Why Do Black Horror Movies Matter?
This is the written version of a talk I gave on black horror for the Mercy College ReImagine series in October 2021. It presages my paper on the topic for Film and Philosophy, released in 2022. Pardon the numerous typos, sloppy constructions, and rushed argumentation. I’ve also refrained from editing it to read as a written document rather than as an oral presentation; partly out of sheer laziness, partly because it was, in fact, an oral presentation, and the form and content are, as with all things, intertwined. If I were to edit it, it would essentially be my forthcoming paper! If it’s of interest to you despite all that, here ya go.
Who here has seen a horror movie before?
Who here has seen a horror movie about black people before?
When I ask the former, you probably have a long, long list of movies to choose from. Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Saw, Scream, Paranormal Activity, Jennifer’s Body, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Pyscho, The Exorcist, Dracula...household names all, and I could go on, and on, and on.
But when I ask the second question, you likely have a much smaller list. Get Out and Us, obviously; less popular blockbusters like Antebellum, Lovecraft Country, the Candyman reboot; maybe classics like the original Candyman, Blacula, and Tales from the Hood; maybe smaller recent indies like His House, Atlantics, and Zombi Child. And that’s about it, no? Not a long list. Only a few of these, most would say, match the heights of the horror classics mentioned a moment ago. And it’s worth noting that all except the three classics were released in the past five years.
So asking “do black horror movies matter?”, the guiding question of my talk today, seems a little silly. Do French farming almanacs written in the early 1700s matter? Sure they do, to the few nerds obsessed with this incredibly niche or parochial topic. So too, one might say, do black horror films matter only to those of us with particularly particular fascinations. But to suggest that their significance is more universal, more central – not just to horror, or to black cinema, but to broader conversations about race and art, indeed to each of our daily lives,– seems like wishful thinking.
Today I want to suggest otherwise. I want to convince you that these films – often cringey, often bad, often cheaply made – are important. I want to convince you that you should care about them, even if you’re not a geeked-out historian of black cinema or horror fanatic like myself. I want to convince you that they matter.
In some sense, though, I might seem to simply be following a trend here. We are, after all, in the middle of a cultural and political moment defined by what we can call a politics of representation. That is, we seem to be collectively paying attention to, and seeking to correct, historical erasures of the presence of black life in history, in politics, in art (and that of Indigenous life, and trans life, etc.) Next month, The Harder They Fall, a film by black people about black outlaws in the Wild West is dropping on Netflix; it’s one of the most anticipated movies of the year. And it’s major sell is “Look; there were black cowboys too!” In the past few years, the television show Pose – a show primarily starring black and brown trans women – has continously broken ground with Emmy wins and major magazine covers. The excitement for these projects has felt almost archeological: like finding a whole new history, one where we are actually the main characters. Their importance seems to stem from the simple fact that they are, and they reveal, black presence. Our attention is constantly directed to the presence of marginalized people – of black people – where we aren’t expected, or weren’t seen before. Streaming sites have whole categories just for “black film”; museums book entire wings for exhibits starring just black artists; Apple Music covers the entire platform with advertisements for black musicians during Black History Month. These are efforts to reveal that we are here, and we been here. In a world where we are constantly told that we are not here, in which art, media, political discourse, and everydayl life continually tries to suppress our very existence, let alone the complexities of our lives, this is presumed to be radical in and of itself.
So I could say this. I could point out that the belief that the tradition of black horror cinema begins with Jordan Peele’s 2017 smash hit Get Out – a common belief – is, in fact, false. Horror films about black people have been being made since 1915, with the silent film The Undertaker’s Daughter. And the list has only grown since then. The following is a mere fraction thereof: Ingagi, Son of Ingagi, Zombiez, Blackenstein, The Blood of Jesus, Abby, The Son of Satan, The Leech Woman, White Dog, Ganja and Hess, I Married a Zombie, The Thing with Two Heads, The People Under The Stairs, Zombi 2, Sugar Hill, Hood of Horror, The Conjure Woman, Leprechaun in the Hood, Beloved, Alien vs. Predator, White Zombie, Night of the Living Dead....Once again, I could go on. Black horror is not new, nor does it consist of a sparse handful of films. For over a century, filmmakers – both black and otherwise – have created many often-brilliant, always engaging horror movies about black people: sometimes as monsters, sometimes as victims, sometimes as heroes. Black horror is not a trend; it is a fundamental element of the horror genre: but one that has been erased and gone too long unnoticed.
