WHILE box office receipts may be declining there is one staple that works revenue-wise, and that is the horror film: minimum budget for maximum profit and an almost guaranteed audience.

Two recently released staples of that genre, Sam Raimi’s Send Help and Kevin Williamson’s Scream 7 unfortunately also betray sordid aspects of the same kind of penny-pinching, profit-driven mentality that begat them in the first place.

The larger ideological disaster is Send Help which begins promisingly as an abused female employee, aptly named Linda Little (Amy Adams), who no matter how hard she tries cannot get the recognition she deserves from her male supervisor, or the new youthful head of the company who is more interested in improving his putting than listening to her ideas for improving the company.

It’s not long before, in a plane crash off Thailand, the two are isolated and her survivor skills come to the fore, the ones she learned from watching the series Survivor. The boss is wounded and weak after the crash but still wants to exert his male privilege, so she sets out to teach him some lessons.

Sounds great so far and it is. The problem occurs when we find out she may have homicidal tendencies and may have exercised them in getting rid of an abusive spouse. Those tendencies reemerge when the boss’s black fiance and a Thai fisherman sight her on the island. To keep her new-found power, she pushes them off a cliff and begins a duel to the death with her boss. She wins the duel and, in a coda, is now wealthy, having sold her book and appearing as the celebrity at a golf tournament, thus completely turning the tables on her miniature golf former employer.

She is now more ruthless than even her boss but her ruthlessness, achieved by murdering a black woman and an Asian worker, is celebrated. The thrust of the ending is to validate ruthlessness as the only way to achieve what is called “success” in this society, and that may be true. A society that is this unequal requires absolute ruthlessness to get to the top.

In the West, violence itself and, as in this film, violence against the peoples of the global South, is welcomed as titillating and can be written off as humorous or ironic. The makers of Send Help, unaccustomed to the realities of a multipolar world, should themselves “Get Help.”

Sam Raimi is famous for injecting two things at once into the horror film, both upping the level of grossness and explicitness of the violence and, at the same time, injecting humor alongside the horror. This is the formula for the Evil Dead series, but it is a formula that we see playing out in real life for deadening its audience to the effects of violence.

Scream 7 begins with what is sometimes called a “structuring absence”; that is, Marissa Barrera and Jena Ortega, two Latina actors who had been used to reignite a faltering franchise, were not to be found. Instead, the series returns to its origins with Neve Campbell reappearing as “the final girl,” she who survives and defeats the male violence.

The reason for this change is that Barrera has made some openly pro-Palestinian statements calling Gaza a “concentration camp,” and that she has been actively campaigning against police violence because her brother was, she says, “murdered” by the Woodland, California police. Her partner, Jena Ortega, in solidarity, then also dropped out of the franchise.

Neve Campbell, the original final girl, then returned and the film itself goes back to its original Scream roots, which means returning to its exclusively Anglo make up, at least in its leads, and eliminating the troubling Latin element.

In this latest iteration there is a lack of comradeship and intimacy between its female characters. Sydney (Campbell) agrees to an interview by long-time reporter and open opportunist in the series Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) only if Weathers will not, in her questioning, reproduce Sydney’s trauma.

Weathers betrays her trust in the interview and quickly “goes there.” Sydney ultimately claims that Weathers, who has constantly throughout the series betrayed her, is her only friend. If that’s true it is sad indeed, as the “final girl” stands alone with no female companions and misrecognises her betrayer as her friend. Only in Hollywood where this type of behavior — betrayal to get ahead — is commonplace could this kind of non-relationship be offered as satisfying.

What Scream brought to the horror film is a high level of reflexivity. Characters throughout the 30-year life of the series cite religiously the rules and situations of past horror films. As with Raimi’s humor, this reflexivity allows the audience to shuffle off the horror even as the actual horror in the series increases.

This is simply another way of desensitising an audience to violence, the same kind of desensitisation that occurs in US mainstream news media, so that Venezuela, Cuba and Iran (2026) are merely sequels to Iraq (2003) Afghanistan (2002) etcetera, in a (never-ending?) horror series.

These horror films in the light of what is going on are not innocent. They are part of the process of desensitisation that allows the US audience to sit comfortably experiencing violence, and keeps the crowds of anti-war protesters out of the streets and in the safety of their plugged-in homes.

The “Shock and Awe” of Baghdad, Gaza, Cuba, Venezuela and now Teheran are transmuted into manageable, ironized horror, that we can all live with and that does not disturb our shopping.