1973 and the American horror film: Political futurity in The Exorcist and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

This article examines how the 1973 horror films *The Exorcist* and *The Texas Chain Saw Massacre* anticipate the political and social transformations marking the advent of the neo-liberal and neo-conservative order in America. Rather than viewing these films as reflections of past traumas, the analysis positions them as speculative fictions that prefigure emerging political realities, with *The Exorcist* embodying the tensions of affluent, urban middle-class life and *The Texas Chain Saw Massacre* representing the precarious rural working class and the reconfiguration of family under late twentieth-century capitalism. The films illustrate the contradictory alliance of neo-liberalism’s market rationality and neo-conservatism’s moral-political rationality, projecting a future political subjectivity shaped by economic individualism and social conservatism. This approach challenges traditional trauma-based readings of horror cinema by highlighting its capacity to sense and dramatize incipient political shifts.