But if that were all I had to say, I think it’d be a little disappointing. Do these movies truly only matter because, there are black faces behind the camera or on screen? This seems rather tokenizing. We transform black folks into tokens when we suggest that they only matter because of their blackness, when that blackness is reduced to a one-dimensional caricature. Think of the way endless Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes are circulated every February, by people who have very little idea about King’s complex philosophical and political thought, and are unwilling to commit to the same radicalism King embraced. King spent years developing sophisticated theories of antiblackness and black resistance, grounded in his extensive experience with philosophers like Kant and Hegel. King’s black radicalism, in other words, is not reducible to the simplistic notion that “Racism is bad; can’t we all get along?” And yet, his quotes, divorced of context, are reduced to platitudes, to be plastered on Instagram bios by people who know absolutely nothing about the depths of his political radicalism and philosophical brilliance. King is reduced into a token: he doesn’t matter because of what he thought, what he argued; he matters simply because he is black. He checks off the right box.
And representation politics often gets accused of making this same mistake. In the summer of 2020, after the murders of Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd by police officers, a general sentiment that “Black Lives Matter is cool” pervaded American culture. Everyone posted the black square on instagram, everyone boasted about buying from black-owned businesses, and everyone shared cute infographics with lists of black authors to read. The last of these was particularly pernicious: “Antiracism Reading Lists” popped up on my feed daily. I was always fascinated by who was included on these lists; they featured writers at seeming random, all united only by their race. “Teach yourself about your white privilege” these lists proclaimed, going on to demand that you read Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Michelle Obama, Angela Davis, and Malcolm X alike. Why? Well, because they’re all black! Never mind the fact that these writers all profoundly disagree with each other. This reduction is tokenization. Treating these writers like tokens – as though they only matter because they are black, as though they are nothing but the most simplistic notion of black – erases what they actually wanted to say.
In politics of representation, what black people actually think, say, and do becomes less important than the fact that they can serve as tokens. The true brilliance and significance of black folks – and our failures and complications! – are disregarded in favor of easy narratives of “diversity and inclusion.” Which is to say that I don’t want to do this to black horror. I don’t want to blithely trumpet these films’ importance, where by that I simply mean “Look! Black people!” I want to do better by the films, and to do better by you. Black horror films are works of art. And like all works of art, they have something to say. Instead of covering that up, let us listen. Because I think that what black horror films are saying – the brilliant philosophizing they do, the theories of life, violence, beauty, and blackness that they offer – matters.
But now I sound like I’ve really lost the plot. What brilliant theorizing could a movie like Leprechaun in the Hood do? What does Blacula – the pitch is literally “Dracula, but BLACK!!” – really have to say? More than you might think. But to get there, we’ve got to dig deep.
Let’s start with a clip from Sugar Hill, one of my favorite black horror films of all time.
Released in 1974, the film stars the glorious Marki Bey as the eponymous Sugar, a photographer whose boyfriend is killed by a white mob boss. Furious for revenge, Sugar turns to Mama Maitresse, a voodun priestess, who summons Baron Samedi, the voodun lord of the dead to beg for his assistance. Samedi grants Sugar control over an army of the dead: specifically, dead black slaves, turned into zombies.
About fifty years later, we see a similar scene in the really fantastic Netflix original film His House. Sugar Hill, as you may have guessed, is a campy, surreal blast, channeling the manic energy of blaxploitation cinema. His House, however, is infinitely darker and more serious. The film tells the story of Bol and Rial, two refugees from South Sudan who’ve fled to the U.K. Experiencing daily racism and xenophobia while attempting to make a life in this new country, the two eventually realize that their government-issued refugee housing is haunted….and in this clip, we finally get a good look at what is haunting them: the spirits of the dead they left behind, it is eventually revealed, the victims of a massacre that Bol and Rial barely escaped.
In both of these scenes, we see the history of black suffering literally resurrected before us. The tattered manacles of Sugar’s army, the rotting flesh of Bol’s demons, are blatant reminders that blackness, as a form of life, is one defined by violence. Frederick Douglass calls this the bloodstained gate. He describes, as a young boy, listening to the brutal whipping of his Aunt Hester by their slavemaster. This moment, he says inaugurated him into the form of life called “being black.” it was only then that he was truly born; only when he learned that the world, for people like him, was a fundamentally horrific place, a place where every moment held the possibility of brutal violence, violence without rhyme or reason. He entered the bloodstained gate, and became black. These scenes, then, function as scenes in which the audience – both us and Sugar/Bol – is placed into the position of Douglass. We confront the figures that have passed through the bloodstained gate. We are terrified of them.
