Scary asylums! Creepy disfigured people! People being punished for ‘not moving on and letting their trauma control them’! Violent and dangerous ‘crazy’ people! Poverty coded scary old women who must be a witch!
While asylums are less common horror locations these days, it still doesn’t stop the genre from using pop psychology to frame itself as deep while simultaneously expousing harmful messages. Usually written by people with very shallow understanding of the themes they’re employing for cheap scares at the expense of some of the most marginalized groups.
Also this might be cringe taste but some horror I actually do like are Jordan Peeles movies, because the themes of those are things like “Wow racism is horrificly dehumanising” and “Animals should be respected.”


A lot of it’s cultural too. Compare how horror movies that get American adaptations almost always get shifted into a more black-and-white, down-punching shape. Not that European and Asian horror is perfect. Compare Pulse/Kairo (2001) vs. the American Pulse remake where instead of having a sympathy with the ghosts (and reiterates theres a larger system at work) the ghosts are malevolent beings who are jealous we’re alive and they’re dead.
the ghosts hate us for our freedom