Culture Wars and Horror Movies: Social Fears and Ideology in post-2010 Horror Cinema 3031538366, 9783031538360

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Culture Wars and Horror Movies Social Fears and Ideology in post-2010 Horror Cinema Edited by Noelia Gregorio-Fernández Carmen M. Méndez-García

Culture Wars and Horror Movies

Noelia Gregorio-Fernández Carmen M. Méndez-García Editors

Culture Wars and Horror Movies Social Fears and Ideology in Post-2010 Horror Cinema

Editors Noelia Gregorio-Fernández Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades Universidad Internacional de La Rioja Logroño, Spain

Carmen M. Méndez-García Departamento de Estudios Ingleses Universidad Complutense de Madrid Madrid, Spain

ISBN 978-3-031-53835-3    ISBN 978-3-031-53836-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Culture Wars Revisited: Navigating the Ideological Landscape in Post-2010 Social Horror  1 Noelia Gregorio-Fernández and Carmen M. Méndez-García Part I White Anxieties: Current Challenges   9 2 Black  Bodies/White Spaces: The Horrors of White Supremacy in Get Out (2017) 11 Hervé Mayer 3 The  Post-Truth Era and Monstrous Ambiguity in It Comes at Night (2017), The Invitation (2015), and The Gift (2015) 27 Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns 4 “I  Can’t (Don’t) Breathe”: White Veterans and TwentyFirst-­Century Culture Wars 47 James I. Deutsch 5 The  Unbearable Whiteness of Get Out (2017) and Midsommar (2019) 63 Donald L. Anderson

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Part II Oppression, Abjection, and Race: Black Bodies and Communities  85 6 “Tell  Everyone”: Abjection and Social Justice in Candyman (2021) 87 Victoria Santamaría Ibor 7 “  Say His Name”: Candyman (2021) as a Critique of Black Trauma Porn105 William Chavez 8 “It’s  Probably the Neighbors”: Identity, Otherness, and the Return of the Oppressed in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019)129 Thomas B. Byers Part III Economic Exploitation and Neoliberalism: Privilege, Class and the Other 147 9 The  Revenge of the Serves: The Wounds of Neoliberalism in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019)149 Fabián Orán Llarena 10 Preying  on the Other: Culture Wars Narratives in Horror Hunting Films169 Melenia Arouh and Daniel McCormac 11 Humans  Hunting Humans: Allegories of Cultural and Economic Divides across National Boundaries191 Pablo Gómez-Muñoz 12 “Obliteration  of the Unfit”: Disposable Other Bodies and Economic Privilege in the The Purge Film Series209 Gamze Katı Gümüş Index229

Notes on Contributors

Donald L. Anderson  teaches film, literature, and writing at Mt Hood Community College outside of Portland, Oregon, where he also teaches a course on the horror film each year. He has published on mostly Italian horror in Horror Studies, Situations, Gothic Studies, Rhizomes, and Studies in the Fantastic, and has contributed to the anthologies Make America Hate Again: Trump-era Horror & the Politics of Fear (2019) and Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad (2023). He is also the guitarist for the long-running heavy metal band Agalloch who have released five full-length albums and have toured throughout North America and Europe. Melenia Arouh  is Associate Professor at Deree, the American College of Greece, teaching courses in the Communication and Philosophy programs. Her teaching includes such courses as Philosophy and Cinema, Aesthetics, American Cinema, and Film Analysis. Most recently she led the validation of a new Cinema Studies BA at Deree College. Her research interests are in film, television, and digital media, and she is primarily interested in interdisciplinary scholarship that links film and media theory with philosophical enquiry. Specifically, she has published articles and chapters on mapping cinema space, aesthetics and film form, morality and Schindler’s List, online television fandoms and toxicity, and the impact of Hamilton: An American Musical. Thomas B. Byers  is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky, USA, where he also served as Director vii

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of the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society. From 2016 to 2021 he was Profesor Honorífico at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has had Fulbrights in Denmark and Ukraine, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Milan, the State University of São Paulo, and the University of Paris IV—La Sorbonne, where he held the Chaire DuPront. His publications include What I Cannot Say: Self, Word, and World in Whitman, Stevens, and Merwin (1989); articles in Contemporary Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, Cultural Critique, Transatlantica, Arizona Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, and other journals; and chapters in collections from Oxford, Illinois, Indiana, Verso, and other presses. For twelve years he directed the US Department of State Study of the US Institute on Contemporary American Literature. William  Chavez  is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Stetson University, and studies the doom and gloom of religious imagination. His dissertation Exorcism in America: As Practice and Spectacle examines how contemporary exorcists negotiate the popular mediatization of their practice and how exorcism discourse is appropriated in media by marginalized communities to identify and resist Western hegemonies. William specializes in legacy and new digital media. A scholar of American religion, folklore, and popular culture, William contributes to the collaborative Gaming+ Project, organized by Daigengna Duoer, Keita Moore, and Kaitlyn Ugoretz (UC Santa Barbara). Chavez appears as a gamer/guest on the Folkwise podcast, hosted by Dominick Tartaglia (Florida Folklife Program) and Daisy Ahlstone (Ohio State University). He serves on the steering committee for the AAR Religion, Media, and Culture Unit and is co-developing an edited volume with Valeria Dani (Cornell University) on the material and ideological intersections between horror media and class. James I. Deutsch  is a curator and editor at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage in Washington, DC, where he has helped plan and develop public programs on California, China, Hungary, Baltic nations, Ukraine, the Peace Corps, the Apollo Theater, Circus Arts, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Mekong River, the US Forest Service, World War II, the Silk Road, and White House workers. In addition, he serves as an adjunct professor— teaching courses on American Film History and Folklore—in the American Studies Department at George Washington University. Deutsch has also taught American Studies classes at universities in Armenia, Belarus, Bulgaria, Germany, Kyrgyzstan, Norway, Poland, and Turkey. He has

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attained academic degrees from Williams College (BA), the University of Minnesota (MA), Emory University (MLn), and George Washington University (PhD), and has published numerous articles and encyclopedia entries on a wide range of topics relating to film and folklore. Pablo Gómez-Muñoz  is Assistant Professor of English and Film at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). His book Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns was published in December 2022. His research interests include transnational cinema, science fiction, space, cosmopolitanism, precarity, borders, spectacle, and climate change. He is a member of the research project “From Social Space to Cinematic Space: Mise-en-Scènes of the Transnational in Contemporary Cinema” (PID2021-123836NB-I00). He is also Book Reviews Editor at Film Journal. Noelia  Gregorio-Fernández  (PhD in American Studies) is Associate Professor at the International University of La Rioja (Spain) in the School of Social Sciencies and Humanities. She has been a visiting scholar at the Chicano Research Center (UCLA, 2014), the JFK Institute of North American Studies (Frëie Universitat of Berlin, 2015), and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race (Columbia University of New  York, 2016). Her lines of research focus on ethnic representations in media, Chicano cinema, and transnational models in American literature and culture. She has written about Latino ethnicity in contemporary US cinema, American culture, and cultural identity and cinematic representation in publications such as Atlantis, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Post Script, and Cinemas d’Amérique Latine. Her second monographic work, Una mirada al cine chicano: Robert Rodriguez en la era transnacional, was published in 2020 in the Benjamin Franklin Library collection at the Editorial Universidad de Alcalá. Gamze  Katı Gümüş  is Assistant Professor at Ankara University, in the American Culture and Literature Department, where she received her BA and MA degrees. Gümüş completed her PhD in the Department of American Studies at the University of Kansas. She concentrates her studies on immigrants and immigrant literatures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ethnic newspapers, and the hegemonic power structures of everyday US institutions. Gümüş teaches American History and Literature at the Faculty of Languages, History and Geography, and she serves as a member of the editorial board of DTCF Journal.

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Hervé Mayer  is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Cinema at Paul-­Valéry University, Montpellier 3. His research focuses on the construction of power and political identities in US-American cinema. He is the author of Guerre sauvage et empire de la liberté (2021) and La Construction de l’Ouest américain dans le cinéma hollywoodien (2017) and co-editor of Transnationalism and Imperialism: Endurance of the Global Western Film (2022). Daniel McCormac  holds an MA in Journalism and Media Management and a BA in politics. He is an assistant professor at Deree, the American College of Greece, where he teaches courses on the History of Communication, Journalism, and Public Relations. His teaching covers such areas as the history of media, multimedia journalism, and public relations communication techniques. He also works as a PR communication consultant, training corporate executives in public speaking and consulting them in areas related to the development of media communication strategies and tactics. He previously worked as a print and television journalist and editor, and his professional experiences fostered his academic interest in identifying and understanding how frames are used in public discourse to persuade audiences or confirm their pre-existing attitudes and beliefs; in examining how competing frames interact with each other; and in exploring the ethical issues that surround the use of frames in media and politics. Carmen  M.  Méndez-García is Associate Professor of American Literature in the Department of English Studies, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain). Her doctoral dissertation, The Rhetorics of Schizophrenia in the Epigones of Modernism (2003), was based on her research as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001 and 2002. She was also a participant in the 2010 Study of the United States Institute on Contemporary American Literature at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, funded by the Spanish Fulbright program and the US Department of State. Her research and teaching interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-­century US literature, postmodernism and contemporary fiction, the countercultures in the U.S., spatial studies, gender studies, medical humanities, and minority studies (especially Chicana studies). Fabián Orán Llarena  holds a Masters in North American Studies (2013) and a PhD in English Studies (2016) from the University of La Laguna. He works at the University of La Laguna as an assistant lecturer in the

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Department of English and German Philology. His research interests lie in the fields of American Studies, Cultural Studies, and Film Studies, with a focus on contemporary American film and its engagement with cultural debates concerning post-9/11 politics, the rise of right-wing populism, and the crises wrought by the Great Recession. He is likewise interested in Marxist and post-Marxist thought and affect theory. He has been a visiting scholar at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of North American Studies (University of Alcala, 2018) and at the JFK Institute of North American Studies (Frëie Universitat of Berlin, 2022). Fernando  Gabriel  Pagnoni Berns  (PhD in Arts, PhD candidate in History) works as a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (Argentina), where he teaches courses on international horror film. He is the director of the research group on horror cinema “Grite” and has authored a book about Spanish horror TV series, Historias para no dormir (2020). He has edited books on Frankenstein’s bicentennial, on directors James Wan and Wes Craven, on the Italian giallo film, and horror comics. He is editing a book on Hammer horror films and another on Baltic horror. Victoria  Santamaría Ibor  is a doctoral candidate at the University of Zaragoza. She graduated with honors in English Studies from the University of Zaragoza and was awarded with an honorary mention for her final degree project. Recently, Victoria published the paper ‘“I Eat Boys’: Monstrous Femininity in Jennifer’s Body” in the journal BabelAFIAL from the University of Vigo. She is writing her thesis on spaces of abjection in horror cinema from 2008, research that has received funding from El Gobierno de Aragón. Her research interests include: horror cinema, abjection, spatial theory, precarity, gender, and otherness.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Culture Wars Revisited: Navigating the Ideological Landscape in Post-2010 Social Horror Noelia Gregorio-Fernández and Carmen M. Méndez-García

When Jordan Peele’s Get Out made its big-screen debut in 2017, it was met with instant, widespread praise among worldwide audiences for its creative blending of horror conventions and social commentary. As part of the horror film trend commonly known as “social horror” (Heba 1995; Kronja 2016), Get Out championed the filmic representation of sociopolitical ideologies in the United States at a time when horror codes and

N. Gregorio-Fernández (*) Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, Universidad Internacional de La Rioja, Logroño, Spain e-mail: [email protected] C. M. Méndez-García Departamento de Estudios Ingleses, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_1

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sociocultural issues acquired recognized critical distinction. Parallel to current divisive sociopolitical disagreements, contemporary horror movies are emerging as a reproduction of what dominates popular culture and the current political framework: culture wars. Identity politics and social media are more than ever polarizing Western civilization and, specifically, the United States, now deeply divided in their fundamental political views. The clash between social conservatives and progressives in American society, described as “culture wars” by sociologist James D. Hunter (1991), is as much a reality today as they were in the past. Beginning in the 1960s, the United States experienced a partisan conflict over cultural issues such as gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, immigration, and ecology, which is actively exported as a model to other cultural spheres such as contemporary cinema. According to theses on the present-day existence of culture wars, a number of significant battles can be identified in contemporary cinema as “new fronts in the culture war” (Castle 2013), thereby giving reasons to revisit the culture wars debate. Since the 2010s, American politics has been increasingly spoken of in terms of culture wars, even though, as Roger Chapman has argued, cultural battles raging on American soil are “nothing new” to the history of the land and its peoples (2010, xxxi). New culture wars have accrued to traditional ones, such as those hinging on feminism, migration, the rights of racial minorities, and manifestations of so-called American exceptionalism. Old and new culture wars polarize American public opinion and often lead to full-on conflicts acted out in the streets or in courts of law, in the mass media, and in governmental and intergovernmental bodies. Twenty-­ first-­century culture wars include those concerning the #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration, class, white masculinity, religion, and socioeconomics, together with more recent ones relating to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election and the subsequent attack on the Capitol. In the last decade, American culture wars— not to mention proxy wars connected to larger culture wars—have multiplied and branched out, so much so that, recently, The Atlantic’s Helen Lewis declared that “the world is trapped in America’s culture war” (2020), suggesting that American culture wars have even expanded around the globe. According to Lewis, this is partly explained by the rewards involved in social media consumption and the advertising revenue of massively popular American conflicts on all sorts of topics, regardless of whether a given topic is of immediate or tangential interest to the local environment.

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What is interesting about the current American culture wars, besides their current viral status, is their intimate connection with the horror genre’s sociopolitical nature, which can be discerned in new manifestations of the culture wars phenomenon which deserves our critical attention. The widespread social discontent with recent political actions has been connected to recent horror films, specifically those filmed in the 2010s and onward, which can be taken to be examples of a critical framework that attempts to understand the social divide in the current US society. Yet, even more expansively, culture wars feed off the bountiful terrain of horror: #MeToo and notions of consent, the Black Lives Matter movement and the oppression of Black Americans, immigration, class, the so-­ called “crises” of white masculinity, religion, and society are central to the stories told by the genre. As Murray, Rabin, and Tobias argue, “horror films are usually a better gauge of what’s making the country anxious than opinion polls are” (2006). In this respect, horror film examples have often been considered to be cultural products with left-wing, rather than right-­ wing, tendencies, thus presenting themselves or being interpreted as biased narratives. However, now that the blue-red divide is more evident than ever in American society, and as a result of the current sociopolitical map, we can find a more conservative position in several post-2010 horror movies. This volume is devoted to exploring this current political divide in the United States in the culture wars arena and its complex and timely commentary on twenty-first-century US social relations. Within the context of different culture wars, the horror film genre in the second decade of this century has been re/claimed to shore up (cultural) identity/ies; it has been traded upon to serve sociopolitical agendas; it has been retooled and repurposed, in past and contemporary environments; and it has been revised as part of new cultural projects, more recently in even transnational arenas. At times, post-2010 horror movies have taken sides, aligning with the cause of one or the other social group; at other times, they have challenged all parties involved, thus complicating a specific culture war, whether its rationale or a single iteration of it; and at others still, they have wrestled with the premises, instantiations, and implications of culture wars. While performing in the foregoing capacities, the horror genre encompasses an inclusive range of narratives, variously and variably inspired by and based on sociopolitical division in the United States today. Moreover, the genre has come to involve a diverse array of approaches to

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and patterns of revisiting, treating, retelling, and rethinking the horror film genre, drawing meaning from culture wars. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, horror was claimed to be the perfect medium for re-presenting 9/11 and its aftermath. Robert J. Thompson, in a 2001 The New York Times article by Rick Lyman, tried to imagine the forms that horror films would take to adapt to the new global context, declaring that “to deal with this … [the horror film] is one of the most versatile genres out there, and it is now perfectly positioned to cop some serious attitude, to play a role where it’s not simply a date movie but going further back, to the 1950s, where you have the horror movie as metaphor.” It is significant, then, how these “metaphorical” stories of 9/11 went through visual narratives of horror. In this way, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, a wave of horror films was classified under the label of “torture porn.” Since David Edelstein coined the term for a New York Magazine article a few years after 9/11, many critics have speculated that these movies reflected iconic images, anxieties, and sadistic fantasies that emerged from the War on Terror. Torture Porn in the wake of 9/11, thus, tackled a series of tough philosophical, historical, and aesthetic questions that responded to the context in which they were created and drew from older tropes. Similarly, in our approach to the following decade (2010–2020), we pretend to demonstrate that the horror genre must be understood as part of a sociopolitical phenomenon largely rooted in a long tradition of the American political stage, that of the culture wars. This volume builds on existing literature produced in the last years on the phenomenon of political instances and culture wars within the horror genre. Among this examples, we can find Russell Meeuf’s White Terror: The Horror Film from Obama to Trump (Indiana University Press, 2022), an exploration on how racial, political commentaries were represented during the Obama era and gave rise to the Trump presidency; Victoria McCollum’s edited volume Make America Hate Again: Trump-Era Horror and the Politics of Fear (Routledge, 2019), in which the horror genre adapts itself to the transformation of contemporary American politics with a renewed potential for political engagement in a climate of civil conflict; Dawn Keetley’s examination of polarized politics in Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror (Ohio State UP, 2020), devoted to the film’s roots in the horror tradition and its complex commentary on the twenty-­ first-­ century US race relations; Adam Lowenstein’s Horror Film and Otherness (2022), which studies new meanings of horror and why it matters for understanding social Otherness and ongoing metamorphoses