Horror, after all, is about fear! Philosophers spend a great deal of time arguing about how to define emotions; so it’s impossible to give you an uncontroversial definition of fear. Someone will inevitably pop up their head with a “well, aaactually..” But here’s a good shot at it: fear is the uncomfortable anticipation danger. We fear what we find threatening; what we think will harm or hinder the things we love or like (our health, our loved ones, a pet, etc.). And this definition fits quite well, because it seems like horror films are filled with danger! It’s usually physical: Michael Myers, Godzilla, and Dracula will tear you apart. Sometimes it’s also psychological or spiritual: part of the danger of a movie like Midsommar is the weakening sanity and happiness of Florence Pugh’s Dani, while part of what makes possession films like The Exorcist is the loss of the eternal souls and personal identities of the characters. What’s consistent is fear.
It seems like, then, black horror is a match made in heaven. Because, and here’s the thesis, these movies that show how terrifying blackness. Sometimes this is shown through the suffering of black characters at the hands of racists, directly staging the scene Douglass described. This is what we see in Get Out, and in Antebellum, and Them, Night of the Living Dead and the new thriller Karen: in which the monster harassing the black couple at the film’s center is, yep: a white woman named Karen. The threat of most horror movies is the result of a villain, a monster, who makes the main characters suffer. It seems, then, like what black horror can do is show that racism is monstrous, that, if you’ll pardon the dramatic turn of phrase, white folks can be monsters.
But here’s what makes this hard: it’s somewhat surprising that only a small portion of black horror films follow this model. After all, look at the two examples I showed you: there, the scary thing wasn’t white folks; it was black folks! Bol and Rial are terrorized by the spirits of black folks, and in Sugar Hill the zombie slaves actually terrorize white folks. The vast majority of black horror films operate in this way: Us, Candyman, Atlantics, Blacula, Ganja and Hess, etc. In these films, it’s not the racists that are monsters; it’s the black folks.
This seems worrying! After all, antiblack racism has historically often worked precisely by imagining black folks to be monsters! Black people, we’ve been told, are ugly, disgusting, lascivious, violent, evil...I could go on. The historian Robin Means Coleman actually declares that the first black horror film is D.W. Griffith’s landmark, and hauntingly disturbing, Birth of a Nation, a propagandistic film that asserts that black folks are poisoning America, and imagines the Ku Klux Klan to be the knights in shining armor purging our republic from this scourge. Coleman focuses on one particularly infamous scene, in which Gus, a black man, attempts to rape a white woman, and is “righteously” caught and lynched by the KKK. Gus, portrayed by a white man in blackface, is played as an obscene imp, a grotesquery that is barely human. And this monster is imagined to be dangerous; we’re supposed to fear him.
This is but one instance in a long tradition of the monsterization of black folks. Think of the ominous William Horton ad, in which a black man serving a life sentence for murder was painted as a monster that only George H.W. Bush, then presidential candidate, could save America from. Think of Hillary Clinton’s ominous notion of the “superpredator”: black, urban “kids...with no conscience, no empathy”...kids “we have to bring [] to heel.” Think of the fear that causes folks to call the police simply when they see a black person on the street or in the park, or to lock their car doors when driving in “that part of town,” or allows police officers and everyday citizens to literally murder unarmed, innocent black people “in self-defense.” Black folks are figured as threats, deserving of fear first and foremost.
So are most black horror films, then, just more racist propaganda? Many argue that they are. Black folks in horror films are often Gus: sex-crazed maniacs, like Candyman (whose crime was miscegeny: loving a white woman); or they’re inhuman animals, like King Kong and Ingagi; or zombies with “no conscience, no empathy”, like in Sugar Hill. These films thus seem to perpetuate the same ideologies we have elsewhere acknowledged to be so evil! Are horror films only important in the same way the Willie Horton ad, or Birth of a Nation, are important? Do they only matter because racism matters?
I’m insisting that that’s not the full story. In fact, when I insist that we should care about black horror films, I’m insisting that not even despite their demonization of blackness, but because of it. Understanding that is the key to truly loving these films.
Because I think what these films are showing us is not that black people are horrifying, but that blackness is horrifying: that being black is horrifying; that it feels scary, to be black. But this doesn’t seem right: it feels scary to be black because racism is scary, because racists are monstrous. But these films make the black people seem monstrous...right?
Let’s recall Aunt Hester’s whipping. Imagine Frederick Douglass, a child: he opens the passage saying that “I have often been awakened at the dawn of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine…” He goes on to describe the barbarism of the master, whose whipping brings forth the screams, but notice: Douglass begins not with the barbarism, but with its consequence. It’s the scream that awakens him, a horrifying “heart-rending shriek”; do you hear it? Later, he describes the moment visually as he watches the whipping. The passage ends thusly: “After rolling up his sleeves, he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm red blood (amid heart-rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from him) came dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror stricken at the sight, that I hid myself in the closet…”
What does Douglass find horrifying here? What about this scene is monstrous? The master’s actions, surely. But Douglass’ recitation of the scene neither opens nor closes with attention directed towards him. It is not the master that shakes Douglass awake with terror, nor that drives him away with fear: it is Aunt Hester herself. She is what terrifies him so. It is her scream, her blood, the gross grotesquery of mangled flesh that she is reduced to, that he finds so fearful. The fear of the master is the fear of his power to transform her into that, to pull such terrible utterance from her breast...and to transform Douglass into such a monstrosity, if he should ever desire.
