They Live revealed the psychological effects of late-80s Reaganism gone wild. Even Iraq War zombies have shown up on the big screen - and Cloverfield? It's the return of the repressed, the environmental effects of offshore dumping come back to tear us apart. Or something like that.

Women aren't meant to ask for divorces and move out - bad things will happen. Anthropologists should be wary of what they bring home with them; maybe they should never have left the country in the first place. After all, there are Communists everywhere. And everyone's off having a good time, doing something else, without you.

And what about The Stuff? That weird and strangely forgotten horror classic from 1985 about some sort of brain-rotting, highly addictive frozen yogurt... that turns out really to be an organism mined from the surface of the Earth by sinister retail dessert conglomerates? Edible geology. Timed perfectly for the advent of artificial sweeteners and for the arrival of frozen yogurt at your local mall, who wasn't afraid? "Are you eating it?" the film's absurd poster asked, addressing an American audience terrified less by the Cold War than by the FDA's recent approval of Aspartame. "Or is it eating you?"

More than a year ago, meanwhile, The New Yorker ran a short article about Halloween-themed haunted houses in Queens - or Brooklyn, or San Francisco, or Atlanta, I don't remember - that had been designed to provoke real fears. Not chainsaw-wielding maniacs, in other words, but tax auditors and bedroom spiders and muggers with hoods. The experience of falling from great heights. Having your in-laws round for a surprise breakfast while you're sitting on the toilet, late for work. And so on. Are you more scared of being eaten by zombies or of becoming homeless? I'm reminded of Nick Flynn's book, the unfortunately titled Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, in which Flynn, a volunteer at the local homeless shelter, finds, horrifically, that his own father has just checked in for the night.

In other words, what are we really afraid of?

The idea here is that maybe contemporary horror films only cater to one side of our world's ever-widening political divide. We've got the horrors of ecocide, of nuclear radiation, of Orwellian Christian hordes taking over the country, and robot Presidents - but what if a different sort of horror film were to come out someday in a theater near you? You're browsing Netflix in the summer of 2009 and you see Blood Rite recommended for whatever algorithmic reason. You rented something once with "blood" in the title. You have no idea, actually. But you're bored - so you click on it.

It's about gangs of AIDS-infected homosexuals kidnapping Cincinnati businessmen and forcing them to drink blood. It's directed by Jim McGreevey.

Two weeks later you see a preview for Sovereign Terrain: a lone man stands out in the desert somewhere, surrounded by undead Mexicans. There are more and more of them. He doesn't understand where they're coming from. Are they magic? They walk right through fences - and they double in number every 36 hours. What's worse, he once employed them...

Then there's the gay black couple that only adopts white boys. They watch ballet during the Super Bowl and hug quite frequently, even by normal standards. That's a lot of hugging, people mutter to themselves. That's an awful lot of hugging. Grown men shift uncomfortably in their seats. I don't like this film, they think. It's scarier than Jaws. They have their hands in front of their eyes. Women are screaming.

It gets worse.

The blacks are actually Jewish.

What's happening to this country? People literally throw popcorn at the screen. It's outrageous. We are losing control. Mexicans illegally crossing the border are just a front for an invasion by Satan - wait a minute, that was Constantine.

So what about horror for the Red States?

Sinister black athletes invade from space. Women are drawn to them.

Perhaps we've seen enough Blue State horror. Perhaps we've seen too many military coups and Fascist dystopias and suburban conformist nightmares. Perhaps we don't even know what we're afraid of anymore. Maybe we'll all live in cages, whilst endangered tree frogs rule the world. Down with these goddamn tree frogs! people scream. Humans unite!

Weird tools from the tail end of the 1800s - like Helmholtz Resonators (pictured above) and the Horizontal Kymograph - were considered by some to be a vital part of "experimental psychology," a new field whose central proposition was that psychology itself could be measured and mapped; even the most subtle reactions, on the level of conscious thought and unconscious reflex, could be predicted and repeated elsewhere, these experimentalists believed, under laboratory circumstances.

I'm reminded here of Dr. Channard, from the film Hellbound: Hellraiser II, whose mantra - "We have to see; we have to know" - became an oft-used sample in early 90s industrial music. Channard, that is, was not just a surgeon: he was an experimental psychologist.

In any case, not everyone was happy to measure the human mind - assuming such a thing exists - using instruments of brass and wood. "Many philosophers vehemently opposed the new experimental psychology," we read. "They adhered to Emmanuel [sic] Kant's view that mental events could never be captured or measured by experiment." Capturing mental events, like netting butterflies, was a task that required much more grace and skill, not brute machines - however carefully calibrated they may have been. Desktop resonators that looked like something out of a bad 19th-century stage version of Ghostbusters didn't, even then, inspire much confidence.

