Bush’s cave rhetoric preceded a wave of Hollywood cave-monster 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

• SEED: The cave as shared imaginative space: bin Laden’s ‘terrorist underworld’ becomes subterranean horror films. Serious article angle: the specific image of the cave-monster bridging presidential rhetoric and genre film.
• XREF: Feeds the reader’s thesis that the image precedes contact — Bush speaks of caves before any film features them.