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across “normal” self and “monstrous” Others; and Kendall Phillips’ A Cinema of Hopelessness: The Rhetoric of Rage in 21st century Popular Culture (2021), a discussion of political thinking in the international context around the first decades of the twenty-first century. The widespread social discontent with recent political actions has been connected to recent horror films, which can be taken to be examples of a critical framework that attempts to understand social divisions today. In this volume, we ask ourselves the following: How can we create a framework for the analysis of conflicting and divisive sociocultural representations in contemporary horror cinema? Are American horror films becoming more polarized in their representation of social values? Have movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter contributed to making this trend even more salient? Which conventions of the genre challenge traditional values and ideals within twenty-first-century horror cinema? By what means are these movies taking sides in the current culture wars? This volume aims to turn the spotlight on commonly believed myths about the American sociopolitical reality, with chapters about neoliberalism, social justice, socioeconomic dispossession, and critical race, claiming that the current US society is deeply divided in its fundamental political views. Focusing on representations of neoliberalism and racial politics that pervade contemporary horror cinema, this volume explores the ideological polarization in US society as portrayed in horror fiction narratives and tropes. The three sections in this edited collection (volume one of the “Culture Wars and Horror Movies” project) comprise categories such as the exploration of racial debates, in which Blackness and whiteness take the center of the stage, economic exploitation, and neoliberalism, with the chapters in each section approaching the subject matter from various angles so that multiple and diverse opinions and views emerge. Part One, entitled “White Anxieties: Current Challenges,” addresses concerns pertaining to whiteness, its representation in horror films in the second decade of the twenty-­ first century, and its accommodation to culture wars readings. Herve Mayer opens the section with a chapter that sets out to examine the racial politics of Get Out (Jordan Peele, 2017) in terms of the exploitation of Black bodies and the racialized power dynamics in social spaces in a predominantly white sociopolitical environment. The Manichean ethos that defined “good” and “bad” under Donald Trump’s presidency is the central focus of Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns’ chapter, which explores white America’s anxieties as derived from the uncertainty of the political

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climate and the fear of the outsider, or the “Other,” in It Comes at Night (Joel Edgerton, 2015), The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015), and The Gift (Joel Edgerton, 2015). The next chapter in the section, by James I. Deutsch, sheds light on the reinforcement of white supremacy in the context of culture wars by exploring a cycle of horror films: Don’t Breathe (Fede Álvarez, 2016) and Don’t Breathe 2 (Rodo Sayagues, 2021), starring a white Gulf War veteran. By focusing on the notable absence of African American characters, Deutsch suggests a possible reading of the film connected with George Floyd’s death and the “Can’t Breathe” protests of 2020 as the continuation of earlier culture wars in the United States. Donald L. Anderson closes this section with a reading of Midsommar (Ari Aster, 2019) in terms of white monstrosity, revisiting classic theories of the viewers’ experience and the gaze, and confronting the limits of white liberalism in the United States and the violent representations of whiteness in the American consciousness. Part Two, entitled “Oppression, Abjection, and Race: Black Bodies and Communities,” groups chapters in which issues of racial oppression, already anticipated in the previous chapters in the collection, take center stage. Victoria Santamaría Ibor investigates abjection and social justice in the new Candyman (Nia Da Costa, 2021). By focusing on the polarized social divisions in the current culture wars context, the chapter explores the portrayal of the abject space in Candyman as the result of the racism and marginalization by a society in which gentrification is used as a cover for a history of continuous racial discrimination. William Chavez’s chapter expands on the previous commentary, by analyzing how Candyman (Nia Da Costa, 2021) uses Black horror and Black trauma as a way of transcending the persistent hostility of American society, building on the cultural and social significance of the earlier Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992) movie. By interpreting the monster’s reconstitution as a popular expression of Afro-pessimistic thought, this chapter argues that the film’s ambivalence toward the propagation of Black historical horror is a reflection of present and historical cultural anxieties. Ending this section, Thomas B. Byers’ chapter focuses on Us (Jordan Peele, 2019) as an active agent in the culture wars debate, representing the repressed history of the oppressed. By deconstructing the “us versus them” opposition and particularly in its use of the uncanny figure of the “neighbor,” Us stands out as a reformulation of how much the forging of the nation itself as e pluribus unum (from many, one) depends on the ruthless denial of the many, in this case, the racialized Other.

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Part Three, “Economic Exploitation and Neoliberalism: Privilege, Class and the Other,” builds on how the racial anxieties explored in the previous section are connected to issues of class and privilege by focusing on a series of films that explicitly express ideological and moral views related to economic neoliberal patterns. Fabián Orán Llarena’s chapter examines violence and the wounds of neoliberalism in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019). This approach goes beyond racial examination by reflecting upon inequality, systemic violence, and the relationship between white middle-­ class liberalism and the Black community during the Obama era. Melenia Arouh and Daniel McCormac turn our attention to manhunting films, revisiting The Hunt (Craig Zobel, 2020), a movie that, using social horror as a genre, expresses the current ideological polarization between conservatives and liberals within the context of the culture wars. Similarly, Pablo Gómez-Muñoz focuses on the first three films in The Purge franchise (2013–2016) and the film The Hunt (Craig Zobel, 2020), studying the socioeconomic discourses that these films develop, arguing that they respond to contemporary fears of neoliberal elites and transnational economic exploitation. In Gómez-Muñoz’s transnational reading, manhunting films reframe culture wars and emerging concerns about the ability of global elites to engage in corrupt practices across borders and to mold foreign spaces. To end this section and the volume, Gamze Katı Gümüş revisits The Purge film series (2013–2021), reflecting on how the elimination of the “undesirable” elements in American society present in the series questions ideas such as consumerism, white supremacy, the limitations imposed by capitalism on BIPOC individuals, immigrants, and the homeless; and the return of eugenic thinking as a solution to the problems created by capitalism itself. All in all, this edited volume analyzes the ways in which the ideology of culture, also known as “culture wars,” has made its way into post-2010 horror film. Looking at horror films through this perspective, we can identify real-life connections between the worlds of horror and politics, with a growing fascination with the filmic representation of right-wing figures and narratives while we observe an accentuation of racial, economic, and social problems. Navigating a polarized society in their representation of social values, twenty-first-century horror films from the 2010s onward contribute to creating a framework in which conflicting and ideological issues are discussed. The diversity in the eleven chapters in the volume, and the variety in the topics and films analyzed in the light of current sociopolitical events, underline the vibrancy and complexity that

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characterize the study of the horror genre in sociopolitical terms and specifically under the auspices of culture wars. The chapters also situate the films in a very specific time and place, both that of when the fictions are set and that of the sociohistorical and regional contexts of their making, distribution, and reception. In conclusion, the value of this edited volume lies in its potential to generate debates given the many perspectives it introduces, which reflect the reconfiguration of the United States and its position in the sociopolitical order. Taken in its parts and as a whole, this volume aims to help scholars, professors, film students, and those interested in the interplay of sociology, politics, and the arts to understand the sociopolitical polarization displayed in contemporary horror movies.

References Castle, Maria Alena. 2013. Culture Wars: The Threat to Your Family and Your Freedom. Tucson, Arizona: See Sharp Press. Chapman, Roger. 2010. Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints and Voices. New York: Routledge. Heba, Gary. 1995. Everyday Nightmares: The Rhetoric of Social Horror in the Nightmare on Elm Street Series. Journal of Popular Film and Television 23 (3): 106–115. Hunter, James D. 1991. Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. New York: Basic Books. Kronja, Ivana. 2016. “Social Horror”: A Critical Analysis of Ideological and Poetic Function of the Motive of Victim in the Contemporary Serbian Film. Temida 19 (2): 309–329. Lewis, Helen. 2020. The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War. The Atlantic, October 27. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/10/ internet-­world-­trapped-­americas-­culture-­war/616799/ Murray, Noel, Nathan Rabin, and Scott Tobias. 2006. “What Monster Could Have Done This?”: Horror Films for Left-Wingers / Horror Films For RightWingers. The A.V. Club, October 25. https://www.avclub.com/what-monstercould-have-done-this-horror-films-for-1798211549

PART I

White Anxieties: Current Challenges

CHAPTER 2

Black Bodies/White Spaces: The Horrors of White Supremacy in Get Out (2017) Hervé Mayer

Since Get Out came out in May 2017, it has been widely received as “political horror” for its strong commentary on race relations in the United States (Keetley 2020b). Viewers and critics were largely thrilled by director Jordan Peele’s successful attempt to merge cinematic entertainment with political critique. Some were less enthralled by its uncompromising stance, reading its portrayal of the wealthy white liberal Armitage family and their peers as anti-white racism (Stoddard 2017; Platts and Brunsma 2020). The already tense context of the film’s release, following the election of an openly racist US President that was largely read as white backlash after eight years of Barack Obama, gave Get Out an air of fueling the ongoing culture wars waged by white conservatives on human rights in the United States, when it was in fact pointing out in cultural form what social movements like Black Lives Matter had been protesting since 2013: that the lives of Black people still are precarious in white America.

H. Mayer (*) University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Montpellier, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_2

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The context of the rise of Black Lives Matter and the 2016 presidential campaign were not even the defining factor for director Jordan Peele’s project as it took shape in a different racial context, that of Obama’s first election as president of the United States in 2008. At the time, mostly white pundits and scholars in the United States and across the world were raving about the possibility of a post-racial America, entertaining the belief that racism in the United States was a thing of the past. But African American Jordan Peele knew race still mattered in American society, and the project for Get Out took shape as a way to keep it in the conversation (Sublette 2020). As Obama was eventually replaced by the son of a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, Peele’s vision for the racial meaning of Get Out shifted from a strictly cautionary tale about the persistence of race to empowering escapism from the racist violence unleashed by Trump’s election. But Get Out maintained and eventually achieved Peele’s initial intention of fueling a conversation on race and allowing different people to talk about race from a common cinematic standpoint (Zinoman 2017). Originally, the first idea for Get Out was not even about race but social isolation. Peele had in mind a male character being invited by his girlfriend to her high school reunion and feeling completely alien in this social setting. It then struck the future director that such marginalization within social spaces powerfully captured the African American experience in the United States, who are compelled to navigate a society that constructs them into the Other (Wisecrack 2018). The racial origins of Get Out, then, are strongly articulated to the power dynamics of social spaces. The starting point for Peele’s exploration of race in the United States was the way the racialized structures of social environments produced and organized unequal race relations. As one researcher noted, the articulation of race and social space remains one of the finished film’s “most notable concerns.”1 This structural perspective on race allowed Get Out to raise political questions that deeply resonated with the dominant concerns of the movement for racial justice at the time of its release, and that remain unanswered to this day: the racialization of public and social spaces, the vulnerability of Black (male) bodies in those spaces, the historical continuity of racial objectification and exploitation, the violence of white power structures, and the systemic nature of racism. These pressing questions about the racial 1  “The relationship between place and race represents one of Get Out’s most notable thematic concerns” (Murphy 2002, 72).

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organization of social space certainly justify the label “political horror” for a film that so directly tackles contemporary racial politics in American society. But Get Out is also political in the way that it uses its status as a cultural object to question and reshape the racialization of the American cultural space. Cultural history and genre cinema are used by the director to review a loaded legacy of racial representations in American film and to reclaim the cultural space of genre film for marginalized, specifically African American, perspectives. In this chapter, I will focus on three aspects of the racial politics of Get Out: how the film exposes the past and present objectification and exploitation of Black bodies; how it ties such exploitation to the racialized power dynamics of social spaces; and finally, how Get Out seeks to rewrite the racial coordinates of American cultural history by reclaiming historically predominantly white cultural spaces—such as the horror genre—for Black narratives.

Black Bodies as White Commodities Get Out tells us that if Black lives do not matter in white America, Black bodies certainly do. The film evokes a history of the commodification of Black people as bodies and the types of violence that have been directed at these bodies once dehumanized (exploited by white people for their economic benefit; physically abused and violated by white people for their private enjoyment). These themes are woven into the film’s central narrative development: the apparently respectable white liberal upper-class Armitage family makes a business of capturing Black people, selling their bodies at auction, and transplanting into them the brain of their buyers, as a way to allow aging white upper-class people to prolong their sentient existences in Black bodies. In this exploitative business, not only are Black people literally reduced to physical shells available for white colonization, but they keep just a flicker of self-awareness that turns them into passive observers of their own exploitation. This is the true horror of Get Out: not the fear of the racialized Other lurking just off-screen to violate the space of dominant, white America, but the horrifying violence that socially organized white power surgically inflicts on bodies of color. In other words, Get Out does not play into the dominant stream of the horror genre that, according to Robin Wood, locates the source of horror in the return of

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repressed Otherness and (racial, sexual, and class) difference.2 Instead, it unearths a marginal, yet potent, stream of the horror genre that thrived in the late 1960s and early 1970s in films such as Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski 1968) and The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes 1975), where horror stems from the systemic operations of hegemonic power and dominant ideology.3 The Stepford Wives achieved this with patriarchy, focusing on the small town of Stepford, Connecticut, where men replace their feminist wives with animatronic homemaker clones. Rosemary’s Baby exposed the horrors of religious oppression. And, although there were horror films that explored a history of racial exploitation and violence before,4 Get Out is arguably the first film to locate the source of horror in systemic white supremacy in the present. That the family responsible for such enslavement first appears to be liberal (with the casting of former West Wing regular Bradley Whitford as Dean Armitage, the neurosurgeon father, and Allison Williams from Girls as the daughter, Rose) serves to highlight the responsibility of white liberalism in reproducing exploitative racial hierarchies in the present (Adams 2017). The film is not dealing with blatant and easily discarded forms of racism of the type embodied by white supremacists and other white terrorists, but rather focuses on the systemic operations of white supremacy and how they seep into every part of a white-dominated society (Keetley 2020b, 7). 2  In his analysis of the horror film, Robin Wood identifies the “true subject of the horror genre [as] the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses” and sums up the formula of the genre as “normality is threatened by the Monster.” In Wood’s view, the genre is structured around the binary opposition of us versus the repressed/ oppressed Other, the Other taking on various features of gender, racial, sexual, class, cultural, age difference (Wood 2003, 68;71). 3  Building on the influence of Ira Levin, the author of Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives, on the horror genre and Get Out, Adam Lowenstein argues that Get Out finds its source within the horror genre rather than disrupts it, building on the genre’s power “as a vocabulary for the illumination, not the demonization, of the pain endured by social minorities” (Lowenstein 2020, 102). In her introduction to the same collection, Dawn Keetley also notes that “while Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives, and Night of the Living Dead feature, respectively, demonic entities, animatronic doubles, and cannibalistic ghouls, they simultaneously represent societal structures—whether it be patriarchy or racism—as the monster. Indeed, characters in Rosemary’s Baby, Stepford Wives, Night of the Living Dead, and Get Out live in constant fear—and constant, vigilant watchfulness—because of those social structures, even as that same society tries to tell them they are paranoid for doing so” (Keetley 2020a, 4). 4  During the Blaxploitation of the early 1970s with films such as Ganja & Hess (Bill Gunn 1973) and in the early 1990s with films like Candyman (Bernard Rose 1992) and Tales from the Hood (Rusty Cundieff 1995).

