5 Horror Movies to Inspire Social Justice

The leaves are turning, the pumpkin is spiced, and horror movies are streaming everywhere. I’ve long welcomed horror as a spiritual companion. As Bible-and-horror scholar Brandon Grafius writes, “While it’s a kind of darkness many of us would prefer to turn away from, acknowledging the realities of the world is an important part of the life of faith.” 

In “Horror is a Smarter, More Diverse Genre Than You Think,” film critic Abby Olcese insists, “Horror allows us to become more critical, discerning viewers and to question our cultural certainties. It asks: Does our truth hold up to the dark?”  

Horror fiction is one of the first spaces to grapple seriously with concerns of justice. (No, really!) 

With that in mind, I present five movies you can watch during spooky season that will not only thrill and chill you, they’ll also spur you to think and act for justice. 

La Llorona (2019) 

In Latin mythology, La Llorona, the “crying woman,” is the spirit of a woman who drowned her children and now haunts the land looking for children she can take with her. This film from Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante reimagined the Crying Woman as an avatar of vengeance. 

La Llorona is a thinly veiled revisionist take on the death of Guatemalan dictator José Efraín Ríos Montt. Montt, who orchestrated a U.S.-backed genocide of Indigenous Guatemalans throughout the ’80s, died without facing punishment for his violence. La Llorona opens with a general sequestered in his home, having escaped justice at a trial for his war crimes. He is haunted by visions of his actions, all because of a mysterious young woman who has recently come into his employment. The film repurposes a classic Latin monster as a balm for the wounded spirit of a nation. 

The Devil’s Bath (2024) 

This Austrian film is set during the 18th century when women regularly killed children as a way to circumvent the church’s categorization of suicide as a mortal sin. If the woman killed an “innocent” — someone who would certainly go to heaven — and turn herself in, she could confess to a priest and receive absolution before being executed, thus ensuring she would both die and go to heaven. 

The film isn’t supernatural at all; the horror comes from the lack of social support available to women who suffered real maladies: depression, isolation, and more. Rather than providing healing and hope for those who suffered, the church demonized them. In a time when many churches are positioning themselves against reproductive rights, The Devil’s Bath is a prophetic warning. 

Infested (2024)

When a highly venomous spider begins reproducing in a Parisian apartment complex, the police quarantine it — with no regard for the poor people trapped inside. Debut director Sébastien Vaniček conceived the film as a commentary on xenophobia; its French title is “Vermines,” a term Nazis used in antisemitic propaganda. The diverse cast of trapped apartment-dwellers are interesting and relatable — humanized in a way that drives home Vaniček’s allegory all the more.  

What sets Infested apart from other spider films like Arachnophobia or this year’s Sting is the emphasis on the systemic evil of the French police. The spiders are terrifying, but they’re also escapable — until the residents reach the exterior doors and find them barred. A film that can make us question whether we should be more afraid of the monsters in here or those out there has a message we should heed.  

Saloum (2021) 

You may be familiar with folk horror — The Wicker Man, The Blair Witch Project, or Midsommar. Saloum is a distinctively West African take on the genre. A group of elite mercenaries, the Hyenas, are extracting a drug lord from Guinea-Bissau during the 2003 coup. Someone sabotages their plane, forcing them to set down in a remote region of Senegal. Though they seem to find safe harbor at a remote resort, the Hyenas soon discover they’ve landed in the lair of a former warlord who maintained an army of child soldiers. Fans of folk horror know this is only the tip of the iceberg, as the warlord’s proclivity for sacrificing children takes on a terrifying — and more literal — form in this remote wilderness. 

Saloum is a horrifying lament of the legacy of colonialism and child abuse in West Africa, an Indigenous, rage-filled protest against the ongoing exploitation of the most vulnerable. It interrogates the cycle of violence and questions whether there is a path to liberation for either the victims of this horror or those who enact it.  

Deadstream (2022) 

The other films on this list are pure horror, but Deadstream is a horror-comedy. The film opens on “canceled” and demonetized YouTuber Shawn Ruddy, who has just finished a six-month ban on the platform. Shawn’s audience grew accustomed to watching videos of Shawn conquering his fears, so for his big comeback — his first video since his pitch-perfect internet non-apology video — Shawn is livestreaming himself spending the night in a haunted house.  

This plan goes about as well as you would expect, and as the spirits of the house torment Shawn, he comes to face to face with his own wickedness. Without spoiling too much, what makes Deadstream work so well is watching Shawn come to understand why he got canceled in the first place: It wasn’t a “woke mob” or some “PC police”; it was his own genuinely horrific choices. A haunted house becomes a surprisingly fitting backdrop for Shawn’s repentance. If only more public figures would take note!