“I’m the messenger of God. You’re doomed if you stay here.”
This famous line from the movie Friday the 13th, uttered by Crazy Ralph, warns the characters not to stay at Camp Crystal Lake. Forty-plus year spoiler, they didn’t listen.
But maybe we should, not about Camp Crystal Lake, but about our current political environment.
While I might be the only person who tries to make a connection between horror movies and politics, I don’t think one could argue against the fact that our politics are quite scary.
And two horror movies, or movie franchises, are strikingly similar to how our political parties operate in society today: the aforementioned Friday the 13th and Final Destination.
Slasher Horror
Jason Voorhees is the iconic character and main antagonist of the Friday the 13th franchise.
He first officially appears as the killer in the sequel and is a huge, terrifying menace that kills and destroys everything in his path.
Not to spoil how these eleven movies go, twelve if you include the remake, but Jason goes on a scorched earth campaign.
He is the sole villain the characters are fighting against and kills all of them.
He destroys everything in his path to achieve this, and, try as they might, the main characters can never destroy him.
Sound familiar?
Donald Trump and the Republican party are the political embodiment of this. One giant monster who is the face of the movie or, in this case, the party.
A monster that is the known enemy and will stop at nothing to destroy the opposition. And try as they might, the Democrats and others just can’t destroy his political career.
They can throw an Access Hollywood tape at him, try to bury him with the countless offensive and ignorant things he’s said, point out terrible policy decisions he made, and even try to hold him accountable for breaking the law. And it only makes him stronger.
Now, I’m not implying that the Democrats are the protagonists in all of this. I’ll get to them in a minute. However, I am implying that this is politically horrifying.
Because Donald Trump is politically infallible, not only is he immune to all criticism, but he is also above society’s standards and the law.
He could realistically break any law at this point.
Anything he does or will do goes away in any circumstance by him and the Republicans saying the law is being weaponized against him.
They say if they can do it to him, they can do it to the rest of us. When it should be the opposite, if they can do it to us, they can do it to him.
I don’t know about you, but if I get pulled over for speeding, I can’t get out of it by saying the Democrats are setting me up and weaponizing the police force because I’m an independent.
But Donald Trump can speed all he wants, and that’s scary. Like Jason Voorhees, he can’t be stopped.
However, this raises an interesting question: what created this political Jason Vorhees? How did a political creature that seems immortal come about? To answer this, we need to watch Final Destination.
Survival Horror
If you haven’t seen Final Destination or the sequels, they all follow the same plot.
The main character has a vision of everyone dying in an accident, only to awaken from the vision to realize that the accident is about to happen.
The main character and some others survive because of the warning, but they are all eventually killed anyway because they are being stalked by Death manifested.
An immaterial force with a grand design that is everywhere, can’t be seen, and will eventually come for everyone, no matter how aware or vigilant they are.
Remind you of anything else?
Political correctness or woke culture operates just this way.
Unlike Donald Trump and the right, it doesn’t have a face.
It is this all-encompassing force with this all-encompassing design that can bring you down anytime if you are not always perfect. And at some point, no matter who you are, it will come for you in some form, just like Death in Final Destination.
The characters in Final Destination are constantly paranoid and highly vigilant about being the next one to die, and they try their best to do everything perfectly right to avoid Death. The character Clear Rivers even commits herself to a room made of foam walls in the psychiatric ward for protection in Final Destination 2.
And that’s how it feels with the woke culture the Democrats have created. You must always be perfect, no matter who you are, or you too can become a victim.
You have to say the right thing, do the right thing, be the right thing, and have the same uniform ideas all the time. Any break in the design will result in you being reprimanded or potentially canceled.
In some cases, this can be a positive thing, like holding intolerant and bigoted people accountable.
But as the Democrats seem to do way too often, they take it too far.
They are turning it into a form of perfectionism that people just can’t achieve.
Everyone has flaws, nobody is perfect, and many times, people get reprimanded for instances that were unintentional.
But in an environment of perfectionism, having flaws, making unintentional mistakes, and not always being hyper-aware will eventually lead to that all-encompassing force coming for you too.
Unless you create a creature Death can’t destroy: the political Jason Voorhees, Donald Trump.
The Democratic party created Donald Trump by taking policies too far and creating an environment of perfectionism, and people who supported them otherwise looked the other way.
Moderates wanted something different, and Republicans needed a new ideology, and this became Donald Trump.
Donald Trump was the only person that many people felt could fight against this culture created by the Democrats, and while many of them didn’t like him and still don’t very much like him, they voted for him anyway.
Unstoppable Force vs. Immoveable Object
Due to all of this, we have created a weird Friday the 13th-Final Destination spin-off in our politics.
One where Jason Voorhees has the vision and is fighting Death.
But the problem is that Death can’t destroy him, and since Death is just a force, Jason can’t destroy it.
Donald Trump can’t stop the Democratic culture, and the Democratic culture has seemingly no effect on Trump.
So where do we go?
I think it is time for us to change genres.
When the genre changes, the story changes, and we make the genre and the story in our political movie.
Now, I really don’t want a political Romcom, but I would like a well-thought-out Drama. One with intelligent, open-minded characters who may have different ideologies but work to make the movie great.
The movie that is the United States should be great, and you can only get a great movie with great in-depth characters.
Fortunately for us, we pick the characters, and in future elections, we need to choose characters that will change the genre of our country and drive the plot of our politics to a less divided and less scary place.
But what do you think? Is America in the horror movie genre? Is that good or bad? And how do you think we should change our story and genre?