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In keeping with Franz Fanon’s argument that objectification and reduction to physicality are the central features of the Black experience in a white world, Get Out articulates the economic exploitation of Black bodies to their fetishization in white culture (Citizen 2020, 90–91). Established as the locus of difference, the Black body as a commodity is both repulsive and desirable to white society. The film evokes the marketing power of Black physicality and establishes how such power is tied to dehumanization and violence as early as its opening post-credits sequence. The sequence introduces viewers to the main characters, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), as they prepare to leave for a weekend at the Armitage family’s estate in the country, where Chris will meet Rose’s parents. The second part of the sequence shows Chris and Rose in Chris’s apartment, with Chris raising the topic of the problematic status of interracial relationships in contemporary American society (“Do they know I’m black?”). But what interests me here is the first part of the sequence, which introduces the characters separately: Chris is just out of the shower and shaving in his bathroom, while Rose stops to buy pastries on her way to Chris’s apartment. The first post-credits shots introduce the viewer to Chris’s apartment: a spacious, well-decorated living room with a large flat-screen TV and framed pictures of Chris’s artwork are meant to evoke the comfortable social status of Chris and his occupation as a successful photographer, establishing Chris as a Black man with the status and means to fully enjoy his subjectivity. Yet, as Kyle Brett points out, what the mise-en-scène emphasizes here, with Chris’s framed pictures and reflection in the bathroom mirror, is not Chris himself, “but images and reflections of [the] character’s life” (Brett 2020, 193). As Dawn Keetley convincingly argues, the mirror scene highlights Chris’s split racial identity as a Black man in white America, and the white shaving cream covering his face when we first see him indicates the white mask he still accepts to wear in order to pass in white society (Moore 2017). After all, at this point in the film, Chris still wants to believe in the post-racial lie that would have him be accepted into the wealthy white family. Yet, what is at play in these early shots of the character is also to establish Chris less as a human subject, with substance and depth, than as a surface for the projection of white fantasies. The very first image we get of Chris is that of a body, as the camera picks up the back of his naked upper body in the bathroom doorframe, teasing viewers with well-sculpted yet partially revealed shoulder and upper arm muscles. And the most effective means by which this Black man is turned into an object of desire is the

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choice of lighting, the white reflection of the bathroom light glistening on his moist shoulders, emphasizing his presence as a bodily surface rather than a substantial being. Such lighting, in the way it reflects off the skin of a fit Black man’s naked upper body, is reminiscent of the way athletic Black bodies can be shot in advertisements and on magazine covers. Here the narration directs our attention to the larger, widespread objectification of Black bodies in Western visual culture. Chris is just another Black man deprived of subjectivity and objectified as a body for the enjoyment of white America. That such objectification is inherently a commodification is suggested in the visual parallel between the images of Chris’s body and mirror reflection and Rose selecting a pastry in a bakery window display. The cross-­ cutting establishes a connection between the consumption of marketed items such as baked goods and the consumption of Black bodies, and places Rose at the center of the trade. This editing choice has narrative implications, as it suggests from the beginning that Rose is complicit in the consumption of Black bodies practiced by her family. But it also has political implications, further exposing that white American society and visual culture treat Black bodies as commodities available for consumption. Just like Rose is browsing the bakery display for pastries in the opening sequence, we later see her, now revealed as a villain, browse Bing to select her next victim among the top National Collegiate Athletic Association prospects.

White Spaces and Black Vulnerability The objectification, commodification, and fetishization of Black bodies make those bodies particularly vulnerable in the social spaces of white America. Get Out exposes this by articulating the way in which Black bodies matter for white supremacy to the racialized dynamics of social spaces. Throughout the film, Chris is subjected to marginalization in spaces dominated by whiteness: the road where a white police officer asks for his documents when he wasn’t driving the car; the country house where Rose’s family meets for the weekend; the social event organized by Rose’s parents at their house that same weekend; and finally, the “sunken place” where Chris has been confined through hypnosis. Rose’s parents’ house becomes a metaphor for the destructive consequences of racialized spaces on Black subjectivity. This isolation is also played out at the level of the film, in which Chris is the only Black character with agency, with the

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exception of Chris’s friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), who remains physically separated from Chris until the very last moments of the film. Here Peele repeats the horror film cliché of having a single Black character as token and early victim, except Get Out embraces the perspective of that character, revealing the horrors that come with being thus isolated in a white narrative. That American social spaces are racialized in a way that threatens the Black body is established in the film from its very first images in the prologue preceding the opening credits. This prologue sequence is a staple of slasher films, in which a secondary character is introduced and killed in the opening sequence as a way to establish a sense of menace and the killer’s power. Here, the director introduces a racial twist, presenting us with a Black male character, later identified as Andre (Lakeith Stanfield), lost and alone in a wealthy suburban area, a type of urban geography that has historically and culturally been developed as a “whitopia” (Means Coleman and Lawrence 2020).5 The character’s unease in such space, feeling like “a sore thumb,” and the ironic uttering of the word “suburb” indicate he is racially at odds with his surroundings, the line “not me, not today” offering a reminder that other Black men such as Trayvon Martin have been killed precisely for walking alone at night in white suburbia. That the violence targeting this character finds its source in whiteness is indicated by the color of the car that stalks him and carries away his body, and the old-­ fashioned soundtrack coming out of it. In her article on the film, Jennifer Ryan-Bryant discusses the racial underpinnings of the  1939 song “Run Rabbit Run” by Noel Gray and Ralph Butler) playing from the white car’s radio, which evokes “mainstream white World War II-era music” and whose origins can be traced back to a racist post-Reconstruction rhyme (Ryan-Bryant 2020, 96–97). This choice of soundtrack harks back to a pre-civil rights United States and to a time when popular music was not yet influenced by Black culture, associating nostalgia for the good ole times of great America with white terrorism. The lyrics of the song also resonate with the title and theme of the film, as they tell of a farmer who likes rabbit pie and urge the rabbits to flee. The song is played again toward the end of the film as Chris takes the wheel of the same white car to escape the Armitage house, revealing Rose’s brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) as the predator in the prologue, and fastening the identification of Black men in white spaces with prey. 5

 For a sociological perspective on the question, see Massey and Tannen (2018).

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The aesthetics of the scene serve to heighten the sense of impending threat. The entire prologue is shot in one long take as a sequence shot, with the camera setting a dark stage for the character to enter in the form of a poorly lit suburban sidewalk at night. The slow traveling backward on a dark and empty sidewalk imbues the scene with an ominous atmosphere. As the character walks up to the camera for an introduction in close-up, the tight framing on Andre’s head and shoulders is subsequently maintained, aligning viewers with the character’s subjectivity. Viewers are meant to experience this Black man’s hypervigilance in white territory as the camera rotates around Andre’s head to keep the incoming car in view. The tight framing also relegates much of the space surrounding the character out of shot, so that his body appears very close to the limits of the frame, vulnerable to an assault from off-screen. The vigilance is legitimized and the sense of off-screen threat confirmed when Andre is eventually hit from screen right by a masked figure. If the scene reminds viewers of the introduction to John Carpenter’s classic horror film Halloween (1978), in which the reassuring spaces of American suburbia are terrorized by an unseen killer (see Murphy 2020), the aesthetics of Get Out’s prologue invert the dynamics of horror by constructing an archetypal space of white America as a source of terror and violence for Black bodies.

Reclaiming Cultural Space for Blackness The rewriting of a classic horror film to expose its racial underpinnings and refocus on the Othered, specifically African American, perspective in the prologue is a strategy that the film will repeat. The ultimate political trajectory of Get Out is empowerment, with Chris eventually resisting his commodification, asserting the right of people of color to self-defense, and escaping the Armitage house. Empowerment also comes from the emancipatory dynamics of violence, which bring Chris to shatter signifiers of whiteness (the China teacup used to hypnotize him) or turn them against the oppressor (the bocce ball used to knock out Jeremy, the cotton used to prevent hypnosis). Such cathartic victory of the Black man over white power is also played out at the level of cultural history, with the film including an African American artistic perspective through the soundtrack and the profession of the protagonist. The song “Skilizam Kwa Wahenga” (2017) by Michael Abels in the opening credits includes lyrics in Swahili

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and announces “Chris’s triumph over racist conditions”6 while Childish Gambino’s “Redbone” (2016) heard in the post-credits opening scene enjoins the main character to “stay woke” and shed the white mask we see him put on in his bathroom mirror. As for Chris’s profession as a photographer, his framed pictures seem to use the contrasts of black and white photography as a way to explore the power dynamics of race—for instance, the white attack dog evoking slave patrols and police violence during the civil rights movement is held with difficulty by a Black lower-class owner, throwing him off-balance—and document the life force and social limitations of an African American urban experience—the pregnant woman’s belly in focus in the foreground, a Black passer-by, and the projects out of focus in the background.7 But the cultural empowerment at play in the film is nowhere more effective than through the film’s work on cultural history and the racialization of the horror genre. I have mentioned how Get Out inverts archetypes of the horror genre by making systemic white supremacy the source of horror. I’ve also mentioned how the film is rewriting the classic horror film Halloween to expose its implicit racial politics and rewrite them from an African American perspective. I would now like to look at one other example of such cultural rewriting that again articulates race and the power dynamics of social spaces: how Get Out appropriates Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining (1980). The Armitage house is introduced in a fashion similar to the mountain hotel resort in The Shining as a space that dominates the characters: the distant framing of the characters entering the house or taking their seats in the background of shots taken from an adjacent room establishes the house both as a domineering presence and as a space where the unseen bears on the visible. The film here nods to 6  “The song, which contains the lyrics ‘run far away’ and ‘save yourself’ …, signals both to Chris and to informed viewers that Swahili possesses social power and that his cultural heritage may protect him from threats within his current environment” (Ryan-Bryant 2020, 98). 7  Here, Kyle Brett convincingly argues that Chris’s photographic eye does not so much seek to celebrate its human subjects as it decenters and dehumanizes them—the dog owner and pregnant woman have their faces cut out-of-frame, the balloon holder competes for attention with his balloons’ shadow on the wall. Chris’s photographic pursuits, while a celebration of African American artistic talents, also reproduce the objectifying violence that Chris himself will be subjected to and comment negatively on the ability of an institutional form of art, sought after by gallery owners such as Jim Hudson (Steven Root) who buys Chris for his “eye,” to bring about emancipation. Grace instead comes from a much more democratic form of art in the shape of a smartphone camera flash that briefly frees the victims of the Armitage from their enslavement (Brett 2020).

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Kubrick’s distant framings on his characters (especially Jack Torrance/ Jack Nicholson) walking through the hallways or sitting in the lobby of the hotel in The Shining. But direct references to The Shining are compressed into one sequence of Get Out: Dean Armitage’s tour of the house with Chris. Here Peele combines two scenes of The Shining: the tour of the mountain resort by Jack and his wife, and Dany’s discovery of the twin sisters’ ghosts. In Get Out, Chris is given a racially laden tour of the Armitage house by Rose’s father, Dean. Narratively, the sequence serves to clarify the spatial coordinates of the building Chris will eventually have to escape. Thematically, it also builds up unease and the sense of a threatening space and articulates this sense of threat to racial competition. The story of the Armitage grandfather Walter (Marcus Henderson), who never got over being “robbed” of the 1936 Olympics by Jesse Owens, leaves an unsettled racial score in the family’s history. This story is immediately followed by the mention of black mold in the basement, which has led the family to condemn access there (the basement actually houses Dean’s operation room). Positioned after the grandfather story, the mention of black mold eating at the white family house’s foundations becomes symbolic of racial strife animating the Armitages. Narratively, the sequence also combines many of the clichés of white liberalism that highlight its complicity with white supremacy. The collection of native artifacts from countries in the global South highlights unequal international power relations Western tourists reproduce. This is followed by Dean’s comment that “it’s such a privilege to be able to experience another person’s culture,” which applies to natives in the global South, but also seems directed at Chris, associating the African American man with what Dean conceives as primitive natives from underdeveloped countries. The laudatory reference to Obama then comes as a cliché of whites showcasing anti-racism in conversation with people of color. But above all, the unequal economic power dynamics of white masters and Black servants is reproduced in the Armitage household, with Dean casting himself as the white savior (“I couldn’t bear to let them go”) and worrying about appearances (“But, boy, I hate the way it looks”) rather than oppression itself.8

 “By offering a multicultural résumé—‘I voted for Obama,’ and ‘some of my best friends are black’—white people attempt individually to excuse themselves from the functioning of a racist society. Such microinvalidations allow white liberals to feel comparatively superior and, crucially, to do nothing, as they are not figured as part of the problem. This means that a more insidious systemic racism is allowed to proceed unchecked” (Ilott 2020, 115). 8

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Accompanying the establishment of racial strife and the characterization of the Armitages as participants in white supremacy, a sense of unease and possible threat is created by the camera movements. For instance, when the camera lingers on the hypnosis room after the characters have passed it, the narration dissociates itself from character subjectivity to comment upon the scene and point viewers’ attention to an element that will be essential to Chris’s entrapment. In a manner similar to the opening shot of the film on an empty suburban sidewalk, the autonomous gaze of the camera also suggests something is lurking in these spaces that viewers cannot quite yet see. Such camerawork is reminiscent of the stalking/lurking camera in The Shining, alternately embracing and dissociating from the victim’s perspective (Barker 2009, 80).9 The height of unease is reached with the introduction of the Black servants, Georgina (Betty Gabriel) in the kitchen and Walter (Marcus Henderson) in the garden. Appearing in the frame as the characters turn a corner to the kitchen, Georgina is aligned with the dead twin sisters in The Shining, revealed as Danny turns a corner on his tricycle. Her body language is meant to confirm the reference: she is standing erect and motionless like the Shining twins, as an apparition, giving her introduction something of the uncanny. The soundtrack, an extradiegetic score softly accentuating the unease, starts right as Georgina comes into view, emphasizing the importance of the moment in building up Chris’s and the viewer’s conscience of a threat. But if Get Out takes its cue from The Shining, it also rewrites the reference to focus on race. Chris’s unease is not so much produced by Georgina’s sudden appearance in the frame as by her artificially polished response to his greeting, with a close-up of Chris’s puzzled face following her formal welcome (“Hello”). The sense of the uncanny comes from the erasure of blackness in Georgina’s behavior, as she looks but a ghost of herself. Not only does she serve the Armitages, but her subjection to white economy has killed the blackness in her and replaced it with a white consciousness (again, literally, as viewers later discover).10 Here, the movie confirms the destructive effects of white 9  Barker argues that this type of stalking camera places viewers in the position of the stalker even as they elicit dread that the character will be assaulted, investing viewers’ bodies in the film’s “gesture.” Such camerawork was also adopted in Halloween, whose introductory sequence famously adopts, and abandons, the killer’s perspective. 10  “The other black people in the Armitage household do not talk, dress, and act like Chris and cannot understand him: Walter, Georgina, and Logan are racially uncanny. While Logan is literally familiar (Chris knew Logan as Andre), all three characters are repressed—enslaved and marginalized within their own bodies by a white consciousness” (Casey-Williams 2020, 66).

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spaces on black subjectivity introduced in the prologue and comments on the ways in which economic subordination also contributes to this destruction. Similar uncanny moments of failed racial recognition are played out later when Chris, this time alone, tries to establish a racial bond with Walter, the gardener, and Logan King (LaKeith Stanfield), the sole Black guest at the Armitage social event. On both occasions, Chris explicitly mobilizes blackness to form a connection and is met with a whitewashed response, and both characters not only refuse this Black social territory but seem uncomprehending of, if not hostile to, his attempts at bonding and completely alien to code-switching. Here again, the horror does not come from Otherness but from what hegemonic power and dominant ideology do to people who are Othered and see their bodies turned into a human resource, as their bodies actually sustain a white mind. The Shining is thus mobilized in the tour of the Armitage property as a way to situate the film within a history of the horror genre and rewritten in a way that refocuses the genre on race: ghostly presences do not simply evoke past acts of violence, as they do in The Shining, but manifest a kind of violence that is specifically racist, exploiting Othered bodies while erasing Others’ humanity. Horror thus comes from witnessing Black subjectivity being crushed to spectral remains in white social spaces. In rewriting horror classics to refocus on race, Get Out plays out the empowerment of Black masculinity not simply at the narrative level through the character arc of Chris but also at the aesthetic and cultural levels through the re-appropriation of the horror film and its history for African American perspectives. In doing so, the film pays tribute to the history of the horror genre while also reimagining its racial politics in liberating ways.

Conclusion The power of Get Out’s racial politics thus comes especially from its articulation of race and space (both social and cultural). The film establishes that Black people in the United States matter only as bodies to be commodified, consumed, and exploited, and that such erasure of subjectivity and physical vulnerability essentially stem from their marginal and subordinate positions within white social spaces. In doing so, Get Out expresses in cinematic terms what movements like Black Lives Matter have consistently protested: the systemic forces that dehumanize and endanger Black people

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in present-day American society. Get Out provides an empowering and escapist perspective on this horrifying reality, with its main protagonist successfully surviving the ordeal, his subjectivity and agency reclaimed. Empowerment is also channeled through the appropriation and racialization of American cultural history and the horror film genre in particular. But Get Out maintains, even in its final, triumphant moments, the awareness that a much darker conclusion would have been more plausible if this hadn’t been a fiction film. As the police car arrives on the scene of Chris’s escape, a mortally wounded Rose is relieved while Chris appears defeated, surrendering to a hopeless turn of events. Both characters, as well as the audience, know that Black men have been killed by police for far less than standing above a wounded white woman. Here, the film invokes the memory of another classic horror film, a rare one that adopted a critical perspective on race. In George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, Ben (Duane Johnson), a Black man secluded in a house with white people, survives a zombie attack only to be killed at the last minute by the police, who mistake him for a threat. In Get Out, it turns out that the car is not police but airport security, and its driver is Chris’s friend and Transportation Security Administration officer Rod (LilRel Howery).11 But the comment has been made that the arrival of the cavalry is not good news when one is racially Othered and that the racialized law enforcement of state authorities in a white social space is a systemic threat to Black lives.

