More critically, what has emerged from these reactions is a question of whether the film and television category of “racial horror” should exist in the first place. It’s a question that has deep complications for what we consider to be the constructions of the horror genre itself. Wes Craven, the creator of
A Nightmare on Elm Street said in 2007 that horror movies are “the disturbed dreams of a society”, and that the horror genre depends on our fears being “manipulated and massaged”. This speaks to the purpose of horror as tapping into the most primal, Freudian fears: the unknown, the dark, grief, death. But how can the spectre of racism and racial violence be reduced to the arena of “fear” when it persists as a force for violence and social death against the Black audiences who are watching?
In his essay on Them, the author
Brandon Taylor writes that the imagination cannot make space for racism as unrealised fear through the horror genre when these acts of violence are realised daily: “I don’t understand how you make a horror if you are never safe. How do you make something to terrify a people who have lived for generations in a state of constant besiegement? The worst thing short of death that could happen to Black people in America has already happened.” These words are particularly heavy in the month that
20-year old Daunte Wright was killedby a white female police officer during a traffic stop just 11 miles from where George Floyd was murdered last year in Minnesota. Taylor further argues that creative licence is stifled in this genre, as the “horror” can only ever be so many degrees from reality. As such, “paranormalising” racism falls flat.
