The Strange Thing About the Johnsons by Ari Aster, in keeping with the director’s filmography, is dark, horrifying and taboo-confronting, like all great horror should be at its core.

But I do think it taps into the very real concerns about how people put on a façade for the public, or even in familial relationships. I won’t spoil the short film, as you should watch it; it’s free, but let’s say that a son loves his dad perhaps a bit too much.

But this is not set in some rural backwater, filled with dirty malformed humanoids commonly associated with such horrors. Rather, it is set in an upper-class neighbourhood with an African American family as its focus point.

The Johnsons themselves put on a show of normality. The mother’s silence and enabling of the horror are all part of maintaining that show.

Society tends to prefer the illusion of stability instead of the reality of chaos. The Strange Thing About the Johnsons is not special in such depictions. American Psycho, The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby all explore the horror lurking under the façade of normality or the inclusion of chaos within normal society, such as with American Psycho.

The horror of a wealthy investment banker, as beautiful 1990s Christian Bale murders prostitutes in his off time, is unnerving. This is because we tend to view wealth as linked to positive attributes like hard work and intelligence.

Beauty is framed in media as an outward expression of goodness and good habits. American Psycho exposes how shallow these attributes are, which then extends to the hollowness of society.

Bateman, much like the Johnsons, is both obsessed with appearance and maintaining such. Their dirty, authentic secrets, family or otherwise, are hidden behind closed doors or in the haze of madness.

The Stepford Wives and Rosemary’s Baby take the private personal shames of people and expand them into hostile systems that allow evil to manifest within. The satire of Wives is through the insane lengths the misogynist goes to control women’s bodies, literally replacing the human with a parody of ideal femininity.

This controlled and safe femininity allows for the illusion of perfect modernity within Stepford. The conflict and autonomy naturally desired by humans is replaced by a social expectation.

Rosemary’s Baby, written by the same author, similarly reflects the subversion of mundanity that hides evil. The coven that wants to get Rosemary’s Baby are dressed as ordinary people. They, for all intents and purposes, look just like you and behave as such. But behind those closed doors, they are trying to bring about the end of the world as the satanic tends to do in 70s and 80s horror involving the devil.

We never truly know anyone aside from ourselves. At some level, we fear what we don’t know about the people we interact with. We never know whether our neighbours or our friends are secretly involved in some sort of heinous actions.

I suspect that is why we tend to find such social horror so engaging; it allows us to express that fear of what might be happening out of sight. We don’t know if we are living next to Jeffrey Dahmer or Ed Gein. It could be anyone after all.

I think social horror that dives into such paranoia is great for our media diet; it allows us that window into the unknown and allows us to accept how society can make monsters.

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