Australia’s right-wing populist One Nation party is enjoying a well-publicised poll bump, so it’s time to talk horror movies. We’ll employ our horror metaphor set before the monster has revealed itself, but as dark forces are growing more manipulative and insidious.Not getting nearly enough play in the sensationalistic coverage around the conspicuously revived Pauline Hanson project is her party’s closeness to Australia’s fringe anti-abortion movement.The Guardian reported this week that the elected-as-One Nation-now-suddenly-turned-independent South Australian MP Sarah Game has already proposed legislation to ban abortion after 25 weeks, even in cases of severe foetal abnormalities. With the support of three other newly minted One Nation representatives in the upper house, the measure could force a vote in the lower house.The horror genre is one that speaks with some perception to unspoken, growing social anxieties; recently, it’s been spawning new subgenres and tropes that may foreshadow One Nation’s lurking attachments to anti-abortion politics.Australia is a country where reproductive rights enjoy overwhelming majority support, and where laws protecting medical privacy and the right to plan your own family have long been seen as sacrosanct. Failing to comprehend the implication of electing One Nation MPs whose policies and views are actively opposed to this majority risks voters recruiting themselves to the role of the mayor in the Jaws movie, which, as any horror buff can tell you, is not the casting anyone wants.Back in the 1970s, Jaws was a smash hit because it landed on potent symbolic expression for a bubbling social concern, that commercial-viability-at-all-costs ethos would denude public safety and get people killed.Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailBack in 1897, what gave Bram Stoker’s Dracula such cultural heft was how well the old folklore embodied perceptions at the time of the parasitic, seemingly unkillable aristocratic class. During the cold war, zombies had their day as western cinema’s fever dream representation of anxieties around mass action and socialism.Horror’s contemporary moment is finding its monstrous metaphor in what the internet has nicknamed “incel horror”. In this subgenre of movies that includes Barbarian and Fresh (2022), Blink Twice (2024), the terrifying Obsession, Companion (2025) and others, masculinised resentment and male entitlement metastasise to devastating supernatural proportion. External patriarchal forces seize control of women’s bodies, and those women lose their agency over them.Horror cinema has been here before. Ira Levin’s classics Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives spoke to the anxiety of the “second wave” feminists in the 1960s and 1970s and of the evil willingness of patriarchal systems to deny women their agency.