Post 9/11 Horror Films Analysis

Monsters released in 2010 was originally advertised as an exotic science fiction horror film based on an alien invasion in Mexico and on first inspection the relation between America and Mexican immigration seems obvious. However, analyzing the film from a global perspective shows the correlation between 9/11 and the alien invasion. In Wetmore’s book “Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema”, he discusses the trend for post-9/11 horror films featuring extraterrestrials to recreate the invasion and destruction of the homeland in order to cope with the fear and trauma the world was experiencing after the terrorist attacks. The alien invasion results in “the trope of the monstrous alien Other that seeks to not only kill us, but to leave our country …show more content…
Therefore, Monsters inverts post-9/11 horror tropes in order to show the horror experienced in developing countries as a result of the disproportionate fear of terrorism, which led to global destruction, manipulation of media to induce a fearful, paranoid narrative within society, and a willful ignorance for the lives lost in order to maintain America’s national security. Monsters incorporates the documentary style of post-9/11 horror films using hand held camera techniques that give “the assurance of ‘reality’, of film coming raw out of the camera and onto the screen as it happened echoe[ing] the experience of September 11” (Wetmore 2012, p. 80). An example of this is when Andrew …show more content…
5). Monsters is one of the first films to challenge the monstrous alien trope in order to question the response of the ‘Self’ as monstrous. An example of the monstrous self is shown when shots of the memorial are juxtaposed with shots of the adjacent wall where Mexican graffiti boldly writes, “Stop the bombing” in English with an airplane drawn into the letter ‘O’. More powerfully the Spanish line above of asks “Que son los monstrous”, which means, “Who are the monsters?” a heavy question that lingers throughout the film. Symbolically the airplane represents an image of international fear from the terror attacks on 9/11, but Edwards subverts the image of the airplane to directly criticize America’s use of planes to drop bombs and chemical warfare into developing countries to eliminate a foreign threat with countless causalities of innocent civilians. The Mexican people do not fear the alien invaders, they have learned to adapt and coexist, but the constant onslaught of American military force has caused more global destruction and death than the ‘monsters’ ever