References Abela, Michael. 2017. Skilizam Kwa Wahenga. Get Out Soundtrack, Back Lot Music. Adams, Sam. 2017. In Jordan Peele ’s Horror Movie, Get Out, the “Monster” is Liberal Racism. Slate, January 27. https://slate.com/culture/2017/01/atsundance-jordan-peele-explains-how-obama-s-election-inspired-his-horrormovie-get-out.html. Barker, Jennifer. 2009. The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press. Brett, Kyle. 2020. The Horror of the Photographic Eye. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley, 187–199. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 11  An alternate ending available in the DVD bonus material shows the police arriving on the scene instead of Rod and Chris talking to Rod in jail. But test screenings and Trump’s election forced Peele to adopt a more cathartic tone (Nigatu and Clayton 2017).

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Casey-Williams, Erin. 2020. Get Out and the Zombie Film. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley, 63–71. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Citizen, Robyn. 2020. The Body Horror of White Second Chances in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds and Jordan Peele’s Get Out. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley, 87–100. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Cundieff, Rusty, dir. 1995. Tales from the Hood. Savoy Pictures. Forbes, Bryan, dir. 1975. The Stepford Wives. Columbia Pictures Gambino, Childish. 2016. Redbone. Awaken, My Love. Glassnote. Gunn, Bill, dir. 1973. Ganja & Hess. Kelly-Jordan Enterprises Ilott, Sarah. 2020. Racism That Grins: African American Gothic Realism and Systemic Critique. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley, 114–130. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Keetley, Dawn, ed. 2020a. Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. ———. 2020b. Get Out: Political Horror. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley, 1–22. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Kubrick, Stanley, dir. 1980. The Shining. Warner Bros. Lowenstein, Adam. 2020. Jordan Peele and Ira Levin Go to the Movies: The Black/Jewish Genealogy of Modern Horror’s Minority Vocabulary. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley, 101–113. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Massey, Douglas S., and Jonathan Tannen. 2018. Suburbanization and Segregation in the United States: 1970–2010. Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (9): 1594–1611. Means Coleman, Robin R., and Novotny Lawrence. 2020. A Peaceful Place Denied: Horror Film’s “Whitopias”. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley, 47–62. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Moore, Omar P. L. 2017. Do the White Thing. Popcorn Reel, March 7. http:// www.popcornreel.com/htm/getoutessay.html. Murphy, Bernice M. 2020. Place, Space, and the Reconfiguration of “White Trash” Monstrosity. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley, 72–86. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Nigatu, Heben, and Tracy Clayton. 2017. Incognegro. Another Round 83, March  1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-­83-­incognegro-­ with-­jordan-­peele/id977676980?i=1000382040164. Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017. Get Out. California: Universal Pictures. Platts, Todd K., and David L.  Brunsma. 2020. Reviewing Get Out ‘s Reviews: What Critics Said and How their Race Mattered. In Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror, ed. Dawn Keetley, 131–146. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Polanski, Roman, dir. 1968. Rosemary’s Baby. Paramount Pictures

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Romero, George, dir. 1968. Night of the Living Dead. Image Ten. Rose, Bernard, dir. 1992. Candyman. TriStar Pictures. Ryan-Bryant, Jennifer. 2020. The Cinematic Rhetorics of Lynching in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. Journal of Popular Culture 53 (1): 92–110. Stoddard, Christine. 2017. Get Out Movie Controversy? Film Called “AntiWhite” and “Racist” by Some Viewers. Mic, February 24. https://www.mic. com/articles/169514/get-out-movie-controversy-film-called-anti-white-andracist-by-some-viewers. Sublette, Cammie M. 2020. Post-Racial Lies and Fear of the Historical-Political Boomerang in Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. In The Politics of Horror, ed. Damien K. Picariello, 233–246. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Wisecrack. 2018. Get Out (Directed by Jordan Peele)—Exploring the Sunken Place. Show Me the Meaning!—A Wisecrack Movie Podcast, February 9. https:// www.wisecrack.co/show-­m e-­t he-­m eaning-­m ovie-­p odcast/episode/ cc007609/get-­out-­directed-­by-­jordan-­peele-­exploring-­the-­sunken-­place. Wood, Robin. 2003. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. Zinoman, Jason. 2017. Jordan Peele on a Truly Terrifying Monster: Racism. New York Times, February 16. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/movies/ jordan-­peele-­interview-­get-­out.html.

CHAPTER 3

The Post-Truth Era and Monstrous Ambiguity in It Comes at Night (2017), The Invitation (2015), and The Gift (2015) Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “good vs. evil” dichotomy was reinstated as a justification for war efforts. “Yet, contradictorily, some terrorist countries reversed the agents of good and evil with, for example Osama bin Laden accusing US of being the ‘head of the serpent’” (Mirra 2008, 86). In this scenario, America was imagined as both soldier for freedom and global oppressor: it would depend on who is looking and from which ideological standpoint. This last statement is coherent with postmodernity and its rejection of any absolute truth: evil, rather than being a material force, is a product of subjectivity defined through contextualized manifestations. Good and evil lie in the eyes of the beholder. Still, the Bush administration accentuated the idea of evil as something external to the individual, a concrete entity. Indeed, some had witnessed the Devil’s face materializing from the flames and smoke emanating from the Twin Towers after the collision of hijacked airplanes. As argued by Mehnaaz F. G. Pagnoni Berns (*) University of Buenos Aires (UBA), Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_3

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Momen, “instead of provoking any meaningful political communication about terrorism and its roots, within a few days of 9/11 a simplistic explanation of ‘us vs. them,’ the clash of civilizations and pure irrational hatred became consolidated” (2019, 23). Evil was enthroned as a material force: yet, this binary ethos was contradicted by the nature of the event, as the US was seen as victim for some and victimizer for others. Donald Trump’s presidency further added fuel to the fire, uneasily mixing a Manichean logic of “us vs. them” with more complicated uncertainties. The “fake news” scenario, which started with Trump but quickly spread through the globe, organized reality under the umbrella of uncertainty, thus beginning a new era of “post truth” and even “anti-truth” ethos (Besley et al. 2018, 221). Definitions of who the bad and who the good persons are depend on information; however, when said information is contaminated by fakeness or paranoia, the definition crumbles down by the weight of ambiguity. It may be argued that the Trump era brought an emphasis on the “gray” zones, spaces where readings on ethics were complicated by narratives of ambivalence, where the good guys and the bad ones recurrently shift their positions. In this scenario, horror films, historically predicated on the big divide between “us” and “them,” accommodate their narratives to illustrate stories where the horror comes from the uncertainty of the political climate. Films such as The Gift (Joel Edgerton 2015, where a mysterious man from the past starts to visit, unannounced and uninvited, a couple), The Invitation (Karyn Kusama 2015, about a man who accepts an invitation to an unsettling dinner party hosted by his ex-wife), and It Comes at Night (Trey Edward Shults 2017, about a man trying to establish a tenuous order in a post-apocalyptic world) play with horror tropes and expectations to warn audiences about this post-truth era which privileges uncertainties. Viewers are left in the dark about who the monsters are, while expectations based on previous knowledge are subverted. These “post-truth” films blur the divide separating “them” from “us,” projecting mental and political landscapes where the horror is born not from a localized monster but from the shift of perspectives. If, as Robin Wood (2004) argues, horror cinema taps into social and cultural anxieties, then The Gift, The Invitation, and It Comes at Night allegorize our new engagement with postmodern relativism in the post-truth era.

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Moral Uncertainty as the Millennial Monster Trump himself played directly into the biblical drama of two entities, good and evil, where America is good and all that is not America is evil (McGlasson 2019). As Esposito explains, it is this Manichean belief in Trump as America’s savior that “encouraged large numbers of his followers to storm the US Capitol in January of 2021 and ‘reclaim’ what many are convinced was a stolen election” (Esposito 2021, 35). Arguably, people who voted for Trump were looking for the man who would do the best for the country, and they considered Trump to be that person. Still, many were baffled by this election and by the fact that there were people “out there” who could vote for evil, including neighbors, friends, and even family. In this scenario, one might ask, who is really good and who evil? Are these notions still relevant today? Donald Trump tweeted at 6:15 a.m. on January 16, 2018: “The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it.” Even if there were little news regarding the Wall, the president felt obliged to remind citizens that his promise was still on. It is understandable since that promise helped Trump to win the elections: the polemic Wall, however, was not conceptualized to separate Mexicans from Americans (besides, Mexicans are Americans too) but to separate “bad immigrants” from “good immigrants,” a distinction that Donald Trump seems to be able to make. In a tweet cited by Philip Bump from the Washington Post, Trump promised honesty in his declarations about immigration: “I’ll say it very honestly, and I’ll say it straight: Immigration is the fault.” As Bump argues, “Consider the contrast that Trump is drawing. Good immigrants come with skills. Bad immigrants come in illegally and are additionally possible murderers and thieves and so much else” (Bump 2018). There are no further explanations, however, of how to differentiate good immigrants from those who want to enter America to steal and kill. Trump’s Manichean ethos did not stop at immigration. Far from it. In his diatribe against journalism, Trump again separated “good” journalists from those “downright dishonest.” As Brian Stelter claims, “This is a common Trump tactic—driving a wedge between ‘good’ and ‘bad’” (Stelter 2018). Trump’s advocacy for a return to Manichaeism has been noted. Jamie Weinstein even gives the title “The Manichean World of Donald Trump” to one of his articles for The Daily Caller as early as July 2015 (with Trump just a contender), while D. Dennis (2017) goes as far as to suggest that

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Trump’s logo should be “Make America Manichean Again!”. There are no shades of gray anymore in America during and after Trump. This ethical approach mostly continues the Manichaeism of Bush’s administration. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, George Bush, then president of the US, argued that “Evil is evil, and it must be opposed” (Michaels 2002, 332). Bush, in this simple declaration, swiped away one basic principle of postmodernity: everything is relative, including evil. On that day, postmodernism died with the phrase “absolute evil.” The terrorist attacks that put the world under siege at the beginning of the new millennium and continue to do so today produced new studies on evil. Terrorism was the work of wrongdoers, and evil was a sufficient cause unto itself. The look into evil, however, is reversible. As Kellner has noted, “Remarkably, bin Laden’s Manichean dualism mirrored the discourse of Sharon, Bush, and those in the West who proclaimed the war against terrorism as a Holy War between Good and Evil, Civilization and Barbarism” (Kellner 2003, 72). Both opponents dichotomized the enemy, leaving no space for reflection and critical engagement with the menacing Otherness. This ideological divide is not new and has roots in long-past history, including the unrest existing between the American North and South. But this new ideological divide comes with a novelty: it is not only ideological but ethical as well. What America faces now is mostly an ethical gap separating those guilty of collaborating with political corruption from the innocents. The problem comes at the moment of defining who is guilty, since both factions see the other one as the real evil. From this point of view, there are people out there who not only think differently (a common ideological divide, even if a remarkable one), but explicitly try to push America (and maybe the whole world) over a cliff with their support/hate of Donald Trump, the best/worst president ever. Through this logic, those Others, those people (neighbors, friends, family, co-workers) who voted to or against Trump, cannot be tolerated: they are people who consciously attempt to make damage, to hurt people with their support for Trump or their ideological backlash against him. Ideological difference can be tolerated; it is not something new. But complicity in corruption, misogyny, and dirty play turns citizens into evil characters. Furthermore, these evil citizens are out there, masking themselves as “normal” people rather than the enemies that they truly are. There is no bodily mark identifying good people and bad people. This arena of ideological and ethical difference is so pervasive that the (supposed) evil within those who pledge

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alliance with Trump makes them “deplorable,” a signpost of an ethical stance separating evil people from good people. Broadly speaking, we could argue that America is a country divided into two halves, each one coding the Other as “evil.” There is no communication, nor a third position that could serve as a bridge leading from one point of view to the Other. For each position, America is under siege, and the culprits are their compatriots. And there is no neutral zone between deplorable and nasty people. In brief, America is close now to being a dystopia where half the country deeply hates the other one or, even more importantly, deeply believes that the others have their hearts filled with poisonous hate. Thus, there is little possibility of keeping any sense of real community, as any bond constructed through social contract is momentarily disrupted. As the title of Henry Giroux’s book says, America is a war “with itself” (Giroux 2017) as Americans have lost their sense of community and compassion toward their peers, immersed as they are into a world that supplants real politics with hate. The Manichean scenario aggravated in the last few years, with the coming of fake news and a resurgence of populism of both right and left roots, throughout the global map. Arguably, fake news sustains its power not so much from deceiving readers and audiences but from telling them stories that support their ideologies, with which audiences can feel identification. The current post-truth world enhances ideological divisions and crystallizes ideological postures while, at the same time, downplaying the need for material proof. Both fake news and right and left populism feed on the same Manichean distinction of “us” versus “them” while heavily relying on stereotypes that blame various groups for the ills of society. Fake news discards moderation, nuanced readings, and thinking, thus enhancing extreme positions and disgust at the Others (the “bad” people). Yet, distinguishing between fake and real is as complex as distinguishing between “us” and “them.” As argued by Tommaso Venturini, the notion of fake news is “misleading because it supposes that malicious pieces of news are manufactured, while reliable ones correspond directly with reality, denying the very essence of journalistic mediation in its efforts to select, combine, translate and present different pieces of information” (2019, 125). What makes some journalistic sources more reliable than others is, sometimes, only the ideological adherence to how that newspaper, TV channel, or journalist thinks more to our liking as readers or viewers. To a certain extent, all information is ideologically manufactured.

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The rise of fake news is concurrent with a new increase in populism, not only in America but Europe as well (Kaya 2020), as democracies become lost in a crisis of representativeness. Manichean divisions, fake news, and extreme ideological positions are coherent with both right and left populisms (Fawzi 2020, 41). Yet, these two ideological forms of politics present themselves as the “real” form of living based on truth, facts, and welfare, while the Other is guilty of misinformation and corruption. The right warns about the dangers of leftist populism (or, better, only “populism” as the right understands populism as being leftist), while the left warns about the dangers of extreme right populism (or, better, only “populism” as the left understands populism as always coming from the extreme right). Neither assumes itself as populism. In his cover for his book Populista: The Rise of Latin America’s 21st Century Strongman (2021), Will Grant astutely makes Jair Bolsonaro and Hugo Chávez face each other, both populist caudillos, both great leaders fighting for their country/both dictators bringing suffering to their respective countries. The fake news phenomenon, in synthesis, is not so much about deceiving as it is about ideological identification.

Identification, Affect, and Monstrosity In his book Horror Film and Affect, Xavier Aldana Reyes uses affect theory to evaluate viewers’ engagement and identification with the horror film. Affect theory argues vehemently for the need to consider audiences’ affect as a serious approach through which to analyze cinema, a useful tool to open investigation on identification, both emotional and corporeal. In other words, affect theory looks for the way our bodies and feelings may be moved by what is taking place in the film. Aldana Reyes addresses the problems that come with affect theory, meaning that this new film discipline “is not a totemic or even cogent school of thought adhering to a given number of precepts” (2016, 5), that this analytical tool may also be known by other names such as “cognitivism” and “phenomenology” (5), and that there are many approaches “to affect, all of which vary depending on angle and discipline” (5). Yet, the author highlights the privileged place that horror cinema occupies for studies on affect theory, as this particular genre invites productive readings from almost “emotional and somatic levels” (5) as tortures (both mental and corporeal), bloodshed, and the dread in the screen force more direct commitments with audiences when “moments of vulnerability

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dependent on corporeal intelligibility, particularly of the results and effects of pain” (196), connect the viewer with the victim. Aldana Reyes bases his investigation mostly on bodily reactions uniting studies on abjection and disgust. His study “places the body at the centre of critical attention at the representational, emotional and affective levels” (9). Still, the author separates reflex responses (like those born, for example, from close shots of open wounds or spilled blood) from cognitive emotions, “eminently processual and construal-based” (6), meaning affect that requires a mental evaluation from viewers. This evaluation includes ideological engagement and identification with the characters. The films here analyzed work heavily on viewers’ expectations of and emotional commitment to the people they assume will be the films’ heroes, the ones who will, as the film develops, suffer a rosary of horrors but come out victorious. The shift in expectations is gradual: neither film presents an abrupt revelation of who the evil character really is but peels away different layers of ambiguity to secure dreadful ambivalence; it is this uncertainty of ethical values that comes from the state of the repressed to shatter any sense of ideological conformity inherent to ethical Manichaeism. Concepts of evil are inextricably attached to images of monstrosity. Everything monstrous is, by its own “essence,” evil and, as such, must be destroyed. Robin Wood, in his classic essay “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” argues that the dominant ideology (which he identifies as bourgeois capitalism) cancels any potential opposition to the hegemonic power through the repression of possible alternatives to that power (Wood 2004, 109). If the repression fails, then oppression takes its place, and the subject who does not repress themselves is harassed (109). Anyone who fails to fit within the hegemonic sphere is then classified as a disruptive Other (111), a monster that comes to perturb the “natural” order of things. This “universal” and ahistorical hegemony is embodied in the heterosexual, white, Christian, Western man. Those who do not fit into the totality of these categories are considered minorities who embody Otherness, never mind that, in fact, only a very small part of the human population falls within this alleged universal. Women, non-Christians, people of color, and LGBTQ, among other embodiments, are Others. Otherness, in this scenario, is an instrument to maintain a hegemonic sociopolitical order (Peleg 2007, 177). The horror film is a subversive text that portrays the coming of some Other that does not fit into the hegemonic discourse, an Other metaphorized in a monstrous form. Following this widely known theory,

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dangerous creatures such as Frankenstein’s monster function as a visual and ideological representation of the fear of the proletarians (Wood 2004, 113), while the possessed Regan in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) mirrors fear of children’s sexuality (Wood 115). Following Wood’s symptomatic take on horror cinema as the perfect vehicle to illustrate, through allegorical and metaphorical deformations, social and cultural anxieties and/or fears, we may interrogate films such as The Invitation, The Gift, or It Comes at Night and the presence of the monster within. Following Wood’s thesis, there is a monster in them that must be destroyed, but it remains to be seen who the evil creature is and, more urgently, how the status quo is reinstated with the death of the monsters. To be sure, The Invitation, The Gift, and It Comes at Night contain monsters, albeit of the human kind. In The Invitation, Will (Logan Marshall-Green) has reluctantly accepted an invitation to attend a dinner party reunion with some old friends at the house he once owned with his ex-wife Eden (Tammy Blanchard), now married to David (Michiel Huisman), whom she met on a retreat in Mexico while recovering from a nervous breakdown. Will is still grieving over the tragic death of their son and is in a fragile emotional state that makes him uncomfortable at the sight of other people’s happiness. He begins to feel that something is not quite right about the gathering, and he is right. All the guests belong to a cult and have decided to kill themselves (and others) to end their state of grief. The dinner party is, in fact, a ritual of massive suicide. The monsters are the cultish hosts and some guests who want to end their lives and kill others in the process. The Gift examines deeply buried grudges by focusing on Simon and Robyn (Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall), a young married couple. They have just moved into a beautiful home, with Simon finding success with the company he works for. While shopping, they meet a man named Gordo (Joel Edgerton), who is an old classmate of Simon’s. Simon barely recognizes him, yet, after a brief conversation, the couple invites him for dinner. At the film’s climax, it is revealed to audiences that bourgeois Simon is a monster who has created success at the expense of other people’s lives, destroying many, including workmates and Gordo in high school. It Comes at Night presents a husband, Paul (Joel Edgerton), wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo), and their son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), living like hermits in their home that is all boarded up in a post-apocalyptic America. They wear gas masks because of an epidemic that has swept the nation.