What I’m getting at – and I say this with all the love in my heart I can summon for her, amidst such terrible suffering – Aunt Hester is a black monster, to Douglass. The bloodstained gate is not something we suffer because of monsters; it is the transformation of us into a kind of monstrous life. This has been a central part of black theorizing for centuries: being horrified by one’s own life, by what one has been transformed into: into a zombie (Sugar Hill) into a vampire (Ganja and Hess) into an inhuman doppelganger (Us) into an avenging spirit (Candyman) into the restless dead (His House). Black horror, if I’m right, is an extension of a long tradition of black existentialism, an extension of the horror theorists and artists like Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Frantz Fanon, and David Walker have tried to explain. Walker sums up the driving force of black liberation as the desire that “none like us shall ever live again.” It’s hard for me to ignore the striking parallel between this and the final words of Frankenstein’s monster in the landmark classic film Bride of Frankenstein: moments before murdering himself, his Bride, and her maker, the Monster mournfully utters “We belong dead.” Perhaps we might say that Walker sees himself as a monster, just as Morrison sees Beloved as a monster, and Wright sees Bigger Thomas as a monster, and Douglass sees Aunt Hester as a monster. This declaration is not a moral condemnation of disgust, but a deep sense of melancholy: you have mangled us, these black monsters moan together; this should not be our lives. We should not be like this. The black monster is the scene of whiteness’ most brutal crime.
So yes, the undead of Sugar Hill and His House and Tales from the Hood, the vengeful grotesqueries of Candyman and Us and Blacula, are all monstrous, horrifying. But they are horrifying just as Aunt Hester as horrifying. They, we, are the fleshy matter that is in the wake of antiblack violence. Both the zombies in Sugar Hill and His House are direct victims of antiblack violence: both the American chattel slave trade and postcolonial African upheaval. They are monstrous: we made them that way. Ditto for Candyman, for Us, for Blacula, for Atlantics, for Son of Ingagi and Ganja and Hess and Beloved and People Under the Stairs and so many more. In all of these films, whiteness may not be explicitly monstrous, but it is implicated – explicitly, implicitly, or simply by the imagination of the viewer – in the monstrosity of blackness. These monsters horrify us all, regardless of race; any true grasp of the mammoth evil of antiblackness, a grasp enabled (these films suggest) by viewing its monstrous vestiges – should be horrifying.
The theorist Frank B Wilderson argues that film about blackness refuses to acknowledge the true depths of antiblackness. They prefer to tell stories of hope, even amidst suffering, stories that convince us of the basic decency of the modern world. They try to paint a picture of blackness and black life as fundamentally good, beautiful, and dignified. But this is a lie, Wilderson argues, an ideological obfuscation of the true horror of black life: not our transformation into criminals, into moral monsters – this too is an ideological obfuscation – but into Aunt Hester. Wilderson says that these films try to make blackness look human; but, he says, it is not. It is an inhuman form of life. Perhaps we can say, then, that black horror makes this literal. It embraces the monstrosity, the inhumanity, of blackness. And it acknowledges that that is terrifying. Black horror films matter, then, because they spit the truth of antiblackness, the world it creates, back in its face.
But hang on, you may be thinking: are black horror films really alone in this? Do you really expect me to believe that black art generally is afraid to show the violence of antiblackness? What makes horror so special? And you wouldn’t be alone. We typically think that a great deal of black art is concerned with the bloodstained gate. Some may sanitize it: but surely not all, surely not all but horror. Take the famous scene from John Ridley and Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, in which Lupita N’yongo’s character, a slave, is brutally whipped. The scene is famous – perhaps infamous – precisely for its unflinching depiction of the violent act. The scene does not cover up anything: we see the whip bite N’yongo’s flesh, the blood splatter, her neck twisted in agony. Surely, you might say, pointing at this brutality, this is a more accurate depiction of the truth of antiblackness. It isn’t hiding behind metaphor or monster movie magic: it is showing us the depths of brutality of real-world antiblackness, completely unadulterated.
Indeed, Fred Moten argues that black art in general has a kind of fundamental concern with suffering; Aunt Hester’s scream, as he puts it, animates the tradition(s) of black radical art.. Isn’t Notes of a Native Son trying to show us the brutality of black life? Aren’t 12 Years A Slave, and Autobiography of a Slave, and Selma, and Another Country, and Bamboozled, and The Bluest Eye?
