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. The dividing line isn’t “lived experience” of racism it’s who profits and who suffers, and we are often not honest enough about which Black faces sit on which side. Notwithstanding the overwhelming number of white directors and producers on the show, what we are seeing is that even Black creators can inflict racist harm on Black audiences. Also clear is that this is not merely a problem of “diversity” in Hollywood, often presented as the panacea for problematic film and television both the show’s creator Little Marvin, and executive producer, Lena Waithe, are Black.
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Does it go too far?” Before the series was screened, the trailer for Them last month led to an eruption of anger and upset in Black social media spaces from those frustrated at the incessant efforts to reify a new genre of “black trauma porn”. That Them depends on lacerating and torturing the psyche of its audience is not lost on Amazon indeed the series debuted with a concurrent headline in the Los Angeles Times: “The racist violence in Amazon’s new series left execs ‘shaken’. It is a particularly cruel and misogynoiristic denial of emotional breadth, and as the son of a Black mother who lost a child and knows that this grief persists even 18 years later, it cannot be understated how traumatising these scenes are to witness. Rather than this episode exploring grief, Chester’s death is merely a plot device to narrate Lucky’s descent into madness and her daughter’s increasing sense of alienation from her. This repeated assault on Black audiences, however, reaches a climax with the gratuitous violence in episode five where, in devastating scenes, it is explained that the Emory family had moved from North Carolina after the mother, Livia known as Lucky, was raped by multiple men as she witnessed her baby boy, Chester, being wrapped in cloth and swung violently around until he was dead.īeyond those scenes being excessively traumatic, what sticks with me is the callous treatment of Lucky in the aftermath. “Piccaninny” dolls are strung up outside the Emory home, while the N-word is burned on the lawn, and each member of the family faces difficulties in assimilating into their new institutions eldest daughter Ruby is tormented by her white classmates with monkey noises. But what distinguishes Them from Us is that the established canon of Peele’s work stretches beyond the expected capacities of Black characters in horror films, allowing his actors, in both Us and his 2017 film Get Out, to revel in the fun and absurdity of the genre.Ġ8:13 Why horror keeps creeping into black drama - video Or at least it’s meant to be: both centre on the home invasions of a Black family, and the title steal is, frankly, cheeky. If, despite the radically different setting and historical material, this series sounds suspiciously like a sloppy pastiche of Jordan Peele’s critically acclaimed 2019 film Us, that’s because it is. As such, the series both historicises and mythologises Compton (now better known as an African American ethnic enclave and the birthplace of West Coast hip-hop) as a once white-majority neighbourhood whose demography transformed after the “white flight” exodus of middle-class residents. The terror they find in Compton is as much about the manifest displays of racism, as the psycho-terror of fear and paranoia evinced through hallucinations and various cliches of paranormal activity. The Emory family, who move to Compton in California, represent those African Americans who migrated to white-dominated northern and western states from the south, in search of new economic opportunities, and to escape the white-supremacist and Ku Klux Klan violence that haunted southern states. The first season, Covenant, is set in 1953 and explores the hostility faced by African Americans during the tumultuous Second Great Migration.
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