

When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and fiancée Lauren Sánchez held their lavish three-day wedding ceremony celebration in Venice just lately, it wasn’t only a social gathering—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 delicate, flood-prone metropolis, whereas protesters took to the streets to sentence the marriage as a tone-deaf image of oligarchical wealth at a time when many cannot afford to pay lease, not to mention lease an island.

The extreme present of opulence felt just like the opening of a horror movie, and these days, that is precisely what horror has been giving us. In movies like “Ready or Not” (2019) and “The Menu” (2022), the wealthy aren’t merely out of contact; they’re portrayed as predators, criminals and even monsters.

These “eat-the-rich” films channel widespread anxieties concerning the present socioeconomic local weather and rising disillusionment with capitalist methods.

In a world where the rich and highly effective often seem to act with impunity, these movies expose upper-class immorality and entitlement, and supply revenge fantasies where these usually crushed by the system struggle again or burn all of it down.

Horror takes purpose on the rich

Originally a quote from social theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau through the French Revolution, “eat the rich” has re-emerged in recent years in public protests and on social media in response to increasing socioeconomic inequality.

In cinema, eat-the-rich movies usually use grotesque hyperbole or satire to disclose and critique capitalist methods and the behaviors of the rich elite.

Film scholar Robin Wood argues that horror films enact a return of what is repressed by dominant bourgeois—that’s, capitalist—ideology, usually embodied by the determine of the monster.

He cites “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” a traditional instance of anti-capitalist sentiment in horror that depicts Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) and his working-class household as monstrous victims of the 1970s industrial collapse. Rather than settle for repression, they return as cannibalistic monsters, making visible the brutality of capitalist systems that exploit and degrade people like obsolete commodities.

But in eat-the-rich horror, it’s the rich themselves who change into the monsters. The locus of repression turns into their privilege, which is usually constructed on exploitation, inequality and invisible or normalized forms of harm.

These movies render these summary methods tangible by making the elite’s monstrosity seen, literal and grotesque.

Revenge horror for the 99%

Recent horror movies are more and more utilizing style conventions to critique wealth, privilege and the methods that maintain them.

“Ready or Not” turns the wealthy into bloodthirsty monsters who preserve their fortune via satanic rituals and human sacrifice. Grace (Samara Weaving) marries into the Le Domas household, board sport magnates who provoke new members of the family with a lethal sport of hide-and-seek. She should survive till daybreak whereas her new in-laws hunt her down to meet a demonic pact.

The movie critiques the thought of inherited wealth as one thing earned or honorable, combining humor and horror to replicate anxieties about class entrenchment and the ethical decay of the elite.

The Le Domases are monstrous not just for their violence, however for a way casually they justify it. When several maids are accidentally killed in the chaos, they react with self-pity, detached to who have to be sacrificed to keep up their wealth.

In “The Menu,” the wealthy are portrayed as monstrous not via bodily violence, however via their ethical failings—like monetary crimes and infidelity—and their hole consumption of tradition.

Celebrity chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) lures rich foodies to his unique island restaurant, utilizing meals as a weaponized type of artwork to show visitors’ hypocrisy and misdeeds. In one scene, visitors are served tortillas laser-printed with incriminating photographs, equivalent to banking data and proof of fraudulent exercise.

The movie criticizes consumption in an trade where meals is now not a supply of enjoyment or sustenance, however a standing image for the elite to show their wealth and style.

Why these movies are hanging a nerve now

It’s no shock that audiences are turning to horror to make sense of methods that really feel more and more bleak and inescapable. In Canada, the cost of living continues to outpace wages, housing affordability remains an issue for many, whereas grocery prices are a source of horror in their own right.

A college diploma, as soon as thought-about a dependable path to stability, no longer guarantees the financial security of a salaried job. Many Canadians now depend on gig economy jobs as supplementary revenue.

Meanwhile, the wealth gap is increasing and obscene shows of wealth—like a multi-million-dollar wedding ceremony—can really feel disconnected, even offensive, to folks experiencing monetary precarity.

Eat-the-rich movies faucet into this collective sense of injustice, reworking financial and social anxieties right into a cathartic spectacle where ultra-wealthy villains are held accountable for his or her actions.

At the top of “Ready or Not,” the members of the Le Domas family explode one by one and their mansion burns down. In “The Menu,” the visitors are dressed up like s’mores and immolated. In each movies, fireplace serves as a symbolic cleaning of the rich, their energy and the methods that defend them.

More than that, these movies present somebody to root for: working-class protagonists who’re focused by the elite however in the end survive. Former foster youngster Grace fights her means via a pack of murderous millionaires, whereas escort Margot/Erin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is spared when she rejects the pretentiousness of high quality eating and orders a humble cheeseburger as an alternative.

In this fashion, horror turns into a type of narrative resistance, illustrating class rage via characters who refuse to be consumed by the methods attempting to oppress them. While inequality and exploitation persist in actuality, eat-the-rich movies supply escape, and even justice, on display.

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