If so, then black horror only matters because black art matters. Sure, perhaps it is particularly vicious or intentional in its portrayal of black monstrosity; but that’s just metaphor, right?
No. No, I don’t think so. Black horror is doing something different; it’s able to do something that I don’t think these other attempts to reveal blackness’ monstrosity are able to do. It captures a truth that they can’t.
To get to that truth, we need to return to a question we already settled. What is horror, in general, about? I said that horror films seek to capture fear; which is to say, they present us with dangerous things: in this picture, then, black horror presents us with the horror of black life. But hang on: is that all that horror does: show us danger? If so, then what’s so special about horror?? If the attempt to collapse black horror into black art, in general, succeeds, then that seems to imply that horror is not doing anything different than other art about suffering! After all, plenty of films show us dangerous things, and show us people suffering dangerous things. Any good action movie will have its hero dodging bullets or wire-fu kicks; sci-fi films pit plucky astronauts against alien monsters; superhero films throw their protagonists into absurdly dangerous situations; tragedies show their character’s deepest suffering. These characters often show fear; I know I would be afraid if I had to face down Dr. Doom or a horde of ninjas or a cancer diagnosis.
This is a question writers on horror have grappled with for centuries, although the debate has become particularly fraught in recent decades. All are bent on figuring out: what is so special about horror films? What is this particular feeling of being horrified, as opposed to merely being afraid? And virtually all have their own answer. What I suggest is perhaps controversial, but I find it compelling precisely because it seems to capture what I think a great deal of these theorists are getting at.
Let’s start with an easy case: What is a zombie? Such monsters are, of course, quintessentially horrific; if a movie has a zombie, there’s a very good chance it’s a horror movie. But what is it? We say it’s a reanimated corpse, an undead, the walking dead. What do those honorifics mean? Zombies are dead entities; literal corpses. And yet, they seem alive, they act alive; they do what living beings do: (albeit what savage, brain-hungry cannnibals do. This seems contradictory, no? How can something that is dead – that is truly dead – nonetheless be alive: walking, eating, etc.?
Generally, our lives are constrained by the categories we place on the world around us. We have a massive amount of concepts at our disposal that we use to make sense of the world: “tree” and “stone”, “friend” and “lover”, “good” and “evil”, “living” and “dead.” We use these concepts to understand the things in the world, and to know what to do with them. And we generally have a pretty good idea of where things fit. We know that that is a tree, and that is a stone.
Of course, sometimes things get a bit harder. Sometimes, for example, it becomes hard to tell if someone’s actions are good or evil. Imagine some pop artist does something most would consider problematic – say, says something transphobic – but declares some kind of mitigating circumstance – say, comes out as trans. Is this action good or bad? Is this person problematic or not? We waver, we oscillate; we are unsure which category this person or thing fits into. But we feel convinced, generally, that it is one or the other. We feel convinced that this person must fit into a category; a concept must apply to them: cancelled or not?? We just have to do the work of figuring out which.
Now: which category does a zombie fit into: living or dead?
Your first instinct may be to treat this like the friend/lover or good/evil case. Yes, this thing doesn’t seem to fit into one or the other. But surely we can make it fit: surely its ambiguity is an illusion, covering up a deeper truth. And indeed, in recent years, filmmakers have actually attempted to erase the ambiguity of the zombie (a move many genre purists, such as myself, have found frustrating). Now, zombies are generally just people infected by some imagined “virus”; scientists spout pseudomedical jargon explaining that while these people may look dead, they’re really just hosts of a brain-altering parasite (think Last of Us or 28 Days Later).
But imagine you’re in the theater to see the first, and greatest, modern zombie movie: Night of the Living Dead. You watch dead characters rise back to life, driven by some bizarre impulse. Why, you wonder? And the film refuses to tell you. Rather than give you a way to categorize these ghouls, to fit them into a box that allows us to say for sure what these things are, the film insists that they are uncategorizable. They are clearly dead; and yet they act as though they are alive. And we are given no secret knowledge, no revelation, to reveal whether they are one or the other. Neither their death nor their aliveness is revealed to be only apparent; as the philosopher Stanley Cavell would put it, we have no criteria, no deciding evidence, to strike out of these contradictory possibilities out.
