From The Hunt to Us: What Hollywood genre movies tell us about class and politics in Trump’s America

A new wave of satirical horror films are revealing just how bitterly divided US society has become, says Geoffrey Macnab

Betty Gilpin in Craig Zobel's film 'The Hunt' (Universal Pictures)

If you want to know about the social, racial and political divisions in US society in the President Trump era, don’t read op-ed pieces in newspapers, watch cable news shows or follow the president on Twitter. You’ll get better, quicker insight into Trump’s America from some of the genre fare made by TV and film companies like Blumhouse or produced by its founder Jason Blum over the past five years: films like Get Out (2017), The Purge: Election Year (2016), BlacKkKlansman (2018), Us (2019) and Ma (2019).

In Blumhouse’s latest film The Hunt, which is out in cinemas next month, wealthy, liberal Americans hunt “deplorables” for recreation. The name of the prey in this unlikely new blood sport deliberately echoes Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s notorious campaign speech in 2016 in which she described some of Trump’s supporters as “a basketful of deplorables”.

“Every year, these liberal elites kidnap a bunch of normal folks like us and hunt us for sport,” one of the victims in The Hunt notes of their status as playthings and victims.