Book Review: 

Review of Joshua Gooch's Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film, University of Minnesota Press, 2025. 280 pp. Hardcover (ISBN: 978-1517917968). Paperback (978-1517917975). Kindle (ASIN: B0D864Y372).

Joshua Gooch’s Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film appeals to a Venn diagram of Marxist scholars, film and media scholars, and enthusiastic fans of the horror genre.  It is organized into seven self-contained chapters, which can easily be read or assigned individually. Topics include examinations of several issues found in Marxist scholarship, including: 1) labor exploitation and Marx’s value theory, 2) feminist anticapitalism, 3) ecological Marxism, 4) race and Marxist cultural geography, 5) mass culture and commodity culture, 6) materialist feminist studies of race/gender/class in reproduction labor, and 7) Marxist sociological work on intellectual, manual, and emotional labor.

Gooch’s scholarly intervention is his application of Marxist approaches to horror films of the last twenty years. What separates new horror films from previous generations? Gooch makes a distinction between earlier horror films, produced by studios largely controlled by white men, and later films that came after marginalized groups gained access and autonomy within the industry. This film cohort’s appeal to wider audiences, Gooch argues, “has less to do with attacks on feminized and racialized bodies or the embrace of transgression than with audiences' shared judgments about the terrors of their historical moment” (8). The result is that new horror films decenter the previously default demographic of straight white cis men, instead seeking shared connections to audiences that previously only found themselves represented as sexualized victims or exotic, tokenized Others. Each chapter starts with an overview of Marxist theories related to the themes to be analyzed in the new horror subgenre. Gooch demonstrates a vast knowledge of Marxist work, including the cutting-edge publications of contemporary scholars. Before he begins his analysis of new horror, Gooch historizes the topic in each chapter, showing us the film predecessors in the horror genre that lead up to the contemporary film cohort.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a particular horror subgenre that interrogates pieces of common sense in contemporary capitalist societies. Chapter 1 focuses on the most widespread piece of common sense: work hates you. This chapter utilizes Marx’s theory of value to analyze what Gooch calls the antiwork horror subgenre, specifically Joe Lynch’s Mayhem (2017). He argues that the film interrogates how people deal with the horrors of work in capitalism, providing a shared fantasy that takes pleasure in rejecting capitalism’s impersonal economic domination. In chapter 2, Gooch analyzes films that interrogate the commonsense demand that, even though it hates us, we should love our work. This chapter demonstrates the wide array of Marxist theorists with whom Gooch is in dialogue, such as German social reproduction theorists Maria Mies, Claudia von Werlhof, and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, as well as American and Italian Marxists like Silvia Frederici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. These theorists help fill in the gaps left in classically Marxist perspectives on labor, exploitation, and the accumulation of value. Capitalism is not, Gooch maintains, “simply an expansive system of exploitation focused on the accumulation of value; it’s a system that accumulates value through the appropriation of the earth, the bodies of enslaved peoples, and unpaid domestic and reproductive labor” (48). Gooch focuses particularly on four films made by and about women in the workplace: Gillian Wallace Horvat’s I Blame Society (2020), Corinna Faith’s The Power (2021), Prano Bailey-Bond’s Censor (2021), and Rose Glass’s Saint Maud (2019).

In chapter 3, where Gooch turns to eco-socialism and eco-horror, he connects to Marx’s plea for a human relationship with nature that demands “freedom beyond necessity and the horrors of capitalism’s metabolic rifts” (76). Through analysis of Gaia (2021) and In the Earth (2021), Gooch highlights horror’s use of fungi as a source of terror, viewed from a Marxist perspective as a critique of ecofascism and the Capitalocene, a combination of the Anthropocene and capitalism that points to capitalism’s appropriation of nature as the driving force of global warming. Chapter 4 turns the focus to new Black horror and uneven development, relying on the Marxist perspective of gentrification from geographer Neil Smith and concepts of racial capitalism produced by the work of Cedric Robinson. This chapter focuses on Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), before turning to DaCosta’s remake of Candyman (2021).

New horror films that critique mass-culture and commodity forms are the discussion of chapter 5. This chapter draws deeply from an excellent unpacking of Arnaud Esquerre and Luc Boltanski’s 2020 book, Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities, which describes four distinct types of commodities in contemporary postindustrial capitalism. Gooch demonstrates the critique of the standard form found in Peter Strickland’s In Fabric (2018), the trend form found in Elza Kephart’s Slaxx (2020), the collection form found in Oliver Assaya’s Personal Shopper (2016), and, finally, the asset form found in Jeremy Saulnier’s Murder Party (2007). The next chapter tackles the Marxist critique of family and reproductive labor found in the emerging subgenre of elevated family horror. Gooch first examines Jonathan Cuarta’s My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To (2020) and Robert Egger’s The Witch (2015), later turning to Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2017), Ali Abbasi’s Shelley (2016), and, finally, Alice Lowe’s Prevenge (2016).

In the final chapter, Gooch draws upon Mark Fisher’s theorization of depression and what he calls magical voluntarism in contemporary capitalist societies, where mental health is seen as uncoupled from structural forces and where instead people are led to view mental health as individuals’ responsibility and not the consequences of capitalist pressures. Gooch connects this to what Eva Illouz calls therapeutic narratives, stories that make overcoming trauma “the necessary precondition to self-improvement” (175). He demonstrates this trope in The Babadook (2014), Midsommar (2019), Men (2022), and other films in the therapeutic horror subgenre.

In his conclusion, Gooch reiterates that horror in the twenty-first century represents the terrors of diverse peoples living under capitalism, reflecting the wider experiences of its creators and audiences beyond young white men. The sheer scale of his primary film selections demonstrates that this new wave of horror has not only emerged but is a dominant cultural form that justifies research. Gooch adroitly underscores that horror criticism needs Marxism, and, vice-versa, that Marxism needs horror because capitalism is not just an economic system but a social system that is revealed by the wild imagination of horror films.

-7 Aug. 2025