These entities don’t fit into a category. To be alive is to be non-dead, and to be dead is to not-be-dead. But zombies break those rules; they are bigger than the categories we seek to place them in. And this is, I think, a crucial element of horror. Horror is not just fear of the dangerous; it is fear of the fundamentally unknown and crucially, unknowable; it is fear of that which we cannot fit into any concept. Whether it’s a car that suddenly turns on, or house lights that flicker, or a ghost, or a Lovecraftian elder god, or a masked serial killer who just won’t stay dead: horror revels in providing us with terrors that break rules, conceptual rules, rather than just physical or biological rules. Edmund Burke might call this the sublime: that which stretches beyond our powers of rational thought, that which brings about terror specifically because we can’t – and never could – get a good grasp on what this thing is. Horror is about that which is bigger than our categories, bigger than our concepts. It is about that which outstrips our abilities to understand our world: that which terrifies us precisely because we can’t understand it.
If this picture is right, then black horror does something more than show us black suffering; it transforms that suffering into true monstrosity, where that means that it transforms it into something we can’t fully understand. The remnants of antiblackness are revealed to be not merely fearful, but incomprehensible. This need not be purely intellectual: what matters for horror is not (just) the intellect, but the affect; what matters is not (just) that we can’t rationally understand the monstrous, but that we feel its bigness, we feel, emotionally and sensuously, the way that it outstrips our conceptual landscape. When we scream at black horror, rather than flinching at the 12 Years A Slave whipping scene or shaking our heads in moral approbation at the suffering Celie and Bigger Thomas endure, we are feeling the mammoth character of antiblackness and its detritus, the incomprehensibility of this foaming mass of broken bodies and mangled flesh and manic spirits.
We have reached an unfortunate impasse, I think, in our moralizing about antiblackness. This is the impasse of comprehensibility, odd as it is to say. We – those of us here today, if not all those the world over – insist that we know that antiblackness is bad, that Aunt Hester’s suffering is evil. But do we feel it? Does our knowledge stretch beyond the rational, the objective, and plunge into the depths of feeling humans are capable of? Yes, we insist! We have heard the horror stories, we have felt the tragedy; we know how bad it is. What I am suggesting, what I think black horror is suggesting, is that this is a vicious contradiction: truly feeling the depths of the monstrosity of black horror is contradictory with knowing how bad it is. Much work in black theory in the past few decades – you may be familiar with the term Afropessimism, which captures a great deal of this work – has been spent arguing that antiblackness does not fit into our typical moral categories. It is too alien, too monstrous, too big, to be fully captured with a Rawlsian, or Kantian, or religious ethical system. We use these categories, as I’ve suggested, to carve up the world, to understand it, so that we can feel secure in our evaluations, our judgements. Antiblackness, if these theorists are right, is too big for these concepts; we cannot comprehend it within them. As such, the security those ethical systems grant us offers us no conceptual and emotional solace when it comes to antiblackness. This is what Wilderson means when he says that our narratives, especially our cinematic ones, always fail to capture the monstrosity of black life. Our typical moral judgements and sentiments do not do justice to the true weight of antiblackness. Does this mean, as Wilderson seems to think, that no sentiment can do justice to it? What do we do with black monstrosity; what modes of emotional engagement are even possible?
It’s clear that I think horror can do this work. Horror is the emotional register that most dutifully captures what antiblackness is, where that entails accepting its incomprehensibility, its monstrosity in addition to its danger. This is what these films offer: a rare opportunity to truly feel the weight of antiblackness, to truly grasp it: namely, by realizing that we cannot truly grasp it, that it feels too big to grasp, that it outstrips our capabilities. That recognition itself has an affect: a creeping sense of dread, a sublime crackling current, an uncanny rush of ineffable incomprehensibility: horror.
And who understands this better than Frantz Fanon? Here, he channels Lovecraft (eerily enough), Phantasm, The Evil Dead, to give us a vision, a dread vision, a horrific vision, of blackness:
Black horror is an attempt to truly capture, to artify, to aestheticize, to eroticize, precisely what Fanon is after here (after all, nowhere is Fanon’s own poetry and artistry more clear than in passages like this). Black horror is about the beauty of the monstrous. That is why it matters; it goes beyond seeking to fully comprehend (an blackness.
In closing, I want to note that, as you already may have noticed, I just tried to sneak something by you! Beauty?? I have given you a brutal, ugly story about blackness, painting it as a terrible thing that is striking precisely in its ugliness. Black horror, then, is important because it captures, in a unique way, this ugliness. So it seems bizarre to call this beautiful. This bizarrity is aesthetic – it just seems weird to call these scenes beautiful, or to admit that they offer us pleasure – but it’s also ethical. How dare I suggest that black horror is beautiful precisely in its depiction of the history of monstrosity of antiblackness? This is precisely what the theorist Saidiya Hartman warns us about. Hartman argues that representations of the gratuitous spectacle of black suffering purport to serve radical projects. But they are, in fact, tittilations, instrumentalizations of our suffering for pleasure: trauma porn.
