Don Siegel himself once told an interviewer that he was not presenting a political allegory, but rather expressing his own jaded, if not downright bleak, assessment of society—namely, that “the majority of people unfortunately are pods, existing without any intellectual pretensions and incapable of love.”

Why, the censors wondered, “should vampires be messier feeders than anyone else?”

Hitchcock may have accomplished the greatest feat of his career by holding an audience riveted and breathless, through the sheer imposition of cinematic will and technique, with a story that can never be rationally explained. Someone asked him during the filming of The Birds why on earth Tippi Hedren goes up to the attic alone. “Because that’s where I want her to go,” he replied. It’s an answer that explains a lot.

A daily backdrop of senseless death was provided by the Vietnam War, a never-ending conflict that, for millions of people, was as incomprehensible as a zombie apocalypse. Protests and riots, like the one that occurred at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year, gave further credence to the idea that the social structure might be breaking down. The real world may not have been far removed from George Romero’s horror fantasy after all. As Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman noted, the film “was made in the most violent year in American history since the Civil War. It’s shot like cinema vérité, as though it were the evening news. It never wavered from its desire to terrorize the audience and offer no hope at the end.”

Since witchcraft doesn’t exist, an objective analysis of Rosemary’s Baby can easily conclude that the story is “really” about women’s reproductive anxieties and reproductive choices, not satanic conspiracies. However, as is the usual case with horror films, a devilish disguise allows us to process our worst apprehensions without having to look at them too directly.

The immense popularity of The Exorcist underscores the degree to which horror movies, with their stark portrayals of good versus evil, routine depictions of demons and hell, and demonstrations of death and resurrection, may fill an unmet craving for religious experience in an increasingly despiritualized world.

The larger cultural import of visceral Grand Guignol–esque spectacle in late twentieth-century cinema has been extensively analyzed and debated, but it is likely that at least some of the appetite for blood and guts arises not from sadism but rather from the need to reaffirm the body in all its messy biological reality against the onslaught of the cold technology that engulfs us. In movies like The Thing, nobody is a computer inside. We see the proof.