Horror as Resistance: Reimagining Blackness and Madness

Horror genres in film and literature have a uniquely troubling history in representing disabled bodies and minds. Visible disabilities—scars, disfigurement, blindness, limps, prosthetics—and mental disabilities, especially conditions associated with madness, have been used repeatedly, or rather, excessively, as symbolic shorthand to signify evil, or to signal villainy. Disability Studies scholars have rightly critiqued such spectacularization of disability to invoke horror. David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder argue that visual and literary representations of disability are used to evoke intense affective responses. In horror films especially, they suggest, "disabled bodies have been constructed cinematically and socially to function as delivery vehicles in the transfer of extreme sensation to audiences."¹ Horror genres demonstrate a "repetitious reliance,"² as Mitchell and Snyder put it, on specific disabled bodies and minds, especially the violent psychiatric patient and the monstrous villain.

In recent years, however, some writers and filmmakers have worked within the horror genre to upend stereotypical tropes of disability; instead, they use the intense emotional power and violence of horror to engage in contemporary social critique. Much of my work has investigated discursive processes and representations of mental disability and race; building on these interests, this essay focuses specifically on African American filmmaker Jordan Peele and novelist Victor La-Valle to analyze how they grapple with the interwoven representations of madness and Blackness within fictional landscapes of horror. Specifically, I explore how Peele and LaValle situate madness and Blackness in relationship, and how each represents these entities, not as metaphor or narrative prop, but as integral (albeit distinct) patterns in the mosaic of cultural intervention.

In her groundbreaking book, Black Madness: Mad Blackness, Therí Pickens provides a map for critically engaging with these categories. She theorizes madness and Blackness—both defined broadly—as having a "complex constellation of relationships…constituted within the fissures, breaks, and gaps in critical and literary texts. Black madness and mad Blackness then are not interchangeable or reciprocal. Rather, they foreground the multiple and, at times, conflicting epistemological and ontological positions at stake when reading the two alongside each other."³ Like Pickens, I define madness and Blackness broadly: They have biological and discursive dimensions and are cultural constructs with material histories of their own. From Disability and Mad Studies, madness functions as an identity claim and community affiliation, linking people across cognitive diagnoses—from intellectual disability, learning disabilities, psychiatric conditions, and neurodiversity. While I am invested in the affirming impulses of this definition, I appreciate Pickens's rejoinder that mad functions simultaneously and potently as insult,⁴ a reminder that our critical engagement must consider those gaps between pride and put down, as well. Blackness, like madness, also has a range of meaning: It functions "as a racial category, cultural affiliation, and social position."⁵ This critical cartography is instructive: Representations of madness and Blackness may be focused on specific bodies and minds, but larger systems, structures, and beliefs are crucial to understanding how these categories overlap and push against each other.

Turning to a contemporary Black aesthetic of horror, this essay explores the ways film and literature develop complex relationships between madness and Blackness to stage various social critiques of white racism, police bias, the fantasy of post-raciality, and the voracious violence of white male supremacist ideology. Using Jordan Peele's Get Out as a starting point, I pay specific attention to his use of mental control, which evoke horror and madness, as a masterful critique of white racial power, haunted by histories of enslavement and racial violence. From there, I turn to Victor LaValle's recent novels, The Devil in Silver and The Changeling. Both literary works feature monstrous figures, but the metaphorical significance of these characters does not stigmatize mental distress or people of color. On the contrary, the child-stealing troll in The Changeling and the murderous patient in The Devil in Silver signify resistance to ideologies of white, able-minded privilege. Peele and LaValle use horror to unmask enduring legacies of racial oppression; further, madness, as lived experience or social product, is complexly woven into these fictional landscapes.

Horror functions as a powerful genre to deliver racial...