Dossier: Spectacles of Anti-Black Violence and Contemporary Black Horror

This dossier gathers key questions, concepts, and resources for artists, scholars, teachers, curators, and admirers of contemporary black horror films. The form and content of each of its sections offers a way to think about the intersection of blackness, spectacle, and cinema as a point of collaborative thinking, aesthetic connection, and citational practice:

• • Section 1: A Conversation between the Authors

• • Section 2: The Sunken Places Image Gallery

• • And finally, Section 3: A Resource List for Study and/or Teaching

1. A Conversation between the Authors

Almost a year to the day the COVID-19 outbreak was declared a global pandemic we hosted “Spectacles of Anti-Black Violence: Teaching Horror ‘With Everything Going on Right Now,’” a seminar at the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (virtual) conference that focused on topics both authors regularly address in our research and teaching: blackness and anti-blackness, visuality, genre, and popular culture. Yet, what is hopefully evident in the session’s title, is an unease around these topics as they straddle the unresolved space between theory and practice, which is exactly the place where the current cycle of horror films largely driven by black directors and producers render the “atmospheric” violence of anti-blackness on screen and invite audiences to consider the spectacularization of black pain, trauma, and death.¹ In turn, we invited our disciplinary community to join us for a conversation that began with a claim: films and shows like Them (2021), Us (dir. Jordan Peele, 2019), and Suicide by Sunlight (dir. Nikyatu Jusu, 2018) are about a black lived experience and, no matter how fantastic, supernatural, temporally or spatially distant the story is, they are also about us—film scholars, teachers, and makers.

The seminar description begins,

Asked to identify the genre of Get Out (2017), director Jordan Peele famously referred to the film as a “documentary.”² The comment acknowledges his audiences’ multiple realities, that some were experiencing the inventiveness of this film as a new and exciting development in the genre and others were viewing it as a surprisingly literal rendering of their everyday lives.

Peele’s “joke” about film genre feels directed towards those who remain attached to these categorical distinctions because, of course, an exploration of anti-blackness is well within the “the nature of horror.”³ Yet, visualizing the legacy of slavery in literally monstrous form is only an uncanny return of America’s repressed—if anything about Get Out actually feels distant or past.⁴ Instead, the film relishes the cinematic and actual familiarity of its characters’ postracial performance, which is evident in its quotability (“I would have voted for Obama for a third term if I could”). To call the film a “documentary” does not change anything about its content, but it does speak to our theorization of form. The joke hinges on the ‘obvious’ nature of a film’s genre, which is apparently much easier to discern and trust than black people’s accounts of racism. The specific reference to nonfiction film elaborates on this disavowal by pointing toward a faith in the veracity of the photographic image that, even in our exceedingly malleable visual culture, is still treated as the most effective tool against anti-black violence.⁵ Even in jest, an obsession with the truth of the black experience displaced onto the image is far more dubious than the Armitage family’s colorblindness.

The film is both the spectacle of anti-black violence and of learning about anti-black violence—a convergence that describes the focus of a distinct portion of contemporary horror film/TV and the most recent expression of the Black Lives Matter movement.

As our seminar proposal goes on to contend, Get Out suggests that en route to understanding “the spectacle of anti-black violence,” is the spectacle of “learning about anti-black violence.” The latter describes the scary things these films teach about the terror inflicted on Black people and the, at times comparably chilling, things these films teach us about the people who are recognizing and confronting that harm for...