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CNN host Audie Cornish drew a striking comparison between heightened immigration enforcement in cities like Chicago and scenes from horror movies — suggesting that parents of trick-or-treaters could be “abducted” by ICE.
During Friday’s broadcast of “CNN This Morning,” the panel watched a clip from Cornish’s “The Assignment” podcast, where she spoke with filmmaker Tananarive Due about how today’s horror movies “wrestle with our fears around invasion and race and gender” — in ways that politics cannot.
“Maybe that’s why I think it’s so complex, doing very stark political things or kind of ‘eat-the-rich’ type horror, because it almost, I don’t know, something is sapped from it. When you feel the weight of our current politics so plainly,” Cornish told Due.
After watching the podcast clip, Cornish compared the horror blockbuster “Get Out” to the current immigration crackdown taking place in cities across the United States.
“And [Due] also pointed out something like a movie like ‘Get Out.’ There’s a scene where someone is abducted in the opening scenes of the film, and I have to admit, I thought about this Chicago directive, that’s like, ‘ICE, please don’t go to trick-or-treating,’” Cornish said. “Like, please don’t make that the scene of a raid that is a horrific experience – if someone loses their parent on a Halloween trip.”
One of the panelists, New York Times journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro, added her take on how movies from prior generations were once an “escape” from reality, but are now mirroring people’s real-life experiences and fears.
“We were looking for escape. We were looking for someone to save us from our fears,” Garcia-Navarro explained. “Now, actually, what we‘re seeing with these horror franchises is what you exactly point to – people actually going in and seeing their reality reflected in a way that… is easily handled.”
“You don’t want to escape from it. Now, you actually want to confront it – but maybe in a way that is less, you know, visceral,” she added.
Garcia-Navarro added on to Cornish’s analysis of the movie “Get Out,” noting that while the film is unquestionably a horror title, “it was about racism” and was the first film of the genre she’d seen that “wasn’t a guy with a chainsaw.”
One of the more controversial movies of 2025, Leonardo DiCaprio’s “One Battle After Another,” was an intensely political film that played on some people’s fear of rising authoritarianism in the U.S. The movie faced backlash from critics who argued that the film’s premiere was poorly timed amid rising left-wing violence and its focus on a violent political revolution.
The film, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Reagan-era set novel “Vineland,” follows The French 75 – a Weather Underground-like group of self-described revolutionaries rebelling against what they believe is authoritarianism. The revolutionary group breaks illegal immigrants out of detention centers and bombs courthouses and offices of lawmakers who pushed abortion bans throughout the course of the film.
Although some critics have voiced their concerns over the film’s themes of political violence and revolution, it has been a box office success, earning more than $100 million globally since its premiere in September. It sits as the highest rated film of 2025 on Metacritic.
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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