Bin Laden’s cave escape triggered a wave of cave-monster horror films

Evidence

In 2002, following the scape of bin Laden from his hiding place in a cave, Bush evoked images of a “terrorist underworld” that dwelled “in caves.” Soon, Hollywood produced a number of films featuring monsters lurking in caves and other subterranean chambers, including The Cavern (2005), The Cave (2005), The Descent (2005), The Descent 2 (2009), and Catacombs (2007). Horror films, with their element of surprise and narratives of destruction, offered a space for people to release their anxieties. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 738

Categorization

• QUESTION: Correlation or causation? Worth chasing whether studios explicitly cited the Bush cave discourse, and why 2005 clustered so many cave films.
• XREF: The subterranean monster ties into the reader’s figure set; the cave as underworld container for the projected enemy.