The Black Death - How Black Trauma is Portrayed In the Modern Horror Genre

Part 1: A Brief History On the Origins of  “Black Horror”

During the 30’s and 40’s the American movie industry boomed. Americans wanted a reprieve from the troubles of the world, and found their comfort in the theaters. Strangely enough, horror movies became the frontrunner in box offices across the country. People wanted to see heroes triumph over demons, monsters and ghastly others to see that good can always find a way. During these times a lot of films used “otherness” to signify evil. These evil characters didn't look like the conventionally attractive hero or heroine of the story,  they were grotesque, scary, ugly and sometimes they were black. In the movie Birth of a Nation, whilst not a horror movie, the black characters who are actually being played by white men in black face were portrayed as these animalistic creatures who lusted after white women.  The fear of Blackness was portrayed in a manner to bring not only fear but justification for brutality against black people.  This othering of people, this fear of people who don't fit into the norm of supposed humanness is a constant that has been seen throughout horror movies. The entities that lack humanness, who plague our heroes, are the monsters. When black people were finally allowed in films, there were but so many roles that they were allowed to play. Roles were given but they were demeaning roles like the servant or the comic relief but never the main character. In the 50’s and 60’s, the movie started to use themes from reality in the way of the scientific horror genre. The advancements in science and technology gave way to genres that started to incorporate the strange and the fantastic parts of science and how science could go wrong.  It also mirrored reality in the way that black people were left out of this narrative yet again.  This time black people were not even in these sci-fi horror movies because they had no place in a laboratory. All of these instances of black exclusion are not to say that there were not films in which black people were the main characters because that would be untrue. The movies that were produced weren't big box office blockbusters, instead they were small, often low budget productions put on by mostly black directors. The films didn't have the reach that larger companies did, so unless someone was looking for them, they were unseen by most. During the 70’s the blaxploitation film, movies starring black actors in urban settings, were all the rage. Black people are finally allowed to be represented in their own stories,  but many of the stories that were written we're done so by white screenwriters and directors. Yet again black characters and their stories  were written through a white gaze and only allowed to exist as stereotypes. The black female lead, whilst the hero of the movie, was seen as a sexual object and fiesty and The black leading man was usually seen as being over-sexualized and hyper aggressive and demeaning to women. Actor, Richard Lawson,  spoke on the negative imagery of black people during this time and said, “these images were perpetrated by white people who exploited these images for their own gain.” It wasn't until the eighties and nineties where black directed and written films were finally given a platform and funding to allow for these stories to be told to a wider audience. In the 90’s we started to see films that used elements of what was going on at the time, but through the eyes of black creators, so we start to see stories that portrayed police violence and brutality against black people but these black characters were to thrive in these stories because they weren't the monsters or they didn’t die to save the white protagonist, but they were the ones we rooted for. And with those films black people got that reprieve from the harshness of reality  that at least in these stories we can conquer the demons that plague us. In the film “Horror Noire”, author and educator Tananarive Due spoke on the history of the black horror genre “black history is black horror”. In some Black Horror movies the scariest parts are not the monsters, but the atrocities that humans do to each other . 

Part 2: The Resurgence 

I have never truly been a fan of Horror movies. I was never cut out for the jumpscares, the creepy music and the ghouls that waited for their next victim, but being the youngest of 3, if my sisters wanted to watch horror movies, I did too. And since my oldest sister loves them, I’ve spent nights watching creepy movies that left me keeping the lights on in my room for days. 

I wasn't the one to go out of their way to watch a horror movie, but that all changed when I was 16 and the trailer for the movie “Get Out” by Jordan Peele came out. I can remember feeling excited to see Daniel Kaluuya as the main character of a horror movie. I wasn't really aware of many black led or even black written horror movies so to see that movie was important to me. As I watched it at the end of the school year with my English class, we were told by our teacher that the movie had a lot of symbolism in it and that we should take notes to analyze later and that is what made me love this movie so much. I loved the cinematography,  the storyline,  the acting,  the symbolism,  the light-hearted funny moments that broke the tension, I even liked the moments where I felt nervous for the protagonist.  But the movie overall didn't scare me at least not until the end. After our main character, Chris defeats The Armitage family,  a family who has been kidnapping black people in order to use their bodies as vessels  for their experiments,  we see red and blue flashing lights pulling up to Chris and we are brought back to reality. I remember turning away from the screen because I didn't want to see someone get shot.  That was something for me that would have been too realistic,  something that I've seen too much of  and something that is traumatic for me. But in yet another plot twist in the film,  it's Chris's friend coming to save him in the end. 

