By Steve Newton
I’ve really been enjoying the work of Canadian editorial cartoonist Michael de Adder of late.
The New Brunswick-born artist has really been sticking it to American president Donald Trump recently, ever since the back-stabbing Cheeto Mussolini starting threatening our country with punishing tariffs and non-stop talk of annexation.
I especially enjoyed his latest batch of three cartoons, which use notable scenes from horror movies to imply how unhinged Trump and his right-wing policies have become.
The sketch shown above sees the reenactment of a scene from Misery, director Rob Reiner’s 1990 adaptation of Stephen King’s 1987 novel in which a bestselling author is taken captive by an insane fan of his. In the film the writer, played by James Caan, gets bound to a bed and brutally “hobbled” by his “biggest fan”, played by Kathy Bates.
To make his point, de Adder put a freaked-out Uncle Sam in Caan’s role, with Trump in a matronly brown dress wielding the sledgehammer that Bates’s character used to shatter his ankles, promising him “It’s for your own good.”
Sure it is, Mr. President. Sure it is.
Then there’s the sketch concerning Trump’s tough isolationist stance and his talk of pulling the mighty U.S. out of NATO and/or no longer defending its longtime allies from historic adversaries. A woman is shown in the dead of night in a house with a NATO sign, being told on the phone: “We traced the call. It’s coming from inside the house.”
Trump’s stupid orange head is shown peeking out from a window above. It’s a horror trope taken from the ’60s urban legend of “the babysitter and the man upstairs” that was effectively used in the 1974 Canadian slasher flick Black Christmas and then again in 1979’s When a Stranger Calls.
The last of de Adder’s horror-based ‘toons also originated in 1974, via director Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. In the final scene of that low-budget blockbuster the only survivor of a run-in with a cannibalistic family, played by the blood-drenched Marilyn Burns, escapes by jumping in the back of a passing pickup, which is chased down the road by the chainsaw-swinging Leatherface.
In de Adder’s sketch, the shocked driver of the truck is Uncle Sam, and Burns’s hysterical survivor has been replaced by the Statue of Liberty. The blade of the chainsaw Leatherface is hoping to mangle Lady Liberty with is emblazoned with the acronym DOGE, so you just know that’s good old Elon grinning maniacally behind the mask of human skin, his bloodlust for ruthlessly cutting social programs in the name of “government efficiency” never to be sated.
Hats off to patriotic Canadian Michael de Adder for getting his “elbows up” and cleverly connecting the current insanity of the Trump administration with classic horror moments of the past. I guess we’ll find out in due time whether fact is scarier than fiction.
To read more than 350 of my reviews of horror movies released theatrically in North America between 1988 and 2018, go here.