Jon Greenaway’s Capitalism: A Horror Story states its thesis at the outset. This welcome gambit is one that more books of critical theory should deploy. Like the oft-memed “In This Essay I Will …” sentence at the start of a school or university assignment, it grounds the reader. It lets us know what is being attempted here. It is also brave: in telling us what his book aspires to prove, Greenaway gives us a yardstick to judge it by. If he falls short, we will know. The thesis that Greenaway gives us is this: “Capitalism is a horror story” (p. 20). He has chosen his words carefully. The sentence does not simply mean, to paraphrase crudely, that capitalism is a shitshow. The words “horror” and “story” are both to be taken literally. In Greenaway’s view—bolstered by pile-em-high quotations from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Walter Benjamin and André Breton, among others—to describe the workings of the capitalist economy as “body horror” (p. 7) is not an aesthetic choice or a metaphor, but literally true: it “constitutes a theory of history” (p. 6). This is a bold claim to open a book which, at its heart, is mostly a collection of film analyses, but I appreciate its boldness—even if, ultimately, I find a different thesis, which Greenaway presents more gently, to be a truer summation of his book’s contribution.

Capitalism: A Horror Story hovers somewhere between a critical theory monograph for an academic readership, and a love-letter to the horror genre aimed at fellow enthusiasts. Attempting to thread this needle is a laudable aim, although it leads to some awkwardnesses as the book twists between one mode and the other. Over here films are introduced, in good academic style, with their year of release in brackets after the titles—but over there, in another chapter, they are not. Here, the phrase “the normative enclosure of history which marks capitalist ideology” (p. 149) clearly belongs in scholarly discourse. There, the lines “typical, affluent boomer” (p. 81), or “the horror here is far more low key” (p. 81), just as clearly do not. Elsewhere, a footnote points out that, “While [Silvia] Federici’s historiography has come in for substantial criticism, the mode of analysis put forward in the book remains highly compelling” (p. 189), a nuanced distinction deserving sober consideration; while, over there, the clarion call “we must, in order to forge a future, become monsters against the monstrosity of capitalism” (p. 146, emphasis Greenaway’s), has a splashy enthusiasm better designed to draw applause at a horror fiction conference.

If it sounds like I am arguing that the book oscillates between theoretical opacity and enthusiastic clarity, that is a failing of this reviewer. Greenaway’s work, perhaps unusually, feels clearest when it is most theoretical. He is an elegant explicator of Ernst Bloch in particular (about whom he has written a whole book), and he mediates debates between the likes of Bloch, Benjamin, and György Lukács with even-handed competence. Other twentieth-century names, all familiar to the critical theory seminar room, drop by: Auerbach, Brecht, and Gramsci, often served with lashings of the late, great Fredric Jameson to explain what they really meant, all poke their heads in. Drawing on these canonical men of Marxist theory, Greenaway argues convincingly that anti-capitalist critical theory has leant too hard on the “cold” rationality of political science, which teaches us to be disenchanted by capitalist ideology, but stumbles when it comes to injecting life into this disenchantment, or to dreaming of something better. Political progress, Greenaway claims, is only ever made when this “cold” strand of Marxism intertwines dialectically [1] with a “warm” strand rooted in vision, religion, dreams, hope, and creativity. Neither is sufficient by itself: the warm and cold strands are “profoundly codependent” (p. 22). Horror, this book claims, can reinvigorate the warm, “dark red,” dangerous strand of Marxism, and give us reasons to dream. In his own words, “it is precisely through the romantic and even non-realist aspects of culture that an accurate articulation of the present capitalist totality can find expression” (p. 26). This expression is to be found in the “Gothic Marxism” that Capitalism: A Horror Story seeks to develop, define, and promote.

I badly want this to be true, and I find myself thinking of Greenaway as a fellow traveller. This feeling increases as his book goes on, perhaps particularly when he struggles to connect his fannish enthusiasm to his theoretical scaffolding: this is a struggle I know all too well from my own writing on fiction and economic catastrophe. Greenaway’s love—his own word—of horror is infectious, like a zombie bite. But there is a sense, at times, that Capitalism: A Horror Story is also straining to believe its own enthusiasm. Greenaway tends to assume blithely that his readers share his political convictions. The linkages between capitalism and fascism, and between capitalism and sexism, and capitalism and homophobia, are scantily drawn. This may be strategically reasonable: it is likely that anybody picking up a book called Capitalism: A Horror Story needs little encouragement to blame capitalism for all the world’s ills. But I found myself wanting more. Chapter five, on portrayals of witchcraft, is a case in point. It trumpets “the radical potential of the witch” (p. 93), and promises to show how recent Witch-films like Robert Eggers’s The VVitch (2015) and Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria offer “a model for life outside of the disciplinary oppression of capitalism” (p. 93). But when it comes to the readings themselves, we read not about class struggle specifically, but about The VVitch’s “threat to the religious and patriarchal forces” (p. 93) and Suspiria’s portrayal of resistance against authoritarian fascism. Ultimately, this chapter is about capitalism to the extent that all bigotry, and all fascism, is capitalist: a claim I have no doubt Greenaway has the chops to articulate, but the connective tissue is left unsaid, is assumed agreed-upon between author and reader. The chapter is well written, but does not advance the book’s purported thesis. It may, simply, be a good essay in the wrong book.

