Horror films frame enemy territory as a wasteland invaded by evil

Evidence

The Gothic convention of the wasteland is often employed in horror films. Think of the deserts, forests, and jungles that serve as the setting for these movies. The 2006 film The Hills Have Eyes, which was shot on location in the Moroccan desert, has nuclear mutant monsters. The dark and Jurassic-looking forests of the Pacific Northwest are the setting for Twin Peaks, where a blonde teenager is raped and murdered by a demonic spirit named “Bob”; in the Twilight franchise, the forests of northern Washington State are occupied by both vampires and werewolves. It is not accidental that movies, whether Western, horror, or science fiction films, feature territories occupied by the enemy. At times in political discourse these are conflated, as in Johnson’s comparison of Vietnam to the Alamo and Norman Schwartzkopf’s description of Iraq as “Indian territory.” As the films examined here show, the wasteland can be anything—a forgotten land called Transylvania, an ancient empire where the sun never shines, a planet in an unknown galaxy, or the American landscape—ravished by an outside, evil force. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 652

Categorization

• XREF: The wasteland trope is the modern cinematic continuation of the medieval monster geography — the reader’s project maps this onto the ‘Saracen lands’ of earlier chapters. Also parallels Said’s orientalism in how territory gets othered.
• SEED: The Schwartzkopf ‘Indian territory’ Iraq quote and Johnson’s Vietnam/Alamo conflation show the monster-wasteland framing leaking directly into US war rhetoric — strong material for the reader’s thesis on manufactured fear.
• QUESTION: The Hills Have Eyes shot in the Moroccan desert with ‘mutant monsters’ — is the desert setting itself meaning-inflected, or incidental?