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One day, another family, husband Will (Christopher Abbott), wife Kim (Riley Keough), and son Andrew (Griffin Faulkner), shows up at their doorstep. The central family decides to harbor them, even with some doubts about how the relationship could evolve and how resources will be distributed. As days unfold, the relationship between the two families gets increasingly strained, with suggestions that maybe treason is in the mind of the newcomers. In the end, when the new family tries to escape from the home, Paul will be the one showing his monstrous colors, as he and his family will do anything to stop Will and his family from running free, including murder. The films play with the viewers’ expectations, especially those generated by repeated viewing of horror cinema and thriller films. Audiences have knowledge about the specificities, tropes, and narratives of film genres and know, up to a certain extent, how said tropes will unfold in a particular film. Film genres are not “simply a method of classifying modes of communication and art” but “explain how the different genres may create differential meanings for an audience” (Jeffres et al. 2022, 22). Genres are recognized by film audiences, and part of the enjoyment of film viewing comes from the film answering back, affirmatively, to the viewers’ mental image of what the genre should offer (Altman 2018, 15). Audiences seem to know where the film is going and how the narrative will play at the end, yet those expectations are turned upside down in the films here analyzed. Viewers follow a character they think will be the hero to, at the film’s end, face a reversal of expectations. As such, audiences have fallen into an ethical trap that sought to highlight that the Manichean ethos has been reinstated in a world where black and white are more prevalent than ever, and which is increasingly revealed as fiction, thus producing a contradictory narrative where identification with the hero is betrayed. Following Robin Wood and his thesis that the American horror film stages nightmares shared by directors and audiences, in the sense that film horror taps into its social and cultural context, it is possible to argue that the main monsters in the films here analyzed are not freakish cultists or post-­ apocalyptic monsters but something more insidious: the repressed brought to the surface speaks about how people, historically, have assumed to be in the “right place” ethically speaking. Yet, the films reveal this assumption as an ideological façade that obscures how manifestations of evil and goodness should be recognized as subjective.

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Shifting Monsters, Shifting Narratives It is important to note that all three films, The Invitation, The Gift, and It Comes at Night, do not revolve around moral relativism. According to Neil Levy, there are three types of moral relativism. One is descriptive relativism, when we accept that different cultures or individuals “hold different fundamental moral principles” (2002, 28). Second, there is moral-requirement relativism, the view that “what is morally required of individuals varies from group to group, culture to culture” (28). Finally, meta-ethical relativism is “concerned with the meaning of moral statements and the foundations of ethics” (28). Still, the films here analyzed do not build their narratives around moral relativism because The Invitation, The Gift, and It Comes at Night certainly advocate for the existence of a binarism that supports the division between good and evil as mutually opposite spheres. The films offer, indeed, both evil and good characters. What the films bring as a novelty is the fact that the binarism is not rigid anymore, with the different characters shifting from one position to the other, to the point that viewers are left insecure about ethical identification. The Invitation, The Gift, and It Comes at Night obscure any sense of belonging to the “correct” side of the ideological and ethical spectrum, forcing viewers to reassess their identifications. The films do so by first confirming the viewers’ suspicions about who the monsters are to, later, pull the rug and reveal, via a reversal of the good-evil binary, how wrong our ethical identification was. In this scenario, it is only logical that It Comes at Night begins with the death of the law. The grandfather of the main family, a patriarchal figure, is taken to the woods for his sacrifice. Sarah’s father, Bud (David Pendleton), is dying. Filled with sadness and regret, her daughter pushes him to “let it go” rather than fight to stay alive. Bud, like many in this post-apocalyptic, dystopian future, has succumbed to the strange illness that has taken the lives of millions. Sarah’s husband, Paul, loads Bud into a wheelbarrow and rolls him to the forest. The scene is divided between a large shot that shows Paul and his son Travis carrying Bud to the forest and a close shot of the old man’s face; filled with pain and defeat, Bud is still capable of looking straight at Paul, showing that he is still a conscious man, and that he knows what his fate will be. As the camera takes Paul’s point of view, Bud looks directly at the viewers, thus morally questioning his son-in-law and the viewers alike through ethical and affective engagement. Paul’s face, however, is covered

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with a gas mask; thus, his emotions are hidden from viewers, preventing any kind of relationship with the character. Viewers are forced to empathize with the old man on the brink of being sacrificed. Later, in the woods, Paul lays Bud on the ground before shooting him in the head and burning his body. With the killing of the father/grandfather, the law is suspended. With the killing of the law—the one in charge of pointing out who is right and who is wrong, what is bad and what is good—the story properly begins, creating a dystopia where the heroes are the evil characters. As mentioned, the films play with audiences’ expectations regarding genres. Paul, Sarah, and Travis are the family living alone, the one group that opened the narrative and the one who invites strangers into their midst. As such, even if the film opens with a human sacrifice, viewers assume they are the “good ones,” and the strangers are the people who will bring trouble. It Comes at Night is not the only film with an “us vs. them” ethos: The Invitation is also predicated on assumptions about who the good ones are. Like It Comes at Night, the opening plays with sacrifices and moral ambiguity. Will and his new girlfriend Kyra (Emayatzy Corinealdi) drive through the night to a dinner party they have been invited to. Unintentionally, they run over a dog with their car. Will is forced to sacrifice the animal to avoid further suffering. Lacking a gun, Will kills the bleeding dog with a pipe, a rudimentary tool that requires force and proximity to the sacrificed beast. It may be argued that Will kills the animal twice: first, running over it with his car; and second, with the pipe. Still, even if Will has entered a gray zone in ethical terms, The Invitation offers what seems to be a clear group of villains, at least in the film’s first scenes. Will and Kyra arrive at the dinner party to find not only a perpetually smiling Eden (the host) but also a group of guests that unite old acquaintances with new friends, all wearing the same smile on their faces. Will senses that something is wrong with this group of people, who insist that all pain and grief is by election and that happiness can be obtainable with some effort and spiritual cleansing. Will’s suspicions seem doubly confirmed as the film unfolds. First, Eden confesses she has recovered from the death of their son, thanks to her joining a cult. Said cult offers paths to overcome grief in unorthodox ways. They insist pain is a mental state that can be overcome by accepting death as something natural, part of life rather than a symptom of disruption. Viewers already have the information that Eden, her new partner (whom she met at the cult), and some of her guests belong to that cult. The mention of a cult triggers prejudices in viewers’ minds, as horror stories about brainwashing, end-of-the-world

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narratives, mass suicides, kidnapping, and scams saturate media even if “most people have little direct experience with new religious movements” (Roberts and Yamane 2020, 88). Further, piling “all cults together” as evil and equal is part of the general treatment media give to this phenomenon (Melton 1992, 366). Thus, The Invitation expects viewers to engage in a relationship of suspicion against all the members of the cult, most of whom display unsettling levels of happiness based on denial. Second, Eden shows her guests a documentary video filmed during one of the sessions at the cult’s headquarters. The video shows a middle-aged woman slowly dying from an unknown illness, saying goodbye to her fellow cultists, and happily affirming that she will meet all her deceased friends and family in the afterlife. A guru tells her to welcome death to cease pain and grief. She finally dies. While the video is playing on a laptop, the camera zooms in, taking the reactions of all those reunited for the party; most are heartbroken but also uncomfortable with being witnesses to such an intimate moment. The zoom is not an innocent narrative device but a stratagem to engage viewers more directly with the unsettling mood of the scene. The guests who do not belong to the cult are clearly uncomfortable, and the intimacy caused by the zoom invites viewers to identify with their feelings. When the brief documentary ends, some guests confront the hosts for forcing them to see a dying woman. So far, the film has established a sense of ambiguity, which makes it hard for viewers to know whom to follow, whether the hosts trying to be happy, or the man who killed a dog on the road; still, slowly, The Invitation suggests viewers should side with Will in his increasing sense of dread as the hosts reveal more intimate details of their pain, their newly gained happiness, and how the cult works. Another instance of affect manipulation is highlighted through the use of close shots: while Eden, her new partner David, and the rest of the guests are depicted in wide shots, Will is mostly framed through close shots of his disapproving face, thus inviting audiences to connect their emotions and sense of dread with him. The film’s narrative and formal strategies invite audiences to side with Will, especially when he suspects that one of the guests, Claire (Marieh Delfino), may be in danger just for having left the party earlier. He observes from the window how she climbs into her car while a member of the cult opens the house’s big gate. The camera takes the place of Will’s gaze, with he and the film’s viewers carefully observing what is happening outside with Claire. Will the cultists let her go? Or could foul play be involved? Yet, David insists on getting Will away from the window, leaving the outside and what

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transpires there in darkness (for Will and viewers alike). As the film progresses, Will shows signs of being paranoid, searching Eden and David’s bedroom and bathroom, looking for something that may prove they are dangerous psychopaths, and accusing the hosts of being liars. Yet, nothing evil happens, and the point of view slowly shifts again to Will, who has been unable to prove anything against the hosting couple up to this point, with the film close to its end. Over and over, he has been proven wrong in his assumptions. Who is the monster here? Is it the grieving father who wants to find horror in everything just to prove a point? Or is it the grieving cultists who have turned to a weird form of belief to help them understand death? The Gift does not offer a sacrificial scene at the beginning, nor does it present gray areas; instead, it quickly establishes Simon and Robyn as the film’s “heroic” couple who must face the mumbling, shy stranger who insists on intruding into the couple’s life. Gordo repeatedly makes kind, yet invasive gestures toward Simon and Robyn, delivering wine, bringing fish to fill their small pond out front, and stopping by while Robyn is home alone to keep her company. While Robyn sees a sensitive man in Gordo, Simon sees nothing but a persistent creep abusing his patience. The film heavily engages with the viewers’ background in horror and thriller films; while Simon and Robyn are the middle-class, pretty white couple, Gordo is the unhinged solitary man who starts forcing his presence into his ex-friend’s home. Gordo is oblivious to Robyn’s uneasiness at being alone with a man she barely knows, inviting audiences to sympathize with her discomfort. Furthermore, viewers know nothing about Gordo, as the film never depicts his life; audiences only hear and see what Simon and Robyn do every day and what Simon says about Gordo, thus shaping a narrative constructed on a binary that separates those good (Simon and Robyn) from those seemingly evil (the perturbed Gordo). Alone with Robyn after an uneasy dinner with Gordo, Simon talks to his wife about how weird his ex-friend is and always was. All the above are formal strategies The Gift introduces to align viewers with the couple while increasing mistruth toward Gordo. Even Robyn and Simon’s friends tell the couple that Gordo may be dangerous and should be kept at arms’ length. Simon’s story is one of success, as the young man has just accepted a promotion at his work. He also seems to be the perfect husband, inviting his wife to return to work (after a miscarriage) only if she wants to do so. Gordo, on the other hand, shows childish attitudes, seems to be trapped

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in the past, makes awkward political and religious comments, asks unfortunate questions about babies, and is caught lying about his life. Ominous music is heard in the background when Robyn is alone, presaging moments of violence. Like in The Invitation, the film offers close shots of Robyn’s face to enhance her discomfort at the (forced) presence of Gordo, while the man is shot mostly via wide frames. Soon after Gordo’s appearance, the couple’s dog disappears, and Robyn and Simon (and the audience) suspect Gordo. At the film mid-point, however, Robyn uncovers some facts about Simon’s life as a student that contradict some of his claims about Gordo. A couple of scenes later, the dog reappears, further cementing the ambiguity which starts to creep slowly into the story and disorient the viewers. The film plays masterfully with viewers’ expectations: Gordo is the psychopath about to explode, while Simon (played by Jason Bateman, well-­ known at the time for his comedic roles) is the man who will save his family at the climax. Eventually, however, buried secrets are brought to light: Gordo was bullied by Simon throughout his youth, to the point where Simon invented stories—revealing the homophobic streak in Simon’s character—to damage Gordo’s life. To end this new, uneasy relationship, Simon approaches Gordo to offer him an apology. For Simon, apologizing for his behavior as a child is a waste of time: he only does it to please his wife’s “exaggerated” concerns. For Simon, an alpha-male kid bullying a shy child is a natural stage of adolescence. When Gordo does not accept his apology, Simon brutally beats him, revealing him as the film’s real monster all along. Simon’s past as a bully is not something the now-successful businessman left behind but an integral part of himself. As revealed later in the film, Simon is climbing the social ladder in his job, thanks to his abusive behavior toward his peers, backstabbing, and the fabrication of stories that harm those who cross his path. Even worse, Simon is unable to find fault in this behavior, which he sees as integral to the ethos of cutthroat competition. It is Simon’s disdain for Gordo’s feelings that provokes the ire of his former classmate, who unleashes cruel vengeance on the family—maybe (or maybe not: it remains ambiguous to viewers) raping Robyn after drugging her in her home. Subsequently, Robyn is shown to be pregnant and perhaps expecting Gordo’s child. Stealing paternity from Simon is the path to damage his masculinity, turning the bully into a cuckold. If Gordo is now a monster, the film carefully depicts his construction as such at the hands of bullies like Simon.

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Like The Gift, It Comes at Night reveals the real monsters at the film’s end. The film’s community—Paul, Sarah, and Travis—works as a metonymy of Western society, with rules for political coexistence and reproduction of the conditions of kinship. Newcomers to this micro-society, Will, Kim, and Andrew are told about the rules for coexistence. The norms include always eating together—for the sake of rationing—leaving the house always in groups of two, never going out at night, keeping hygiene, and, most importantly, keeping the only door that gives to the outside always closed. As the house has all its accesses blocked except for that single door, the boundaries between the inside and outside are well marked. The rules guarantee not only coexistence but also survival: life resides within, death waits outside. The painting that decorates Travis’ room, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Triumph of the Death (1562), symbolizes the exterminating force that has returned to wipe out the entire world population once again. To keep death—the enemy—from coming in, rules must be strictly obeyed, even if they are cruel or can be read as inhuman. Despite the state of welfare that has been established for the community, Paul can also dispose of the lives of others at will through a kind of “super law” with which he arrogates to himself the power to decide, separate, and even eliminate the evil within the community. This “super-­ law” clearly delimits who is good and who is evil. Still, the blurring of the Manichean ethos shapes It Comes at Night. Paul and Sarah welcome the new family, so, to viewers, Paul, Sarah, and their son are presented as the “good” family, as the narrative is also filtered through their point of view. The only thing viewers know of the other family is what Paul knows: almost nothing. Thus, Will’s family remains in the shadows, presenting them as a potential threat. At first, Will’s family offers additional defense against the outside with the increase in numbers. As Sarah says, “The more people we have here, the better we can defend.” Paul agrees: his family is the most important thing, and if the incorporation of new members within his tiny community results in stronger defense for his family, it is imperative to incorporate them. This addition, however, is also apparently based on an ethical principle: it is the right thing to do. Will’s family is starving and afraid as they roam the country without a home: they need the companionship of other families. The social pact established between them is based on the norms of coexistence previously mentioned, but there is something that neither Paul nor Sarah mention to Will and his family: Paul’s right to dispose at will of their lives.