The result is that some (but by no means all) of the actual writing about horror in this book can feel strangely divorced from that original thesis, that capitalism itself “is a horror story.” When Greenaway does plug his less overtly economic analyses into a theory of culture under capitalism, his two most frequent contemporary intellectual sources are the New Weird novelist China Miéville and the late cultural theorist and blogger Mark Fisher. Indeed, Greenaway cites a talk on “Marxism and Halloween” by Miéville as inspiring this book, and Capitalism: A Horror Story is published by Repeater Books, itself co-founded by Fisher. In this choice of intellectual firepower, I once again feel a kinship to Greenaway: I, too, reach for these two writers before any others when I need neat, contemporary descriptions of capitalism’s all-pervading ideology, and require eloquent expressions of alternative art and subcultural writing’s ability to find that ideology’s interstices and to undermine it through them. Where Miéville and Fisher both excel is in laying out, alluringly if sometimes aphoristically, how an economic model has become a cultural mode. Greenaway, for the most part, recruits their skill here but does not probe or even explicate it. Unlike Bloch, whose work Greenaway appreciates, owns, and develops, the arguments into which he throws Miéville and Fisher remain somewhat in their shadow. Sometimes, of course, the critical theorist cannot win. If he had brought in Donna Haraway, with her modish and Lovecraft-invoking work on the “Chthulucene,” to bolster or modify Fisher and Miéville, I would have thought it a baldly predictable move on Greenaway’s part. But here in the counterfactual, where he does not cite her work at all, I am left surprised by her absence. For all Greenaway’s theoretical deftness and depth of reading in Marxist theory, and his thoughtful critiques of individual works of horror fiction, one step of his argument feels missing: the case that the critiques re-energise the theory.

On the other hand, and like most books about capitalism, Capitalism: A Horror Story is far and away at its strongest when class inequality, the core political structure of capitalism, is brought squarely into the frame. His reading of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), in the only chapter of this book dedicated to the novel as a form, lays this out neatly. Here, his reading of horror fiction takes aim directly at the abuse of the working classes under capitalist employers’ maniacal focus on extracting surplus value from labourer’s bodies and brains—and transferring it to capitalists’ pockets. Frankenstein’s monster, he points out, is “literally stitched together from the fragments of the poor and the working class” (p. 58), perhaps the clearest example in this book of body horror and class oppression commingling. Count Dracula, by contrast, is “pure need.” Here, Greenaway is building on Franco Moretti’s argument that the vampire is a force of “pure capital” (p. 63), alienating his victims from themselves in a manner which not only elucidates the alienation of the working class from the products of their labour, but does so with blood and viscera, plunging us back into the hot veins of “warm” Marxism. Greenaway then offers a counter-critique to Moretti’s “economism” (p. 64), calling upon Katie Stone’s theories to reclaim the vampire for the anti-capitalist cause based on a claim that the count is “maternal” in the way that he nourishes his victims as he drains them. This counterclaim reads as both unconvinced and unconvincing, suggesting that Greenaway feels obliged not to monster his monsters. Nonetheless, the original distinction, between the (dis)embodied body politic of Frankenstein’s creature and the “pure need” of the arch-capitalist count, remains well-argued and productive.

This Frankenstein and Dracula chapter is among Greenaway’s strongest proofs that Gothic Marxism provides a stern critique of capitalist ideology. Certainly, it is the section of this book, alongside the introductory theories of “warm” and “cold” Marxism, which I would predict that I am most likely to cite myself in the future. Another strong episode is his analysis of the Saw and the Purge movie franchises. This section also makes the economic disenfranchisement of the working poor central to its cultural criticism. Saw (2004), Greenaway tells us with relish, is “necroneoliberalism.” This is not only a fun turn of phrase, but one which Greenaway turns into a convincing reading of the film franchise. One highlight is the dagger-sharp observation that “‘Can you afford to stay alive’ is the dominate [sic] question of both the American healthcare system and all of the Saw films.” The Purge (2013), meanwhile, gets credit for the crisis it identifies, but Greenaway laments how the franchise always, ultimately, endorses “the good liberal democrat” rather than the anti-capitalist revolution that would present, for Greenaway, the logical endpoint of its inherent critique.

So does Capitalism: A Horror Story meet that yardstick which it gave us, at the beginning, to judge it by? Perhaps not, or not all the way. It is a book which tells us more about horror, and about the theoretical case for a Gothic Marxism as a tool of anti-capitalist analysis, than it does about capitalism itself, which that initial statement suggested would be its main object of study. But, even if the claim that “Capitalism is a horror story” is sometimes neglected along the way, Greenaway has given us a book with two strong arguments, both presented in prose that is simultaneously intellectually rigorous and, by the standards of these things, damnably readable. The case for a hot-blooded, romantic “Gothic Marxism,” to reinvigorate the “cold” critiques of scientific socialism with Utopian vigour, is well stated and passionately argued, and the readings of individual books and films are vivid and compelling. And so, for me, behind the bugbear of that original thesis statement, there is a narrower but stronger hypothesis lurking, like a timid poltergeist, just out of sight. Towards the end of the book, Greenaway writes that the goal of a Gothic Marxism is “to find that which still haunts” (p. 153). Although less bombastic, this feels like a more organic thesis for the book overall. Certainly, it is easier to see how this desire motivates the specific readings of horror and Gothic fiction which Greenaway has performed over the course of his book. He develops this nicely turned phrase by insisting that “history is an active and dangerous force,” however strongly capitalism’s advocates might want us to believe otherwise, and that his program of Gothic Marxism is well-placed to resist this because, in the always-haunted Gothic, “history is never over, never gone, and thus the present is never stable” (p. 155).

Endnotes

[1] The big book of Marxist orthodoxy dictates that I, like Greenaway, must use the adverb “dialectically” here. [return]