We should be wary of this. Hartman is right; perhaps if black horror movies do offer pleasure, it is precisely because they exploit the horror at the essence of blackness for entertainment. I will not dispel this worry now. Instead, I’ll turn to the brilliant Christina Sharpe, to see us off. Sharpe uses the concept of the “wake” – alternatively the funeral mourning of our lost and the crest of waves trailing behind the slave ship – to capture the brutality I have described as monstrous. We exist in the wake of antiblackness: like Aunt Hester, and the slaves of Sugar Hill, we are the broken mass of flesh that antiblackness leaves behind it. Sharpe asks: what, in fact, is there in the wake? What does this monstrosity, this devastation, offer us? Death, surely; but, just as surely, Sharpe insists, there must be life in the wake: because we are here, we are getting on with the business of living. Blackness may be fundamentally monstrous, but it is not only monstrous.
So perhaps there is something more, in these scenes of horror. Perhaps their honesty in the depiction of blackness’ horror is in service of finding out what survives that horror. And perhaps – and here I shall close, in service of another day, in search of work for another day – perhaps the two are one and the same. Perhaps the life that survives these scenes, the beauty, is, in fact, what is monstrous. It may be that blackness is, as Fred Moten puts it, terribly beautiful: what we have been transformed into is precisely what is most beautiful, most radical, most liberatory about us. It may be that, as the poet Holderin and the philosopher Martin Heidegger put it, “Where the Danger Is, Grows the Saving Power Also”. Perhaps these scenes are not beautiful despite their monstrosity, but because of it. Perhaps recognizing that is the route towards something we might imprecisely call liberation. Perhaps that route, that road map, is what makes black horror films matter so much.
On Charles
Recently, I went on a date; it was the second, and the last. This is because my date told me, in no uncertain terms, that I’d cultivated an utter lack of sexual charm. “You haven’t flirted with me once,” I was told. I was, of course, shocked. We’d just spent nine hours (the sum total of the two dates) talking at length about Fred Moten, the epistemic (non)value of astrology and tarot, the (para)ontologies of the black evangelical church, Adrian Piper’s catalysis, anarchist architecture, etc.: you get the picture. If that wasn’t flirting, then what the fuck is?
That’s just to say that philosophy has always been erotic, affective, the context and landscape of my emotional life. Philosophy is my pneuma, my biological imperative, the thing I do to communicate and feel the entirety of the thing I imprecisely call “me.” So what else can I do, when I’m most feeling something like love, but do philosophy? Philosophy is how I love and how I grieve.
And I am grieving, thanks to a mammoth excess of love. Charles Mills has died. What the fuck else can I do? This is a time for philosophy, which is to say, for me, that this is a time for love to animate thought and feeling.
Because I wanted to say something. I had to write something. But I hesitated, until this moment. I’ve known Charles for a little over two years. This makes me but a small, relatively insignificant cell in the massive organism of brilliance, entanglements, and bonds of love that we imprecisely call “the life of Charles Mills.” These words, of course, I write largely for my own benefit; I’m not foolish enough to think that I have anything to say other people need to hear. But I found myself hesitating even given that; what right have I, to claim him?
What a fucked up thing, I realize now; to see these words as staking a proprietary claim. What a fucked up thing, in other words, if public words of love are nothing but chits of ownership on the beloved (chits of the exact kind I have decided to spend my philosophical life warring against!). My discomfort and hesitation was a product of the realization that if I had to say something, I had better say it right, and with feeling. Testaments of love that served to warp “Charles Mills” into a feature of my world-picture, my narrative, would be pathetic and embarrassing.
And so, as always when I realize that what is called for is emotional sincerity, I came to philosophy. This is not, of course, to say that philosophizing is the only sincere way to say something, with love, about Charles Mills. It’s how I’m gonna do it.
Because all this got me thinking: propriety, and sovereignty, and the transmutation of the terrible beauty of this fucked up, surreal thing called love into ownership. Specifically, it got me thinking about what it means to call Charles (fuck) an ancestor.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable with black ancestor discourse. My black abolitionism-anarchism – as the motivating force of my life and thought – attempts to, as Moten might put it, make some sweet music with the nightmarish atonality of social death. The loss of kinship is a good thing. Another one of my teachers and heroes, Tommie Shelby, has taught me to be suspicious of reified notions of black cultural identity and solidarity (such suspicion has, as some may know, clearly stuck with me). But this is different. The loss of kinship isn’t the loss of an cultural identity (cultural identity can survive the loss of kinship); it’s the loss of an ability to make a claim on those who have come before. As Stephen Best reminds us, David Walker’s demand that “none like us may ever live again” might be seen as a perlocution severing the umbilical cord that strung him to those – us – who came after. Blackness disowns us. The blood-stained gate out of which we are born is a Qlippothic initiation rite, which is to say that it is the antithesis of an initiation.
