Jordan Peele’s follow-up to ‘Get Out’ is the latest addition to the black-horror subgenre. |
With the wicked one-two punch of “Get Out” in 2017 and now “Us,” opening Friday, director/writer Jordan Peele has brought a distinctively black flavor to the horrormovie genre. You could argue he is the best to do so. But he’s hardly the first. Horror was mining the African-American experience for scares and social commentary well before “Get Out” became an Oscar-winning cultural flashpoint.
It makes sense. African-American history started with a tremendously hostile, forced and, yes, horrific migration to a strange new land. That history contains stories of triumph but also scars of racism, lynching, legal and social discrimination, and so many other forms of horror. The horror movie seems like a natural fit.
“There are certain ideas around gothic horror, like the doppelganger or the grotesque other,” says John Jennings, a professor of media and cultural studies at University of California, Riverside, who studies Afro-futurism, black science fiction and horror, in a phone interview. “When a black writer deals with these things through the lens of race, you get this really rich commentary about the nature of how we exist in the world.
“There’s nothing more fictitious than race and how it affects our life,” Jennings adds. “It’s not real. It’s almost like a phantom.”
Underneath ‘The Hood’
That phantom can take many forms, and it doesn’t require high art to display itself. Take “Tales From the Hood,” the 1995 cousin of the popular “Tales From the Crypt” franchise. Writer/director Rusty Cundieff and writer Darrin Scott conjured what at first glance looks like a quick-and-easy collection of scary and gory stories. But it doesn’t take long to realize there’s an awful lot going on in those tales.
The opening chapter takes on police violence against blacks. Another tackles the issue of slavery reparations, as a David Duke-like gubernatorial candidate, living in an old family plantation house, does battle with dolls representing the victims of a slave massacre. A third takes a page out of “A Clockwork Orange” by putting a young gangbanger through a social reconditioning program that focuses on the horrors of black-on-black crime. “Tales From the Hood,” which spawned a 2018 sequel, is a
remarkably topical film that works as both pure horror entertainment and societal commentary.
Such social consciousness is rarely far from the surface of the black horror movie. In Wes Craven’s 1991 “The People Under the Stairs,” the hero is a black child (Brandon Quentin Adams) stuck in a house of horrors with a maniacal white couple and, well, the people under the stairs.
The couple is flat-out homicidal crazy. Significantly, they’re also what used to be called slumlords, rich people who jack up rents and hoard money that comes in from the largely black community. In this case, lest you miss the point, they have a cellar that is literally filled with cash and gold coins. You may want to tell the scrappy protagonist to get out and stay, but not before he pulls off an explosive Robin Hood plan to redistribute cash into the neighborhood.
Not just about race
Yet Tananarive Due, an author of several supernatural novels and executive producer of the documentary “Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror” (available on Shudder, AMC’s horror streaming service), says it’s a mistake to see these films only through a racial prism. “Black horror isn’t always specifically about race,” Due says via email.
“A more common theme throughout black horror, as in all horror, is the will to fight back and survive against overwhelming
force,” continues Due, who also teaches a class at UCLA about black horror inspired by “Get Out” called “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic.”
“Because black Americans so often feel relegated to outsider status, our horror will often examine isolation and everyday experiences from a unique perspective, or invoking intergenerational magical mythologies and faith we inherited from our grandparents raised in the South or the Caribbean.”
The ’70s saw its share B-grade black horror, with exploitation films including “Blacula” and the “Exorcist” knockoff “Abby,” and the more creative vampire take “Ganja & Hess” (the inspiration
for Spike Lee’s “Da Sweet Blood of Jesus”).
The star of “Ganja,” Duane Jones, holds a special place in the horror pantheon. He played the hero of George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” made on a shoestring in 1968. In that film, he battled not just zombies but an armed mob of cops and vigilantes. The parallels to news footage of the civil rights movement were impossible to miss for contemporary audiences. (Today, parallels could even be made to the many “living while black” videos of African-Americans being questioned or harassed in public spaces while lawfully going about daily routines.)
“I was teaching this course this quarter, and one of the students was saying, ‘I don’t really like horror movies because I step outside and I could be killed,’ ” Jennings says. “You look at the current political climate, it is steeped in a type of existential dread, and we don’t necessarily have to relive that … (But) when you have a black director, black producer and black writer looking at these things, and marrying it with the lived experiences of African-Americans in this country, through the lens of horror, you get a really particular remix of how horror is seen.”
Truly scary movies
The horror has sometimes been played for laughs.
As Phillip Lamarr Cunningham, assistant professor of communications at Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University, says, most recent black horror films have been parodies, such as the Wayans brothers’ “Scary Movie” franchise.
“However, ‘Get Out’ perhaps suggests a return to black filmmakers taking the genre more seriously,” he says. “For instance, ‘The First Purge’ — the prequel to ‘The Purge’ series — was directed by black filmmaker Gerard McMurray and followed in the wake of ‘Get Out.’ ”
That Peele has given the black horror movie newfound mainstream credibility is all the more impressive, given how little he has compromised his vision. He is a master of horror’s visual grammar, but he’s also adept at subtly weaving social content into the fabric of his work.
“‘Get Out’ became the kind of film everyone had to see whether or not they were horror fans,” Due says. “I think ‘Us’ will have a similar impact, given the critical acclaim and artistic layers that will encourage viewers to have conversations about the film.
“It’s also worth noting that although ‘Us’ is not as directly about race as ‘Get Out,’ Peele’s use of black protagonists is still revolutionary in a horror film.”
The race phantom to which Jennings refers is alive and well in “Get Out,” manifesting as a repressed malignance before gradually coming out in the open. The idea of the doppelganger, or double, is at the heart of “Us,” in which a black family comes face to face with its evil mirror image.
But Peele would be the first to admit he’s part of a larger tradition. His films reflect the knowledge that, in so many ways, the African-American experience has frequently played out like an American horror story.