Capitalism: A Horror Story

A horror-story history of capitalism and its relationship to the haunted and the gothic, and a manifesto of Gothic Marxism, which finds revolutionary hope in the nightmare of modernity.

Capitalism is a horror story. In this book, pioneering film critic and cultural theorist Jon Greenaway dives into the dark side of the radical imagination. What does it mean to see horror in capitalism, and what can horror tell us about the state and nature of capitalism?

The book offers a new analysis of Marxist theory and culture, drawing from Romantic anticapitalism from Andre Breton to Walter Benjamin as well as literature and film from the nineteenth century to the present. Moving across literature, film and philosophy, from Frankenstein and Dracula to modern horror like The Platform, Parasite and The VVitch, this book offers one of the first full-length analyses of Gothic Marxism.

The book explains the “dark way of being red” drawing off the warm stream of Marxism from Ernst Bloch. From there, the book explores the socio-political function of the monstrous, the haunted nature of the digital world and the inescapable horror of contemporary capitalist politics. Most shockingly, this book argues that we can find hope in horror — a site of monstrous becoming, that opens the door to a Utopian future.