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The moment Paul and Sarah learn that Andrew, the son, is sick (and, potentially, so are Will and Kim), they assume they will leave the house, as sickness poses a risk to their survival. They also assume that Will’s family will not only take food with them when they leave but also return with other dangerous people. The decision to kill them is immediate. When the film reaches its climax, Will, Kim, and Andrew just want to leave the shelter. This family has no desire to take anything that does not belong to them nor to produce any damage to Paul’s community of three. Even so, Paul and Sarah insist on killing them based on the potential damage they can exert upon the community. Will and his family have become the evil people to the audiences, as they are now cold-blood killers. It Comes at Night connects with the study of complex issues of Manichean thinking by opening onto the question of post-apocalyptic scenarios represented by a pandemic and its effects upon America and its citizens. However, the way in which this is brought about—through the viewer’s ability to assume an uncomplicated empathy with the “leaders” of the survivors—is problematic. If at first the viewer is “forced” to follow Paul and Sarah as the representatives of “goodness” since there are no more characters to follow, the end turns the tables on this unproblematic image: Will’s family, at first depicted as potentially threatening, at least because their back-story remains shadowy, ends up as a group of innocent people trapped within a state of exception where their lives are worthless. They are contained and eliminated by the “good” characters, those who, right up until the climax, viewers follow and cheer for. The shift from “good” to “bad” is prefigured in an early scene. Travis risks his life in order to rescue his dog, an action that triggers Paul’s energetic reproach: “I’m not losing you over your grandpa’s dog … You want me to be the bad guy? I’ll be the bad guy.” Suspending the law means suspending relativism: there are, certainly, good guys and bad guys. Survival of the community/nation is the ultimate goal, even if that means killing a dog or an entire family. Paul’s ultimate action is that of suspending any relativism. He knows where the threat resides and he knows how to put an end to it. Even more ambiguous in its Manichean ethos is The Invitation’s climax. The film first asks audiences to empathize with Will and his fears about how dangerous the cult could be for those reunited at the party. As the film unfolds, however, the story starts to side with Eden and David, as Will is unable to prove anything against the couple, while his behavior deteriorates to the point of accusing the hosts of serving poisoned wine to

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the guests. This last statement, made after Will has been proven recurrently wrong in his assumptions about the cult, is correct. Certainly, Eden and David have planned mass suicide via poisoning. The revelation comes abruptly in the film’s last minutes after viewers’ sympathies have started to shift from Will to Eden. So abruptly comes the revelation that the viewers’ emotional commitment is left “floating,” unable to accommodate the new situation and the revelation of who the real monsters are. The Invitation, The Gift, and It Comes at Night play with expectations about who the bad guys are, apparently offering simplistic readings that easily accommodate Manichean assumptions. Via affect (more than rationality), audiences follow those whose ethics seem exemplary; yet, the films prove audiences wrong, demanding a more nuanced reading of social, cultural, and political contexts. Maybe monsters exist, and black and white are categories that may still be useful, but the problem comes with identification: it is easy to choose whom to follow when life is illustrated through black and white only.

Conclusions Robin Wood argues that most of American horror films stage, with the killing of the main menace, a return to the status quo. Most horror films, according to Wood, step back and revert to conservative values at the end. In the films here analyzed, this return to an idyllic status quo is basically impossible, as the status quo was already corrupted to begin with. The return of the repressed that The Invitation, The Gift, and It Comes at Night have to offer is not the monstrosity of cultists or bullies. What is brought from the social and cultural unconscious is the artificiality of Manicheism, an ethos more relevant than ever because it accommodates opposite and extreme opinions about what the right and the left are in a world where democracies start to slowly crumble down under the weight of populisms (both from the left and the right) which, in turn, base their power in the enthroning of the division of “us. vs. them.” While the Manichean approach practiced after 9/11 and continued until today increases in its dominion upon ethics, there is no possibility of reinstating a grey area of reasoning and doubt. The only thing that seems concrete and objective is that are evil people out there ready to destroy “our” community. The real problem resides in discerning who that bad people are. Unfortunately, the Manichean assumes the role of arbiter of absolute truths, sweeping away relativism in favor of clear-cut extremities that easily

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accommodate both the global market of media and politics, on the one hand, and our own expectations, on the other. There is a tension between the Manichean universalist readings the films offer, as they present real evil monsters and the disruptive nature of the horror genre. This tension takes place in the context of contemporary debates about relativism and the culture wars, with specific references to ethical assumptions of absolute truths. This chapter suggests that these tensions coalesce around the representation of Manichaeism, which is depicted in classical terms of black versus white, and the resulting ambivalence brought by the films is (un)resolved through the depiction of its fictional nature, where viewers’ expectations on who the monsters are end up being wrong.

References Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. Horror Film and Affect: Towards a Corporeal Model of Viewership. New York: Routledge. Altman, Rick. 2018. Film/Genre. New York: Bloomsbury. Besley, Tina, Michael Peters, and Sharon Rider. 2018. Afterword: Viral Modernity. From Postmodernism to Post-Truth? In Post-Truth, Fake News: Viral Modernity & Higher Education, ed. Michael A. Peters, Sharon Rider, Mats Hyvönen, and Tina Besley, 217–224. Dordrecht: Springer. Bump, Philip. 2018. Trump Promised “Very Honest” Comments on Immigration and Then Offered the Opposite. Washington Post, June 18. https:// www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/06/18/trumppromised-very-honest-comments-on-immigration-and-then-offered-theopposite/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a753d41a58dc. Dennis, Dion. 2017. From the Man in the High Tower: Make America Manichean Again. CTheory.Net, February 15. http://ctheory.net/ctheory_wp/from-theman-in-the-high-tower-make-america-manichaean-again/ Edgerton, Joel, dir. 2015. The Gift. STX Entertainment. Esposito, Luigi. 2021. Trumpism During and After the Trump Presidency: The Role of Conspiracy Theories. In Explaining and Resisting Trumpism Post-2020: Goodbye Donald, ed. Laura Finley and Matthew Johnson, 34–66. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Fawzi, Nayla. 2020. Right-Wing Populist Media Criticism. In Perspectives on Populism and the Media: Avenues for Research, ed. Benjamin Krämer and Christina Holtz-Bacha, 39–56. Baden-Baden: Nomos. Jeffres, Leo, David J. Atkin, and Kimberly A. Neuendorf. 2022. Audience Genre Expectations in the Age of Digital Media. New York: Routledge. Giroux, Henry. 2017. America at War with Itself. San Francisco: City Lights.

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Kaya, Ayhan. 2020. Populism and Heritage in Europe: Lost in Diversity and Unity. New York: Routledge. Kellner, Douglas. 2003. From 9/11 to Terror War: The Dangers of the Bush Legacy, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. Kusama, Kary, dir. 2015. The Invitation. Austin, Drafthouse Films. Levy, Neil. 2002. Moral Relativism: A Short Introduction. London: Oneworld Publication. McGlasson, Paul. 2019. Choose You this Day: The Gospel of Jesus Christ and the Politics of Trumpism. Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books. Melton, J. Gordo. 1992. Encyclopedic Handbook of Cults in America. New York: Garland Publishing. Grant, Will. 2021. Populista: The Rise of Latin America’s 21st Century Strongman. London: Apollo. Michaels, William C. 2002. No Greater Threat: America after September 11 and the Rise of a National Security State. New York: Algora Publishing. Mirra, Carl. 2008. United States Foreign Policy and the Prospects for Peace Education. Jefferson: McFarland. Momen, Mehnaaz. 2019. Political Satire, Postmodern Reality, and the Trump Presidency: Who Are We Laughing at? Lanham: Lexington. Peleg, Ilan. 2007. Democratizing the Hegemonic State: Political Transformation in the Age of Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roberts, Keith, and David Yamane. 2020. Religion in Sociological Perspectives. New York: SAGE. Shults, Trey Edward, dir. 2017. It Comes at Night. A24. Stelter, Brian. 2018. Trump Calls Journalists Bad People at Rally a Week after Newsroom Shooting. CNN, July 6. https://money.cnn.com/2018/07/06/ media/trump-­montana-­rally-­media-­attacks/index.html. Venturini, Tommaso. 2019. From Fake to Junk News: The Data Politics of Online Virality. In Data Politics: Worlds, Subjects, Rights, ed. Didier Bigo, Engin Isin, and Evelyn Ruppert, 123–144. New York: Routledge. Weinstein, Jamie. 2015. The Manichean World of Donald Trump. The Daily Caller, July 7. Wood, Robin. 2004. An Introduction to the American Horror Film. In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, 107–139. Lanham: Scarecrow Press.

CHAPTER 4

“I Can’t (Don’t) Breathe”: White Veterans and Twenty-First-Century Culture Wars James I. Deutsch

The surprise cinematic blockbuster of summer 2016 was Don’t Breathe, a low-budget horror film with a largely unknown American cast, filmed primarily in Budapest by a Uruguayan director and released by a major Hollywood studio.1 The film’s protagonist is a white veteran of the Gulf War, blinded by shrapnel in combat, who single-handedly defends his home against three youths seeking to steal the money he received as compensation for his daughter’s death. The film was so successful that five years later it spawned a sequel, Don’t Breathe 2, also with a largely unknown American cast, filmed primarily in Serbia by another Uruguayan director,

1

 Fede Álvarez directed Don’t Breathe, based on a script he co-wrote with Rodo Sayagues.

J. I. Deutsch (*) Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Washington, DC, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_4

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and released by the same Hollywood studio.2 In the sequel, the blind veteran fights members of a brutal gang who invade his home and kidnap the eleven-year-old girl he calls his daughter. Both Don’t Breathe films take place in Detroit, which is the only city in the United States larger than 500,000 that has an African American population above 70 percent (“City Snapshot: Detroit,” n.d.). And yet, African Americans are largely missing from both films. Whiteness predominates, even down to the name given to the central protagonist in the second film: Norman Nordstrom—a name that curiously suggests both Scandinavian normality and department-store prosperity.3 Moreover, Norman’s status as a white veteran of the Gulf War seems to align with the interpretation of Joseph Darda’s provocative book, How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America (2021). Darda argues that US veterans of the Vietnam War not only became symbols of a white masculinity that felt threatened and aggrieved by the culture wars of the late twentieth century but also ultimately proved triumphant in those wars—much like the white protagonist of the Don’t Breathe films. Although Darda’s book does not examine any horror films—much less horror films that feature war veterans as protagonists—this chapter aims to do exactly that. Because the two Don’t Breathe films together grossed more than $120 million in US box-office revenue, their themes and messages seem to have resonated strongly with audiences around the country and therefore deserve deeper explication and analysis.

The Two Don’t Breathe Films The first film (Don’t Breathe, Fede Álvarez 2016) begins with three young burglars breaking into the home of a wealthy family and stealing whatever they like—though careful not to take more than $10,000 in value, which would elevate the crime to “major larceny.” All seemingly in their early twenties, the three burglars are: Money, the leader of the gang; Rocky (short for Roxanne), who is trying to escape a dysfunctional family and move to California with her younger sister; and Alex, whose father works in home security, which enables him to get the keys that allow the burglars to foil security alarms.  Rodo Sayagues directed Don’t Breathe 2, based on a script he co-wrote with Fede Álvarez.  John Nordstrom (1871–1963) was a Swedish immigrant to Seattle, who in 1901 cofounded the store that became Nordstrom. 2 3

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Expressing disappointment with the small amount of money he receives for the goods they have stolen, including a Rolex watch, Money eagerly learns that an “Army vet loner” has at least $300,000 in cash at his home in a rundown Detroit neighborhood. The money was part of a settlement when Cindy Roberts, a “pretty girl” from a “rich-ass family” in the wealthy suburb of Grosse Pointe, accidentally killed the veteran’s young daughter in a car accident. We learn from a television broadcast at the end of the film that the “vet loner” is “a retired Army vet who fought for our country in Iraq and lost his sight as a result of a grenade splinter.” The veteran has no name in the first film—credited only as “the Blind Man.” He also has no name in Don’t Breathe 2, though the film’s credits identify him as Norman Nordstrom, which is the name I will use here. Although Alex wants no part of Money’s scheme because stealing $300,000 is a major felony and also because the homeowner is blind, Rocky convinces him to go along, promising that this will be their last crime. With the cash they steal, she will be able to leave Detroit and start a new life in California—suggesting that Alex might join her there. That night, the three arrive at Norman’s house and silence his dog with a sedative. Rocky breaks a window and enters the house, and Alex disables the alarm. Money finds Norman sleeping upstairs and releases a gas that should render him into “sleeping-beauty mode.” Alex decides to leave the house when Money reveals that he has brought with him a handgun because “It’s a soldier’s house. I’m not going to come in here without some chrome.” Ironically, the handgun becomes Money’s undoing when Norman awakens and finds the intruders downstairs. Because he is blind, he does not know how many there are. However, when he hears Money defiantly proclaim, “I know what’s in there and I ain’t leaving without it,” Norman uses his combat skills to overpower Money and kill him with the gun. Rocky tries to hide and not to breathe so that Norman will not know she too is there. Checking on his money, Norman opens a safe in his closet— which allows Rocky to see the safe’s numerical code. When Norman boards up the broken window and checks the doors, Rocky opens the safe and steals the cash. Meanwhile, Alex, who has heard the gunshot, returns to find Rocky with the money, which he estimates must be “more than a million dollars.” Seeking to evade Norman and escape from the house, Rocky and Alex descend a ladder into the basement, where they encounter a young woman in restraints, secured to a pulley. They learn that she is Cindy Roberts, the

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young woman responsible for the death of Norman’s daughter. Because Cindy’s movements trigger a bell, which Norman hears, he too descends into the basement and fires a gun in their direction, unintentionally killing Cindy. Finding her lifeless body, Norman becomes extremely distraught, crying “no” many times and even “my baby.” Rocky and Alex continue their attempts to escape. Realizing that Norman had abducted Cindy and held her captive, Alex wants to call 911, but Rocky prefers to escape with the money without involving the police. When Norman’s dog, which has recovered from the sedative, attacks them, Rocky and Alex separate. In different parts of the house, they each encounter Norman, who expertly demonstrates his combat skills, but never completely subdues Alex or Rocky due to his blindness. In one such encounter, Rocky pleads, “Please let me go. I understand you. She killed your daughter and you wanted her to pay. I understand that; I won’t tell anyone.” In dialogue that builds sympathy for the veteran—even after we have learned that he abducted Cindy and is not a purely innocent victim—Norman replies, “You understand nothing. Only a parent could know the bond between a father and his child. She should have gone to prison, but rich girls don’t go to jail.” Rocky tries to reason, “None of this is going to bring your daughter back.” But Norman counters with the logic of a grieving and emotionally wounded parent, “That’s not really true. Cindy took my child away from me. I thought it only fair that she give me a new one. She was pregnant with my baby. You killed them both. They would be alive if you hadn’t broken into my home.” “No,” protests Rocky. “You have to be held accountable.” When Rocky calls on God to help her, Norman angrily responds— again with dialogue that may explain his despair, “God? There’s no God. It’s a joke. It’s a bad joke. You tell me what God would allow this.” Placing Rocky into the same restraints that had held Cindy, Norman tries to explain, “I’m not a rapist. I never forced myself on her. I promised I would set her free just as soon as she gave me a child. But now she’s gone.” Holding a turkey baster presumably filled with his own semen, Norman tells Rocky, “There’s nothing a man cannot do once he accepts that there is no God. You’re strong, you’re young, you’ll breed well… Nine months and I will give you your life back.” However, just as he is ready to inseminate Rocky, Alex suddenly reappears and knocks Norman down with a hammer. Rocky shoves the turkey baster into Norman’s mouth and hits him repeatedly.

