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Halloween is on October 31st. Election day always falls on the first Tuesday of November. Coincidence? I THINK NOT! Election season is one of the scariest times of the year for people who are actually paying attention, mostly because it seems like nobody cares about who is running this country. Want to hear something scary? In 2008, less than six out of every ten registered voters actually voted. And that’s not including the people who were too lazy to even register! Want to hear something even scarier than that? That’s the highest percentage in 40 years! During the most controversial election in United States history (that’s Bush vs. Gore in 2000 for those of you not paying attention), barely more than half of registered voters actually filled out a ballot, and no midterm election has had more than 40% voter turnout since 1970. What is wrong with you people?!

I apologize for the rant, but the fact is, the campaign process is so complicated and tortuous that it would give the Jigsaw Killer a headache, and some candidates' ideas about how to lead our country are so frightening they would make Freddy Kreuger pee himself. So how do I distract myself from the terror of election day? By watching movies, of course! There are plenty of movies about the political process, but they don’t always provide the best distraction. Many of these movies are themselves quite scary, and not always for the right reasons.

So I thought it would be appropriate, considering that we at BOP had just compiled a list of our favorite horror films of recent years, to examine six of the most memorable recent films about the political process, and why they could easily qualify as horror films. Some are scarily accurate, some scarily inaccurate, but all of them give me the willies.

Horror Movies About Elections:

1. Wag the Dog

What It’s About: Wag the Dog is David Mamet and Barry Levinson’s biting satire about the ways in which voters are manipulated during a presidential election. Robert De Niro plays one of the sitting president’s top advisors, and is given the job of distracting the American public from a scandal that was recently revealed about the president. He hires a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) to manufacture a fake war, create fake war heroes, and generally lie to and mislead the public as much as possible. They want the voters to decide with their hearts, not their brains, and they want those hearts to be woefully misinformed.

Why It’s Scarily Accurate: Because elections really are all about lying to and manipulating voters. When Sharon Angle told voters that there are Muslim communities in Nevada that are practicing Sharia law, she wasn’t trying to convince them that she was the best candidate. She wasn’t concerned with balancing the budget or dealing with the recession, or even realistically handling the complex immigration issues that are facing her state. No, she was trying to scare the pants off the voters so that they would run pantless to their nearest polling place and vote for the woman who promised to kill all the Muslims. Those are the kinds of tactics that Wag the Dog jokingly portrays, and sadly, are the kind that so many candidates use.

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