Speak No Evil: a jacked-up James McAvoy is the highlight of this horror about masculinity

By Barry Langford, Professor of Film Studies, Royal Holloway University of London

Laying bare our collective deep-lying, half-acknowledged fears and phobias, horror has always been, to quote critic Fredric Jameson, a “socially symbolic” genre.

Contemporary horror, particularly since the breakout success of Jordan Peele’s race and class nightmares Get Out (2017) and Us (2019), has frequently flaunted its social-allegory credentials. Recent years have seen films allegorise spousal abuse (The Invisible Man, 2020) and dating-app predators (Fresh, 2022), among numerous other hot-button cultural…

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