The Best '70s Horror Movies

Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel doesn’t receive enough credit for being a horror movie, though that's precisely the emotion the film is designed to inspire. Reflecting an essential anxiety around communism in its use of Nadsat, the fictional slang (Russian-influenced English) created by Burgess for the original novel, the film showcases a dystopian British future where sociopaths like Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his band of “droogs” lay waste to society, treating “ultraviolence” (rape, torture, murder) as sport while The State attempts to control these impulses via modes of coercive behavioral therapy. Despite its intention as anti-communist propaganda, the violence it portrays (and there is a lot of it) is violence committed with complete banality under the rugged individualism purported by capitalism. Loathing toward the vulnerable and marginalized, rape culture, anti-intellectualism, revisionist history, and a police state which experiments on and exploits its inmates? Can’t imagine what that sounds like.

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