In horror film, a symbiosis exists between the dreams of the filmmaker and the nightmares of the audience—this is the “fusion made by the shared structures of a common ideology.” In some cases, monsters are culturally neutral, failing to express a particular identity. In other cases, however, monsters have a pronounced ethnic, religious, or racial identity. Paul Wegener’s 1920 film, The Golem: How He Came into the World, is an example of the latter, by altering the golem legends situated in Jewish folklore to create a monster that threatens German Christians. This Jewish monster is ultimately destroyed by an Aryan hero.

QUESTION: How do culturally-coded monsters function differently from neutral ones in their ideological impact on audiences? XREF: Connects to broader ideas about how art encodes political anxieties, and how horror functions as ideological projection.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 597