Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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PROPHECY at least has a social conscience, pretending to explore the white man's physical and moral pollution of Indian lands in Maine. Methyl mercury, used to soak lumber, gets into the fish, which is later consumed by animals and humans. The poison primarily affects the fetus, causing nasty mutations, one of which--a huge, snorting, blood-soaked pig (or something)--menaces federal health investigator Robert Foxworth, his pregnant wife, Talia Shire, and assorted noble Indians and opportunistic lumber executives...
...confined to monosyllables, the characters in Prophecy talk. A lot. Long time. Enough exposition for five giant monster movies. Everybody has a point of view; so did I--I munched my popcorn and thought about the blonde three rows down. When it comes to mixing horror and blatant social criticism, I prefer Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster...
...wine, chic, expensive clothing, sporting goods, etc. By surrounding themselves with material luxuries, they almost succeed in forgetting the hordes of zombies that surround the mall, clamoring at the entrances, waiting...waiting...It's an ingenious metaphor for our society's material-assisted repression of certain realities--poverty, social injustice, or more down to earth, our crippling over-dependence on oil, which we were made aware of in 1973 and managed to repress for six years...
...them away. You don't have to blow away Vietnamese and have your audiences cheering it--unless, as in The Deer Hunter, you depict them as bloodthirsty aliens, which is a lie. (If anything, the Americans should have been depicted as aliens.) Nor do you have to blow away "social deviants" whose problems are considerably more complex than mere "badness". Horror movies are genuinely cathartic--they are not meant to be taken with you when you leave the theater; they don't explicitly or implicitly express right-wing political sympathizers...
...above replacement level. This is not so in much of the First World: such countries as the U.S. and Japan are only slightly above zero population growth. The result: a "rising average age of the population and increasing proportions of the aged." The phenomenon will require a shift in social spending from child health and education to welfare systems for the old, but a smaller working population will have to bear the increasing cost. Moreover countries with dwindling populations, the report suggests obliquely, may face necessary "changes in political attitudes toward immigration...