But let's put all these arguments aside and look at the actual objects.

The Hipp Chronoscope, for instance - a glass domed pedestal full of clockwork, gears, and dials - was adapted by legendary German physiologist Wilhelm Wundt from its original use as an astronomical instrument. After some fine-tuned tinkering, Wundt transformed it into something that could help "quantify nervous reaction times." In other words, a mechanism once meant for timing "stellar events" was retrofitted to measure the human nervous system - perhaps implying an unexpected astral cousinry between nerve endings and stars.

Then check out this auditory instrument (pictured below, left), made of "delay lines" that measure the speed and sensitivity of human hearing.

There's also the Ranschburg Memory Device and the Förster perimeter. There are aesthesiometric compasses, and there's the Einthoven String Galvanometer (pictured below, right). This latter device looks rather like a carburetor - only one you hook up to your own chest "to provide highly accurate records of heart currents."

Of course, there's also the Control Hammer apparatus, which served as "the fundamental timing device of the laboratory upon which all timing calibrations relied." Something like a musical metronome, then, ticking away in the background of the laboratory while scientists focused strange brass instruments covered in levers upon their fellow humans, the Control Hammer literally set the time and pace of these psychological experiments.

The museum's description is extraordinary: the Control Hammer was used "to generate a known and constant period of time."

However, all of these now somewhat eccentric little pieces of psychological enginery - like prosthetic testing devices for the mind - also make me think of something from David Cronenberg's old film Dead Ringers. There, amidst a variety of other things, we encounter "gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women."

These devices, specially made by a Toronto-based sculptor for a deranged and drug-addicted gynecologist, are exactly what they sound like: surgical instruments for operating on women whose bodies are somehow not right - nevermind that this "not right" status is entirely in the prescription-addled brain of our vertigo-stricken gynecologist.

The medical devices he has built, in other words, are projections of his own anatomical fears and fantasies.

What about psychological instruments, then, for treating people whose minds are somehow not right - nevermind that such a status entirely depends on whatever standards of normalcy exist at the time? After all, the very instruments pictured here, now gathering dust at a museum in Toronto, are glimpses of just such devices.

The question, then, is: What do these little wooden cases full of tuning forks and color wheels, sound pipes and timers, themselves assume about the human psychology they're meant to measure? I'm tempted to say that these were like reverse Turing machines before their time, or even early Voight-Kampff tests: mechanical devices meant to show who was human - one of us - and who was not. Call them Othering Machines, bringing down their judgments like a hammer.

When we build tools with which to test ourselves, what do the tools themselves imply?

(Elsewhere: Don't miss the Museum of the History of Reaction Time Research, a subset of the Museum of the History of Psychological Instrumentation in Montclair, New Jersey.)

The Aliens are just what the name advertises: truly, creepily alien. We never know what they want, other than to use our bodies as hosts to breed, though it's pretty obvious that they have some form of intelligence. We see them doing things like using battle strategy, and protecting their young. And they don't need tools like those wussy Predators because their entire bodies are weapons. Who is to say that they aren't a race of super-ultra-mega-warriors who genetically engineered themselves to become weapons? That makes them even more advanced than Predators.

Aliens aren't just out to get us - they are out to become us. One of the hallmarks of a hardcore freakshow monster is that it wants to make babies with you, or create versions of itself using your body. That's the Alien all over. It wants to get you pregnant and use your genetic material to create offspring. And the Aliens are so sexy that other species want to do the same thing to it: that's how we got the human/alien hybrid in Alien: Resurrection. Even the Predator-boosting Colin Strause has to admit the superiority of the Predalien hyrid (pictured here) in his new flick. Hybrid vigor!

Nobody will ever mistake the Aliens for a racial stereotype. One of the sort of cool/sort of lame parts of Predators are their dreadlocks, suggesting they're a species of Rasta warriors. Aliens, to their credit, never veer into JarJarism.

And finally, the Aliens are always a pleasure to gawk at. All too often, monsters in horror movies are all bite and no show. Predators are of that variety, which is why the first Predator movie worked the best - the Predator was invisible, so we didn't have any time to feel disappointed that he looked so half-Klingon, half-Rasta boring. The Alien, however, got more intriguing the more we saw. That long, shiny head with its double-mouth dripping acid? The skeleton body like something from an Iron Maiden album cover? Dude. Plus, when the Alien starts to wear thin, just create a cool hybrid! Sure, Alien: Resurrection was total crap, but my inner FX gore geek was totally satisfied by the final scene with the creepy naked Humalien getting sucked out of the teeny hole in the spaceship wall.

In short, Alien kicks Predator's ass on all fronts: it's creepier, better-looking, and wants to make babies with us. What else do you want?