Class Matters and Respectability: The Great Migration in Black Horror
Reflections on poverty, the South, and other marginalized tales.
a blinking cursor.
the blue light of the screen glows waiting for a function.
stretch.
walk.
sit.
start.
stop.
type.
backspace.
type.
highlight.
delete.
…ellipses…
Beyond this repetitive monotonous process, attempting to write has been softy put, arduous. I have a plethora of notes written and on my phone from the previous year, titles, topics, and things of the like, but formulating anything remotely coherent when your entire being feels stuck is a Sisyphean task.
I’ve lost all sense of time. I don’t keep track of the days…they just happen. The only thing keeping me tethered to the world is ‘life’ obligations…bills, immediate family, the existential dread of COVID. We’re in year 3? of the pandemic and hardly anything or anyone has changed. Too many were canaries in the coal mine and their tweets have been repetitively and swiftly silenced.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve been wracked with a myriad of emotions about who is being forgotten in the narrative of this global event. There’s no more (designated) airtime for the deceased, no lead-ins for the mass disabled, rarely any for the currently disabled/immunocompromised who were the aforementioned metaphorical canaries who shouted from the rooftops about the abject horror(s) of being considered disposable, invaluable, and the direct targets of eugenicist policy.
…and then the particular vulnerabilities of being Black and any variation of ‘otherized’ in this racist capitalist society that collectively gave everyone that upside down smiley face emoji with a hearty GET BACK TO WORK for the economy, meanwhile a CEO somewhere jumps into their Scrooge McDuck pool of money.
Gee, what a wretched time to be alive.
Before this anxiety-laced tangent, this piece was to address class matters, but after the colon what is there predominantly? The Great Migration. Black Horror. With all the dominoes attached to COVID such as displacement via evictions, exorbitant hospital costs, the egregious neglect of children’s welfare, and on and on and on…I realized in YEAR 1, that this was par for the course, the status quo, now there’s just an airborne virus attached. The statistics on how Black mortality has dropped even further should mortify you too. This moment in time truly made me wonder, how will Black Americans fare when “this” is finally over? There were so many of us hanging on by a thread before the world shifted on its axis, but now…I truly truly don’t know. I’m not clairvoyant or a soothsayer but I do know an immediate landscape where many of us are being left behind.
*Note/food for thought: this observation about the shifting identity and representation of the cinematic medium applies to all Black American film projects, not just Black horror.
The last chapter of 2021 closed with Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, a film that received a tug-of-war styled discourse because the film was trying to tackle a lot, but the pieces didn’t always connect, nor was there enough time for the narrative to breathe. The entirety should have at least been two hours (or made a horror mini-series, but that’s my wishful musings). People that were glaringly absent from the story and its historical underpinnings were the everyday Black residents, beyond Coleman Domingo’s character William Burke, especially those who had been displaced because of gentrification and redlining (which the film mentioned multiple times but never gave screen time). Black horror stories, once upon a time, gave urgent priority to urban ‘ghettos’, those of us still in the South, or who were first/second generation residents in the west/midwest.
Many of us who are in these locales range in socioeconomic status and I wish that dichotomy could be better reflected in the content that we see greenlit. Where are the accents, dialects, geographic signifiers that are unique to various aspects of Black American identity? The undercurrent of Black horror is changing, or perhaps I should say, has changed. Stories of Black life in conjunction with horror are no longer sequestered or relegated to pockets of poverty, the rural, or the Bayous; the new frontier is ‘exclusive’ suburbia, gated communities, and panoramic high-rises. Horror had indeed begun to shift in the 90s and early 2000s but it was subtle and presented as more of an outlier than a seismic shift. Many films that existed at the time were adamant about staying for the community, inserted messaging about calls for a return to our roots, or reiterated the classic refrain to “not forget where you come from”.
A prime cinematic example is Director Ernest Dickerson’s Bones (2001) which sadly was one of the last hurrahs from a Black (legendary) director, with substantial monetary investment, from this era. It should also be noted the film we were privy to then was not Ernest’s entire vision and was subject to egregious studio interference. Also, the thematic parallels to the 1992/2021 Candyman are striking. A beloved powerful Black male member of society is viciously murdered, a warped version of their soul becomes trapped in an intimately specific locale, those in the present must reckon with the residual haunting. Historical locale interlaced with Black American life/death/trauma. Check. Some sort of Boogeyman with a particular summoning ritual/energy transference. Check. Not to be flippant, my feelings are quite the opposite, but these types of zonbi Black horror films hit a very specific checklist…one that works because its poignant and painful familiarity has been interwoven into the very DNA of Black horror, i.e., when reality pierces the bubble of ‘entertainment’.
2021 marked the twentieth anniversary of Ernest Dickerson’s film and there was hardly any fanfare. No big commemorations from the big horror magazines, no think-pieces from the horror/pop culture writers across the zeitgeist, just…nothing. A quiet BluRay release occurred in 2020, but other than a single podcast from the lovely folks at Horror Queers, it’s been radio silence. This is indeed a travesty because there are so many iconic horror genre tethers (outside of Black filmmaking) we can trace back to this film narratively and visually, as an aesthetic, and as an anchor point between homage to Black horror of the past and the present. The fulcrum may have been an homage to the Blaxploitation era, but the film was a harbinger of where Black stories were headed…away from ‘the hood’, the echo of the plantations, and onward to respectability.