When speaking on the surprising ending Director Jordan Peele says that “by the time  I showed the film to an audience the culture had changed and so black lives matter had become a presence and there was now attention to racial violence in a way that they're there hadn't been when I first wrote it.”  When he first wrote that film he intended for Chris to go to jail but upon conversation with audiences, people wanted a hero, they wanted to see characters that made it out unscathed and were still resilient.  I believe that “Get Out'' was an amazing film that did portray trauma and retribution and it was presented in a way that made it entertaining. I didn't rely solely on trauma as the main point of the film. It ushered in a new era of black lead horror movies to a new generation of moviegoers. 

Part 3: I watched the show “Them” so you didn’t have to

Since the resurgence of modern black horror movies occurred after the rave reviews and hype around Get Out, many other horror movies and tv shows that have black characters as their leads have come out. The latest show to be talked about is Amazon Prime’s, “Them”, a show centered around the paranormal experiences of the Emory’s, a black family in 1950s Compton as well as the horrors that they face at the hands of their neighbors. As soon as the trailer for the show came out black Twitter was a flame. Tweets like, “These directors, writers and producers love shopping around black trauma for reactions and sales. Just one light hearted movie would do but no we’re expected to sit through this” and “Why did the supernatural need to be involved? Was the white people's actions not scary enough? How will there be a happy ending? The country will still be racist after they defeat the demons WHAT WAS THE POINT QUICKLY”, were the majority of what I saw. I saw the trailer as well and I thought before I judge an entire series based off of a two minute trailer, I should give the series a look to be fair.  I dedicated my weekend to watching the 10 episode series to see what was really going on. And honestly, twitter was right. Harkening back to the 1970s blaxploitation movies, “Them” is a show that has black trauma as a focal point in the show but the majority of the writers and directors on the show are non-black people. And when I say traumatizing scenes, I mean extremely hard to watch scenes that occurred in this show.  In episode 5,  we see an extremely graphic scene of violence that was taken too far. In it, one of our main characters, Lucky Emory, is being sexually assaulted by a white man whilst her child is getting murdered by other white people. And even the way that the scene was played out was disturbing, the songs they sang, the way the episode was 30 minutes long, 30 minutes of real life horror, none of these people were paranormal, these people were humans. In episode 9 we witness another flashback episode that serves the purpose of clarifying why the Emory's are getting plagued by demons. We learned that the community, to which they've moved, of Compton is built upon the ruins of another community where the priest was the only survivor of a massive fire. In episode 5, whilst it was extremely brutal to watch was an important plot point,  it tells us why the Emory family had to leave the South and move to California. In the ninth episode, we see brutality on black people that from what I’ve seen, served no purpose. We see a black couple roll into town and they need help, one could assume from the time period, that these people were once enslaved. As the story goes on, the couple is accused of theft, and as a punishment for their crimes, they get their eyes burned out with hot pokers and then they are hung and set on fire.  After that scene I was in awe of how violent it was.  I have never seen something so graphic and brutal. I didn't notice that I was shaking and crying until the final moments of that episode.  At that moment I understood what everyone on Twitter was against.  The way that the episode made me feel ill was when I realized that I'm not their target audience. The amount of traumatic incidents that I have seen within 20 years of living,  incidents that have left people who look like me, dead on the street are not scenes that I want to be replicated in my means of escapism. I watch movies and shows to be escape into worlds of wonder,  to see other people's stories,  feel other people's pain, but I don't always want to be reminded of the painful and inescapable history of a people who have been oppressed. Those stories are extremely important, and it is crucial that people do know that these painful stories are true and they are a part of American history, but I wish that there is nuance when it comes to black stories, and I hope that it doesn't always rely on our trauma and especially not profit from our pain.  If the grand reveal and overarching plot of “Them” was meant to show that humans are the real monsters, then maybe I would’ve liked it more.  But to put such deep and dark and complex content into 30 to 55 minute episodes, and to have these metaphorical monsters, as well as these racist characters, who have no other purpose than terrorizing the Emory family, it seems to be too dense to find the purpose.