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Rocky and Alex make their way to the front door, but fumble with the keys, allowing Norman time to recover and to shoot Alex dead. Rocky is able to escape to the car, just ahead of Norman’s dog, but once again is caught by Norman, who drags her back to the house. However, she is able to set off the security alarm, which emits a piercing sound that drives Norman to distraction, allowing Rocky to hit him repeatedly with a crowbar. Just as a police cruiser arrives at the house to investigate the alarm, Rocky escapes undetected. The final scene shows Rocky and her sister at a train station, preparing to leave for California. A television news program they see in the station shows Norman alive on an ambulance stretcher, noting that “two burglars broke into his home and attempted to rob and brutally attack him.” The report continues, “This visually impaired man was able to defend himself—shooting and killing both his attackers on the spot… No goods were reported stolen by the victim.” Rocky stares at the television screen, knowing that Norman deliberately made no mention of her, thus allowing her to keep the money she stole—unless, of course, she wishes to admit her crime. Rocky and her sister move toward the train platform. The End. Don’t Breathe 2 (Rodo Sayagues 2021) begins with a girl running through woods, pursued by a dog that seems intent on mauling her. However, we soon learn that this is only a survival-training exercise. The girl is Norman’s eleven-year-old daughter named Phoenix, and the dog is their pet named Shadow. Further exposition tells us that Norman and Phoenix live alone in a remote area, where Norman homeschools her, and that (according to Norman) the girl’s mother died in a fire eight years earlier. Their one outside contact is Hernandez, a former Army Ranger, who delivers groceries from her pickup truck and who occasionally takes Phoenix to “town,” which presumably is Detroit—the skyline of which appears in the distance. Norman allows Phoenix to spend the afternoon with Hernandez but does not know that Phoenix will stop—as is her custom—at the abandoned house where the fire occurred and will leave flowers in memory of Phoenix’s mother. However, this time Phoenix hears footsteps in the house and quickly returns to Hernandez’s pickup. Then they go to a park with a carousel, where Phoenix—clearly starved for companionship—fantasizes about riding on the carousel with other children from the nearby Covenant Shelter. Before returning home, Phoenix stops to use a restroom, where a strange man suddenly appears, introduces himself as Raylan,

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and tells her she is pretty. Phoenix rejects the man’s offer of friendship and returns home with Hernandez. Raylan and several other men follow them. Returning Phoenix to her home, Hernandez suggests that Norman allow Phoenix more freedom. Not knowing anything about Norman’s real past from the first film, Hernandez tells him, “You’re a bad man. A man who’s done terrible things.” In a way that again builds sympathy for the veteran, she explains, “At least, I know you think that. Just like sometimes I do about myself. War changes us all. No soul returns holy from it. Don’t make her [Phoenix] pay for that.” Norman thanks Hernandez for the advice. However, when Hernandez starts to drive back to town, the road is blocked by Raylan’s truck, which she tells him to move. Seeing her Army jacket, Raylan asks, “You served?” He adds—though we’re not sure if we can believe it, “We all did too [in Iraq]. Dishonorably discharged from a dishonorable war. So that makes us honorable somehow.” Raylan says he’ll move his truck—“Sure, baby, whatever you want.” But when Hernandez returns to her pickup, a member of Raylan’s gang leaps out from the back seat and brutally beats her to death with a hammer. Back in their home, Phoenix and Norman discuss plans for the future. She wants to go to school next year—a “real school, with other kids like me.” When Norman tells her that “homeschool is safer,” Phoenix declares, “I don’t want to be safe. I want to be normal. I want to have friends. I want to live.” Norman explains, “I already lost a daughter once. I’m not losing you,” though we are uncertain how much Phoenix may know about Norman’s previous daughter. Following the pattern of the first film, Norman is again the victim of attackers, as we see Raylan and members of his gang gathering outside the home. They shoot Shadow and make their way to the house. Sensing danger, Norman orders Phoenix to hide in “the box,” which is a large metal safe in the basement with slats for breathing. Meanwhile, Norman fights and kills several of the intruders, but eventually Raylan captures both Norman and Phoenix, with the help of his dog that tracked Norman by the scent of clothing found outside the house. We now understand that Raylan was the man in the abandoned house and that he had followed Phoenix from there to the park. He tells her not to be afraid, because “this has all just been one big misunderstanding. It’s not me you need to be scared of, but the man standing next to you,” i.e., Norman. Raylan explains, “Years ago, there was a fire in our house. Cops blamed me. I spent eight years in prison, wondering if I would ever see

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you again. Hell, I didn’t even know if you were dead or alive. This creep here [Norman] must have found you and kept you for himself.” What Raylan does not reveal—which we hear in a news report—is that a criminal laboratory for making methamphetamine caused the fire. When Norman and Phoenix momentarily escape from Raylan, she asks Norman if what Raylan said is true. To demonstrate his honesty, Norman does not deny that he found her outside the house that had burned. When Phoenix starts to walk away, Raylan’s gang grabs her, while Norman runs to the house. Raylan ignites the house with Molotov cocktails, but Norman is able to escape, even saving Raylan’s dog, which had been trapped in the attic. Members of Raylan’s gang also notice medals on the wall of Norman’s garage, which identify him as a Navy SEAL—a detail that directly contradicts Norman’s identification in the first film as “a retired Army vet who fought for our country in Iraq and lost his sight as a result of a grenade splinter.” So far as I am able to determine, no reviews of the film have noted this discrepancy. Raylan takes Phoenix to a downtown hotel, where he and his gang live. He tells her that her real name is Tara and that she can leave at any time because she is not “a prisoner”—as she was with Norman. However, just as Phoenix decides to leave, she hears a song that she remembers from her childhood and learns that the woman singing the song is her mother Josephine, who tells Phoenix that “the same fire that destroyed our family” also poisoned Josephine’s blood and “badly damaged” her heart. “It burned up my insides,” Josephine explains. We “used to have a kitchen in the basement of our house where we used to cook. It was for our business,” conveniently not mentioning the meth lab. Raylan gives Phoenix a glass of juice, which apparently is spiked with a sedative. But just before she falls unconscious, Phoenix hears Josephine say, “I need a new heart, baby. But not just any heart… it must be a compatible donor. Like a direct relative. You hold the gift that can save your mama’s life. And baby, I need that gift… We’ll finally be together as one. You’ll live on in me.” Meanwhile, Norman has found his way to the gang’s hotel, thanks to the guidance of Raylan’s dog. Just as a rogue doctor is about to cut open Phoenix and transplant her heart into Josephine, the electricity goes out— signaling Norman’s arrival on the scene. Even though he remains blind, Norman is able to track down everyone, dispatching them one by one. When he finds Raylan, Norman presses his fingers deeply into Raylan’s eyes, telling him, “Now you’re going to see what I see”—meaning nothing at all.

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When Phoenix finds Norman, he tells her not to come closer. “Everything he [Raylan] said is true. I am no father. I have killed. I have raped. I am nothing. Nothing but a monster. And you cannot be around me. Ever. So, go.” Just then, Raylan suddenly stabs Norman from behind and is about to slice Norman’s throat when Phoenix plunges a blade through Raylan’s chest. Turning to Norman, Phoenix cries, “Please, no, no, no. Let me help you. I can save you.” Norman replies with his dying words, “You already have.” In the film’s final scene, Phoenix leaves the hotel and walks toward the Covenant Shelter adjacent to the park with the carousel. Seeing some children on the front step, she asks if there may be “room for one more.” The response from one of the children (who happens to be African American) is, “I’m sure there is. What’s your name?” Long pause as she ponders the question, “My name is Phoenix.” The End.

Reception of the Two Films Although Don’t Breathe had its premiere screening at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin in March 2016, Sony Pictures/Screen Gems delayed its nationwide theatrical release until August 26, 2016. Word of mouth about the film quickly spread, making it the number one box-office hit on its first weekend in the United States, earning $26.1 million—more than twice as much as the number-two hit, Suicide Squad, a superhero-­ supervillain film starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie (Barnes 2016). That contrast becomes even more remarkable by comparing the budgets for the two films. Don’t Breathe cost $9.9 million to make; Suicide Squad cost an estimated $185 million (Barnes 2016). Admittedly, by the end of the year, Suicide Squad had grossed $325,100,054 by playing in 4255 US theaters, compared with Don’t Breathe’s domestic gross of $89,217,875 in 3384 theaters—but one film grossed less than twice its production cost, while the other grossed nearly ten times its cost (“Domestic Box Office for 2016” 2017). The critical reception for Don’t Breathe was primarily positive. The Austin Chronicle noted its “economical narrative that makes the most of its claustrophobic, almost-all-in-one-location shooting to heighten the film’s tension and frights” (Baumgarten 2016). Film Comment praised the way Don’t Breathe “grabs audiences by the jugular from its first seconds,” admiring the film’s “impeccable cinematography,” “obsessive attention to detail,” and “impeccable sound design” (Kern 2016). Similarly, the

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academic journal Film & History observed how the director “balances the brutality of the on-screen violence and the artful mise-en-scène with the audacity of the great horror-film auteurs. The film is a miracle of canny camera placement and scene composition, almost elegant in its calculation and execution” (Tibbetts 2016, 106). Even the New York Times, normally not overly enthusiastic about low-budget horror films, admitted that “it will probably please fans of this simple genre with its solid suspense, murky lighting and ‘gotcha!’ scares” (Gates 2016, C9). Don’t Breathe 2 cost approximately $15 million to make, roughly 50 percent more than the original, and earned significantly less at the box office, with a domestic gross of $32,712,950 by playing in 3005 US theaters (“Domestic Box Office for 2021” 2022). Although the coronavirus pandemic surely affected its box-office reception, the critical reviews were decidedly unenthusiastic. This time, the Austin Chronicle called it “a horrific and delusional sequel to its predecessor… The Blind Man is no longer a mysterious character: The audience already knows his crimes, and it’s delusional for this pair [filmmakers Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues] to think that they can root for him this time around just because he’s tasked with saving the life of a young girl” (Nulf 2021). The Guardian was even more disparaging, calling the sequel “an unforgivably dull piece of product that should never have breathed in the first place.” Its advice: “Save the cash, save yourself” from the film’s “99 increasingly awful minutes” (Lee 2021). In this case, the New York Times faulted the film’s “rancid narrative (and some seriously terrible dialogue)” (Wilson 2021, C8).

The Horror Film Genre The New York Times review of Don’t Breathe 2 begins by observing, “In horror films, dogs often die. People die too, of course, and female characters are usually the quickest to perish” (Wilson 2021, C8). That may be one way to characterize the horror-film genre, but if so, it’s just one of many attempts to do so. Indeed, there may be more written about horror films than any other cinematic genre. For instance, the bibliography for “horror films” in Barry Keith Grant’s definitive Film Genre Reader covers twelve and a half pages; by comparison, the bibliographies for “science fiction films” and “western films” are respectively only ten and nine pages each (Grant 2003, 586–95, 603–2). The consensus among film historians for at least the last half-century is that the horror-film genre remains vital. In 1972, T. J. Ross noted that

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“the horror film continues to enjoy the best of health” and is “among the longest-lived of film genres” (Ross 1972, 1). Exactly fifty years later, Grant observed, “It is not surprising that while other film genres have cycled in and out of popularity, horror has been consistently present in one form or another through film history” (Grant 2022, 1). Given the volume of material written about horror films, there is no single definition of the genre. However, as a folklorist, I regard horror films in the tradition of myths, legends, and folktales (the three forms of folk literature), which often express both our shared dreams and shared nightmares. The latter reflect many of our universal concerns and fears— most notably the fear of death, which serves as the foundation for nearly every horror film. The building blocks of folk literature are formulaic conventions—such as the formulaic opening, “once upon a time,” or the formulaic closing, “they lived happily ever after.” Similarly, horror films—like all film genres— rely on conventions and formulas that both filmmakers and audiences know and respect. One of those is that horror films often take place in domestic interior spaces—whether it be Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, a Georgetown townhouse in which a young girl is demonically possessed and exorcised, a suburban house on Elm Street where strange nightmares occur, or the homes of a blind veteran in Detroit. In this regard, the two Don’t Breathe films closely follow the horror-film conventions. Another horror-film convention is what Carol J.  Clover termed the “Final Girl,” i.e., “the one who did not die… who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again… She alone looks death in the face, but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (1992, 35). Both of the Don’t Breathe films feature a Final Girl: Rocky surviving with ending A and Phoenix surviving with ending B. The fact that the two Don’t Breathe films closely follow the conventions of horror films is not surprising, considering the background of the two Uruguayan filmmakers who co-wrote and directed the two films. Both Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues are film-school graduates who have steeped themselves in film history, especially the horror-film genre.4 In fact, Álvarez’s directorial debut in 2013 was a “reinvention” of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead (1981), a “cult classic about a group of teens… who discover a Book of the Dead that unleashes demons they cannot control” 4

 See, for instance, Hosoku (2021).

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(Kroll 2012). Moreover, Álvarez is very conscious of cinematic conventions, telling one interviewer, “I think a good horror movie should be scary above all things” and should “create a whole cinematic experience. I think that’s what it takes to get the audience to the theater and justify seeing [a movie] on a big screen. You have to give them a cinematic experience” (quoted in Rife 2016). With Don’t Breathe, Álvarez also deliberately eschewed any elements of the supernatural, which he labeled “a trend of horror lately.” Instead, one of his “self-imposed rules” for the film was that “it has to be in the real world, there’s enough horror in the real world” (PBAdmin 2016).

Don’t Breathe and Culture Wars Because of the backgrounds of the filmmakers behind the two Don’t Breathe films and the vitality of the horror-film genre among film historians and critics, the scholarly focus on the two films has been almost exclusively on horror. So far as I can determine, there has been nothing written about the film’s relationship to racial issues nor to the protagonist’s status as a combat veteran in the Gulf War, much less as a combatant in US culture wars. As already noted, it seems highly unusual for two films set in Detroit—a city whose African American population was 77.9 percent, according to the 2020 US Census (US Census Bureau, n.d.)—to have so few African Americans on screen. There are two identifiably Latino characters in Don’t Breathe 2: Hernandez (though we know this only from her surname) and Raul, who is the only member of Raylan’s gang to survive Norman’s revenge because he disagrees with Raylan’s plan to transplant Phoenix’s heart into Josephine. “That’s not cool with me,” Raul explains—just before telling Norman where to find Raylan. Curiously, the first Don’t Breathe also features a character named Raul, who buys the stolen goods from Money and then informs Money about the “Army vet loner” with $300,000 in the house. Although the same actor, Christian Zagia, plays both of the characters named Raul, there is no suggestion that the fence in Don’t Breathe has joined forces with Raylan eight years later. The actor playing Money in Don’t Breathe is Daniel Zovatto, born in Costa Rica, but the character displays no identifiably Latino characteristics and is the first to die in the film. The near-total absence of African Americans in the two Don’t Breathe films might be seen simply as a casting quirk were it not for the deeply

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symbolic meaning of the words in the films’ title. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, made “I can’t breathe” a national symbol for police brutality against African Americans. Moreover, a New York Times investigation from 2020 concluded that “at least 70 people have died in law enforcement custody after saying the same words—‘I can’t breathe.’ The dead ranged in age from 19 to 65… More than half were black” (Baker et al. 2020). At least one of those cases—the death of Eric Garner in New York on July 17, 2014—was front-page news, most notably in the (New York) Daily News, which on December 4, 2014, boldly proclaimed in tall letters, “We Can’t Breathe” (Makarechi 2014). Accordingly, the filmmakers should have been aware of the significance of “I can’t breathe” when it came to choosing a title for the 2016 film— and even more so for the 2021 film. The first film’s original title (ca. 2014) was A Man in the Dark, so renaming it Don’t Breathe was a deliberate decision (McNary 2014). I am unable to determine when or why the titles changed, but there are significant symbolic differences. Presumably referring to Norman, A Man in the Dark renders him relatively powerless, clueless, and unable to see what is happening around him. In contrast, Don’t Breathe refers not to Norman, but rather to the white characters from the first film who have the capacity to breathe but try not to do so— to avoid being heard by the man whose home they have invaded. The African Americans in Detroit who are largely absent from the two films have no breath at all—an irony that seems to have escaped everyone associated with both films. Making a connection between “I can’t breathe” and “Don’t breathe” seems straightforward. However, the only reference to the meaning(s) of the title I could find among the many reviews of the two films is tied to the coronavirus pandemic. A reviewer for RogerEbert.com wrote, “It’s difficult to determine whether this is the best or worst possible time to release a movie called Don’t Breathe 2 about people who stay inside their house all day; the fact that it’s only playing in theaters indicates that the studio hopes you’ll be willing to leave yours” (Lemire 2021). Similarly absent from analyses of the two films is Norman’s status as a white veteran and how this may align with one interpretation of US veterans at the center of the late twentieth century’s culture wars. In How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America, Joseph Darda argues that white veterans of the Vietnam War became a convenient symbol in the 1980s and 1990s for conservatives seeking to define the culture and national identity of the United States. According to Darda,