The emotional and psychological danger of “keeping up with the Jones's”, a “fake it til you make it” attitude, and hustling to the middle/upper classes was apparent on our screens, both large and small. There seemed to be this breakneck urgency to humanize Black people as quickly as possible. No more Jim Crow stories. No more stories situated in ‘the projects’. No more struggle. It’s true, some of us are direct recipients of our parents/grandparents getting out, moving away, or firmly affixing themselves in the suburbs because we were told that a house meant equity, an inheritance, and generational wealth. Absolutely no renting. Our main priority should be to own. It is also true that many of us have become extremely sheltered from what the reality of ‘paycheck to paycheck’ means. For Black Americans, since our emancipation, we have always been on the string of this yo-yo where we tried to keep our material gains in our communities and I need not list atrocity after atrocity that robbed us of it. Much of what I’m addressing is merely a check-in to make sure we haven’t checked out of what’s truly important to the delicate precarity of all Black Americans, and that includes our stories, our folklore, our griots, and our tethers to the ancestors.
This discussion inevitably careens into this new phrase I’ve been seeing and hearing lately, ‘woke horror’. I am legitimately curious but dually cautious about who’s responsible for this terminology. Will I find some White supremacist rhetoric or fall down the rabbit hole of some conspiracy theorems? Great, what other-other circles of the Internet do I have to be on the lookout for now? I’ll put a pin in that ‘woke horror’ thing for the moment because….well, as long as there have been Black faces in horror (or media generally) it's always been political. Our very existence is political/politicized. If White creatives don’t include us, we don’t exist. If they do write us in, what roles do we embody? Are we still existing along the slip&slide of tropes that ‘make us all look bad’? Conversely, because there are Black people with some monetary clout and pull in the industry…how are they writing us? What pitfalls are they face-planting in? What projects are they attached to that by proxy we cringe?
Tis true, Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) most certainly sparked a renaissance for our current time; however, the unintended consequence was an erasure and pivot of the narrative away from lower-income/classed Black people. Next, came another Jordan Peele suburban-based horror entitled Us (2019), which ironically talked about class warfare and the haves/have nots. The much-maligned Antebellum (2020) directed and written by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz has been relegated alongside Justin Simien’s Bad Hair (2020), as films that shall not be named, only forgotten. Candyman (2021), the latest Black horror entry directed by Nia DaCosta continues the trend of disappeared or suspiciously absent classes of Black people. If one veers into the realm of streaming, Amazon’s Them (2021) created by Little Marvin initially received a tepid to high interest, but once information was released about the predominantly White directors, writers, and the show’s triggering content…fervor for the show soured to a vitriolic degree. The only film that challenged this trend and centered the lives and realities of the poor vs the upper classes/police state was The First Purge (2018) — for extra commentary released on July 4 — directed by Gerard McMurray; this particular entry came from a franchise that many have written off, but one that contains plenty of frighteningly similar parallels to our current political reality. I would recommend the currently quintology (and its tv series which I need to catch up on) alone for its challenging discussions regarding far-right/conservative politics, racism, and class issues.
I would also be remiss in this discussion of respectability and class matters if I didn’t address the discussion of LGBTQIA+ representation. There is still a wide gap between the cis and Trans communities regarding storytelling and who gets to wield the mic/lens. Still, regularly and far too frequently in the Black community, queer people have to make all the stories themselves and rarely have the backing of larger studios or people with pull in the industry to get their visions to reality…and this is just regular tv dramas that I’m addressing here…so the broader topography of representation in horror is nil to almost nonexistent. Oh, and here’s a yike…where are the neurodivergent, disabled, and immunocompromised folks? Many of us in the Black community by proxy to trauma, the environment(s) we live in, (epi)genetics, and so on are living with mental and/or physical health issues. It would absolutely be a dream come true to see more of us who exist outside of the cis, straight, or able-bodied normalcy narratives that make certain types of Black people hyper-competent superheroes. I understand this is a residual side-effect of ensuring Black people don’t look or operate like minstrel caricatures or have anything that the White gaze could scrutinize to further undermine Black progress. We should also be aware this is an aspect of mental health — the anxiety, the hyper fixation, and depressive episodes — regarding our image that we really need to speak more openly about. There’s still so much as a community that we are still unpacking and unlearning about our mental health, LGBT+ representation, and other marginalized tales that we won’t see unless we uplift each other.
Lest I forget, a shout-out is in order to the phenomenal Horror Noire (2021) that was experimental, contained a diverse array of Black characters/settings, and interwove a few macabre historical horrors (or at the very least my brain said oooh, I recognize that ‘potential reference’). For example, *spoilers-ish for the segments mentioned* but when you’re watching Director Joe West’s segment written by Tananarive Due entitled “The Lake”, Google: Black community + Lake Lanier, Georgia + haunted + Oscarville (preferably during the daytime and with any combination of those search terms…you’ll be horrified and chilled by what you find).
Or how about those runes in the segment by Director Julien Christian Lutz entitled “Brand of Evil” written by Ezra Claytan Daniels. Psst, watch Midsommar and then get back to me…an additional horrific yikes, right? And one of my absolute favorite segments, “Bride Before You” directed by Zandashé Brown and written by Shernold Edwards was dripping with reverence and homage to Toni Morrison’s works Beloved (1987), The Bluest Eye (1970), Tar Baby (1981), and many more. Two words, colorism, and misogynoir.
As we marked the 54th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s murder this week…one important aspect of his legacy, towards the end of his life, was a ‘radical’ politic focused towards the working class and those trapped in the perpetual cyclic of poverty…thus, as we reflect on horrors past and present, where do we see the trajectory of Black storytelling and the people presented as the focus or symbols of heroism? They don’t have to be perfect, they don’t have to be respectable, but they should reflect the reality of more of us.
This piece is dedicated to @TheTessFiles, who is currently working on a Ph.D., who reached out to the Black horror community on Twitter for audience reception to horror films broadly, and more specifically Candyman, Get Out, and Us. Our conversation kickstarted the broader scope of this piece. Thank you, Tess. 🖤
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