This is a great tragedy, or else a great opportunity. For in the absence of the proprietary claims, which is the operative impulse of kinship, we find ourselves living a different kind of too-loud ensemble, a way of being together in which love is felt precisely as the absence of proprietary claims. No “ancestor” is mine; they outstrip me, which is not a lack of the most gorgeous and glorious of entanglements but its precise condition of possibility. I am not my ancestors’ wildest dreams, because my life is not the climax of a narrative arc that began with them; my life and theirs share something deeper, grittier, more material, more ineffable, more mystical.
I have always thus felt uncomfortable with the very concept of “ancestor”, specifically in the transformation of those we admire – black mythic beings like Charles – into congealed form. I guess what I’m afraid of losing is the fleshy glory Liam so lovingly sketched here; the way Charles ruptured out of “Charles Mills” with of(f)-color humor and patois and, simply, the irreducible anarchism – the fundamental excess of concepts – that is the thing we call human life. I’m afraid of attempting to perform a surgical operation of fit on someone who did not fit; including, and most especially, who did not fit into academic philosophy, who did not fit into conceptions of what the greatest philosopher in living memory should be. Being around Charles, I was constantly entangled in the absolute nothingness that is sociality, that is love, the absolute absence of control.
But perhaps that is the deepest tragedy of death; not an absence, but the filling of that absence. Not a lack, but the violent and once-and-for-all congealment of the unspeakable, cheeky blur that was Charles Mills via the abnegation of “Charles Mills,” which resulted in the most absolute of nothingness that resulted in the most absolute of beauties. (Is this making sense? I wish Charles could tell me; he always let me know when I wasn’t making sense.) Perhaps what I miss is just Charles, plain and simple. Perhaps what really scares me about “ancestor” is that its congealment is, rather than some insidious project of the National Sovereign, simply the naming of the congealment that is death. Maybe I just fucking wish Charles was still here, which is to say that I wish he was not-here-nor-there again, which is to say that he was alive again. Can the dead blur? What is social death to the dead? Can we be social with the dead? How the fuck do we love the dead? How the fuck do I love Charles now?
Two months ago, I asked Charles if he would be my advisor for a project. He said yes. I wanted to write a paper wherein I argue that black philosophy, at its most radical, is the same kind of thing as my favorite video game, The Witcher 3. I could hear his laughter in the words he wrote in the last email I ever received from him, in which he said he would “try his best” to keep up with me and with Liam (who, I told Charles, had been helping me with this project). Reading Liam’s own words on Charles this morning, I see the connection with Charles’ classically-roguish comment that Liam’s beautiful, wonderful work for and in this discipline would do, “until someone better came along.” The absurd thing about Charles’ improbable sense of humility is that he truly, I think, did not think or care that he, or anyone, was the best. I learned very quickly that the merit of my work for and with him was, in some sense, immaterial. Or, better, the merit was precisely in the materiality of the work: the worth of working with Charles was in the gritty sensuousness of figuring shit out. He shrugged aside ideal theory as a way of life. Perhaps this is why he could listen to me rant to him about my Zhuangzist account of the ineffabiltiy of blackness, or my obsessive analytic rendition of Munoz’s Disidentifications, or my bizarre ideal that the structural model of the work we both do can be found in an RPG video game for LOTR nerds, all without laughing in my face. (Instead, we laughed together.) I think – I’ll never know, and I’ll treasure that unknowability as a souvenir of the blur we shared – that Charles cared a great deal more about the journey then the destination, because the journey – the pragmatics, rather than the semantics, of black philosophy – is where liberation lies. From Charles I learned that philosophy is a game, a joke, a way to be skeezy and sly and funny, an exercise in excess, a bizarrity, a circus act, all in service of the complete and utter eradication of the horrors of this fucked-up world. This contradiction, as someone who cares deeply about the philosophical power and pleasure of contradiction, is Charles’ greatest gift to me.
Charles didn’t own his philosophy, I guess is what I’m trying to saw. And he taught me not to own mine. Charles taught me that black radicalism is the death of ownership, the death of the commodification of thought, which is to say the death of seriousness, in service of the blurring of the very concept of claim. He taught me that ownership is so much less fun than self-abnegation, self-deprecation, than love. He taught me to love blackness. I loved him.
I don’t have anything more to say. I guess now the work is to learn to say that I love him, rather than that I loved him. I guess I have to figure out how to – not keep him alive, in any sense – but to love him in death. I guess we have one more project to work on together. I guess there’s still time for philosophy.