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“Conservatives felt that the nation had lost sight of itself in Southeast Asia, with the antiracist, feminist, and antiwar movements eroding the anticommunist consensus, and believed that restoring the nation they longed for meant reclaiming the Vietnam War as a good war” (Darda 2021, 20). The nation’s “losing sight” may add another connection to the blinded veteran in the two films. As Darda notes, the “transformation of the Vietnam vet into a vessel for white racial interests took some historical revision” because “[h]undreds of thousands of American Indian, Black, and Latino soldiers, marines, sailors, and airmen fought and died in Southeast Asia, often receiving more dangerous and less desirable assignments than their white comrades” (3). Nevertheless, in spite of these incongruities, “the wounded white warrior” became a consensus figure among both conservatives and liberals—a consensus that “allowed Sylvester Stallone, the conservative movie star, and Bruce Springsteen, the liberal rock star, to fill theaters and stadiums” to sympathize with “the wounded white warrior” from Vietnam (3). Stallone’s portrayal of John Rambo, the psychologically wounded veteran in Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985), “further elevated the POW as an icon of the conservative moment and reinforced the idea that the United States could have won the war if fainthearted liberals hadn’t lost their nerve” (17). Similarly, Springsteen’s song “Born in the USA” (1984) tells of “white men ‘down in the shadow of the penitentiary/out by the gas fires of the refinery’ whose American dream had turned into a white nightmare in Vietnam” (3). Norman Nordstrom is another of those wounded warriors, who like Rambo or the unnamed protagonist in Springsteen’s song becomes associated with “the overwhelming whiteness of war culture” (4). As was the case with the culture wars, contradictions abound in Norman’s character—and not only whether he may be a veteran of the Army or Navy. As one critic noted, “Many have questioned whether or not the character deserves redemption or if the character should be seen as a hero or anti-hero… In Don’t Breathe, Norman does some unspeakable things ranging from brutal murder to kidnapping to sexual assault. Yet, in this film [Don’t Breathe 2], Norman seemed redeemed for protecting a little girl from people who want to do her harm” (Sirikul 2021). Building upon these contradictions, Stephen Lang, the actor who portrays Norman, told an interviewer,

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Certainly, the blind man, there are many positives to the guy, but every positive in his life has been kind of broken in front of him and thrown in his face and what we’re left with—what you’ll meet—is a man who is deeply embittered and really teetering on the edge of an abyss. But, even in that darkness, the thing that we won’t talk about that he’s doing, when you think about it in his own twisted way, is a life-affirming thing. And to me, what that means, it just bespeaks sadness. It just talks about how really, really sad he is. And I think that operates on an audience. I think it produces empathy and it produces sympathy, even as you’re absolutely horrified by it. (“Don’t Breathe— Cast interview” 2016)

Presumably not knowing anything about How White Men Won the Culture Wars, Lang’s interpretation of the character reinforces Darda’s analysis of the wounded white warrior. Norman Nordstrom unequivocally dies at the end of Don’t Breathe 2—stabbed in the back by Raylan, a thug so brutal that he wants to kill his eleven-year-old daughter in order to transplant her heart into the body of her mother, whose own heart was damaged by cooking too much methamphetamine. Nevertheless, Stephen Lang recently hinted that the character of Norman may return. “I enjoyed filming Don’t Breathe and Don’t Breathe 2 very, very much,” Lang told Screen Rant. “Just as I plan to enjoy filming Don’t Breathe 3” (Hermanns 2022). If so, it would not be the first time that one of Lang’s characters returned from the dead. The recent release of Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) resurrects Colonel Miles Quaritch as a “recombinant” even though Quaritch unequivocally dies at the end of the original Avatar (2009), still the highest-grossing film of all time (Lawrence 2022). If Norman Nordstrom does indeed return to the screen, viewers can only wonder if he will remain blind in literal terms to the physical world and also if the filmmakers will remain blind in metaphorical terms to the connections between “I can’t breathe” and “don’t breathe.”

References Álvarez, Fede, dir. 2016. Don’t Breathe. Screenplay by Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues. Sony Pictures. Baker, Mike, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Manny Fernandez, and Michael LaForgia. 2020. Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of “I Can’t Breathe.” New York Times, June 20. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2020/06/28/us/i-cant-breathe-police-arrest.html

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Barnes, Brooks. 2016. Don’t Breathe Tops the North American Box Office. New York Times, August 29. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/29/ movies/dont-breathe-tops-the-north-american-box-office.html Baumgarten, Marjorie. 2016. Don’t Breathe. Austin Chronicle, August 26. https://www.austinchronicle.com/events/film/2016-­08-­26/dont-­breathe Cameron, James, dir. 2009. Avatar: The Way of Water. 20th Century Fox. City Snapshot: Detroit. n.d. The Roots of Structural Racism Project. https:// belonging.berkeley.edu/city-­snapshot-­detroit Clover, Carol J. 1992. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cosmatos, George P., dir. 1985. Rambo: First Blood, Part II. Tristar Pictures. Darda, Joseph. 2021. How White Men Won the Culture Wars: A History of Veteran America. Berkeley: University of California Press. Domestic Box Office for 2016. 2017. Box Office Mojo. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2016 Domestic Box Office for 2021. 2022. Box Office Mojo. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2021 Don’t Breathe—Cast Interview. 2016. IGN YouTube, August 24. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Q9MYLRzN0P0&t=382s Gates, Anita. 2016. Review: Don’t Breathe: Whose Bright Idea Was It to Rob a Blind Man? New York Times, August 26. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/26/ movies/dont-breathe-review.html Grant, Barry Keith. 2022. 100 American Horror Films. London: Bloomsbury for British Film Institute. ———, ed. 2003. Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hermanns, Grant. 2022. Don’t Breathe 3 Plans Teased by Blind Man Actor. Screen Rant, November 7. https://screenrant.com/dont-­breathe-­3-­plans-­ stephen-­lang-­tease Hosoku, Nobuhiro. 2021. Don’t Breathe 2: Interview with Writer/Director Rodo Sayagues and Writer/Producer Fede Álvarez. Cinema Daily US, August 13. https://cinemadailyus.com/interviews/dont-­breathe-­2-­interview-­with-­ writer-­director-­rodo-­sayagues-­and-­writer-­producer-­fede-­Álvarez/ Kern, Laura. 2016. House of Pain. Film Comment 52 (September–October): 20–21. Kroll, Justin. 2012. Fernandez to Haunt Evil Dead. Variety, February 2. https:// variety.com/2012/film/news/fernandez-­to-­haunt-­evil-­dead-­1118049667 Lawrence, Derek. 2022. Stephen Lang on Quaritch’s Return from the Dead in Avatar: The Way of Water. Vulture, December 16. https://www.vulture. c om/2022/1 2 / st e p h en -­l a n g-­o n -­h i s-­a va ta r-­v i l l a i ns-­r e tur n-­f r om-­ the-­dead.html Lee, Benjamin. 2021. Don’t Breathe 2 Review: Dull and Dingy Home Invasion Horror Sequel. The Guardian, August 12. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/ aug/12/dont-­breathe-­2-­review-­hapless-­home-­invasion-­horror-­sequel

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Lemire, Christy. 2021. Don’t Breathe 2. RogerEbert.com, August 13. https:// www.rogerebert.com/reviews/dont-­breathe-­2-­movie-­review-­2021 Makarechi, Kia. 2014. New York Daily News and Post’s Eric Garner Front Pages Reveal Two New  Yorks. Vanity Fair, December 4. https://www.vanityfair. com/news/daily-­n ews/2014/12/new-­y ork-­d aily-­n ews-and-­p ost-­s -­e ric-­ garner-­front-­pages-­reveal-­two-­new-­yorks McNary, Dave. 2014. Sam Raimi Gearing up A Man in the Dark with Evil Dead director Fede Álvarez. Variety, October 30. https://variety.com/2014/film/ news/sam-­raimi-­a-­man-­in-­the-­dark-­fede-­Álvarez-­1201343516 Nulf, Jenny. 2021. Don’t Breathe 2. Austin Chronicle, August 20. https://www. austinchronicle.com/events/film/2021-­08-­20/dont-­breathe/ PBAdmin. 2016. Interview: Director Fede Álvarez on Don’t Breathe. ComingSoon.net, March 13. https://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/ 665919-­interview-­director-­fede-­Álvarez-­on-­dont-­breathe Raimi, Sam, dir. 1981. The Evil Dead. Renaissance/New Line. Rife, Katie. 2016. Don’t Breathe’s Fede Álvarez on Reversing our Horror Expectations. AV Club, August 27. https://www.avclub.com/don-­t-­breathe-­ s-­fede-­Álvarez-­on-­reversing-­our-­horror-­ex-­1798251141 Ross, T.J. 1972. Introduction. In Focus on the Horror Film, ed. Roy Huss and T.J. Ross, 1–10. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Sayagues, Rodo, dir. 2021. Don’t Breathe 2. Screenplay by Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues. Sony Pictures/Screen Gems. Sirikul, Laura. 2021. Don’t Breathe 2: Norman Nordstrom “Definitely” Isn’t the Hero of the Story. IGN, June 30. https://www.ign.com/articles/dontbreathe-2-norman-hero-or-villain Springsteen, Bruce. 1984. Born in the USA. Born in the USA. Columbia. Tibbetts, John C. 2016. Don’t Breathe. Film & History 46 (Winter): 104–6. US Census Bureau. n.d. Quick facts: Detroit City, Michigan. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/detroitcitymichigan Wilson, Lena. 2021. Don’t Breathe 2 Review: Don’t Be a Woman, Either. New York Times, August 13. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/movies/ dont-­breathe-­2-­review.html

CHAPTER 5

The Unbearable Whiteness of Get Out (2017) and Midsommar (2019) Donald L. Anderson

Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger—these are monsters who happen to be white. This chapter examines how Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017) and Midsommar (Ari Aster 2019) highlight a critical shift in the monster archetype by making the monster’s race a source of horror—the monster who is a monster because they are white. Further, both films present these monsters with liberal and progressive ideals that contradict their otherwise racist behavior. The history of how Black people fear white people—whether from cops trailing their car or the many “Karens” populating suburban parks, both of which threaten Black people with jail time or, worse, murder—is nothing new. But the explicit representation of this fear has only recently manifested in the horror genre. This race-conscious shift in monstrosity requires horror critics reengage with theories of the gaze and the monster and ask how white viewers are hailed by these monsters.

D. L. Anderson (*) Mt. Hood Community College, Gresham, OR, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_5

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To provide the historical context necessary for addressing the above, I begin with analyses of representative texts from African American literature. This is because we cannot read these race-conscious horror films outside the work already done in this literature. Just as the white monster is nothing new for Black people who must navigate such monsters in their everyday lives, they are not new to African American literature.

The Douglass Dialectic Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) offers early appearances of white monsters in the form of overseers who manage slaves and whose brutality matches, if not outdoes, that of horror film’s key villains. Mr. Plummer is the first overseer to appear in the narrative and is described as a “savage monster” who “went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel” (Douglass [1845] 1996, 33). He was known to “slash women’s heads” and “take great pleasure in whipping a slave” (33). Douglass provides this terrible scene: I have often been awaked at the dawn of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tip up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from this gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. (33)

For Douglass, this “horrible exhibition” becomes the “blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery” (34). The next overseer is Mr. Severe— who Douglass claims is “rightly named” and took “pleasure in manifesting his fiendish barbarity” (34). Unlike Mr. Plummer, Mr. Severe is described as a “profane swearer” whose presence in the field “made it both the field of blood and of blasphemy” (35). As if describing Jason Voorhees, Douglass writes, “From the rising till the going down of the sun [he] was cursing, raving, cutting, and slashing among the slaves of the field, in the most frightful manner” (36). Another overseer, Mr. Austin Gore, possesses a “savage barbarity” and a “shrill voice” that “produc[ed] horror and trembling in [the slaves’] ranks” (42). Mr. Gore later murders a slave named Demby, whose graphic death provides one of the more horrific scenes of the narrative. Without the aid of Hegel, whose master/slave analysis appeared thirty-­ seven years earlier, Douglass’ narrative provides an exegesis of such a

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dialectic by showing how slavery “dehumanizes” both master and slave. I do not want to downplay the importance of Douglass’ larger examination of how slavery works—both ideologically and materially, on the slaves themselves; however, it is how slavery corrodes the moral and finally human condition of the slave master or overseer that illustrates their transformation into a white monster figure. This dialectic is especially clear in the relationship between Douglass and Sophia Auld. When Douglass first meets Mrs. Auld, he describes her as having “the kindest heart and finest feelings” and “had been in a good degree preserved from the blighting and dehumanizing effects of slavery” (47). He later tracks how Auld’s “heavenly smiles” and voice that recalls “tranquil music” gradually disintegrate: But alas! This kind heart had but a short time to remain such. The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work. That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon. (47–8)

As with werewolves, zombies, vampires, Frankenstein’s monster, and many other figures of horror, there remain uncanny traces of the human. This is the importance of the adjective and transitive verb forms of “dehumanization.” They both describe a process of becoming Other so the object receiving their description or action is in a state of flux. Douglass employs similar language: “to commence,” “became,” and “changed.” This process aligns these characters in the narrative with their horror monster successors who experience similar metamorphoses. Douglass is clear, however, that slaves received the worst of the effects of slavery—this is inarguable. He nonetheless also shows how the whole institution gradually robbed both slave and slaveowner of their humanity, and this theft from the latter had turned them into thoughtless killing machines—or white monsters. James Baldwin regularly tracked the dehumanizing effects of racism on both Black and white people. In the broadcast program “Perspectives: Negro and the American Promise” (1963), Baldwin asks of white people: How are you going to communicate to the vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority that you are here? I’m terrified of the moral apathy, the death

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of the heart, that is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long, they really don’t think that I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say. And this means that they have become themselves, moral monsters.

Here too Baldwin employs the language of becoming—“happening,” “deluding,” and “become”—before finally identifying the “white majority” as monsters. But what makes them monsters specifically is the moral degradation we also witness in Douglass’ narrative. The “terror” Baldwin feels finds its most palpable presentation in the short story “Going to Meet the Man” (1965), his most violent and disturbing work. The story opens with Jesse, a forty-two-year-old sheriff, who struggles with sleep and pleasuring his wife. His resentment toward the Black people in town is born from his own sexual inadequacies. While beating a Black inmate for failing to silence the other inmates’ singing that Jesse finds so disturbing, the scene assumes the mood of an exorcism. The singing targets the white people’s inhumanity and instills panic in Jesse, who sees the commotion as a threat to “disrupting traffic and molesting the people and keeping us from our duties and keeping doctors from getting to sick white women” (Baldwin [1965] 1995, 233). Despite the agitating effect of the singing on Jesse, these songs are not to save Jesse’s soul as one would expect in an exorcism story. The inmate insists, “Those kids ain’t going to stop singing. We going to keep singing until every one of you miserable white mothers go stark raving out of your minds” (233). Jesse concludes that “perhaps this is what the singing had meant all along. They had not been singing Black folks into heaven, they had been singing white folks into hell” (236). This epiphany allows Jesse to see himself as a monster—in this case, a demon whose proper home is Hell. Unlike other racist characters in Baldwin’s work that maintain some level of humanity, Jesse inspires no sympathy in the reader. The story ends with the most graphically violent scene Baldwin has written. While still struggling to sleep alongside his wife, Jesse recalls a memory from his childhood when his father, accompanied by his mother, took him to a lynching. The memory itself is triggered by a song coming from “out of the darkness of the room,” thus maintaining the theme of exorcism from before (239). On the way to the site of the lynching amassed by hundreds of white people from the local town, Jesse notices a transformation in his father. His “lips had a strange, cruel curve,” and his “body suddenly seemed immense, bigger than a mountain.” The father’s

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eyes turned from “grey green” to “yellow” (244). His father is anticipating and relishing the violence to come. In the center of the gathering is a large fire pit with a nameless Black man suspended in chains over the flames. The awful scene concludes when one of the father’s friends castrates the man: “The crowd screamed as the knife flashed, first up, then down, cutting the dreadful thing away, and the blood came roaring down” (248). The significance of the castration is commonly interpreted as a reaction to the racist fear of Black men’s sexuality and especially the fear a Black man’s penis was larger than a white man’s penis. The moment Jesse notices the castrated penis is larger than his father’s “flaccid, hairless” one reemerges during his present moment struggling to achieve an erection. It is not until he says to his wife, “I’m going to do you like a nigger” is he able to initiate sex which Baldwin continues to describe as challenging (249). Jesse, his father, and his father’s friend are monstrous, and they are monstrous because they are white. It is their commitment to white supremacy that convinces them such an atrocity is justified. Jesse matter-­ of-­factly tells himself he is right to inflict such racist abuse upon Black people musing, “It wasn’t that he didn’t know that what he was doing was right—he knew that” (236). During the castration scene, Jesse’s mother is of particular interest. As the body burns away and right before the castration, Jesse notes her “eyes were very bright … she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her, and more strange” (247). The terror of the mother rests in her beauty, which stands at incredible odds with the gruesome scene in front of her. She is a femme-fatale. For example, it is suggested her white beauty would cause regret in the lynched man who, upon seeing her, would “swear he throwed his life away for nothing” (244). Although the mother’s beauty is not directly fatal, it was often white women’s beauty and “innocence” that justified such brutality visited upon Black men falsely accused of flirting with white women. Her presence at the scene is perhaps the most monstrous of all—she is the embodied pretext and apex of white supremacy upon which rests on so many lynchings from the past and present. Her “strangeness” marks the deadly, and in this case, racist connection between beauty and horror. A line may be drawn from her to Rose Armitage in Get Out, who seduces the Black protagonist, Chris. Kimberly Nichele Brown’s analysis of Rose’s character equally applies to the mother in Baldwin’s story. Brown shows how Rose’s character “reverses the trope of monstrous blackness depicted in American gothic literature” and borrows Amy K.  King’s term “monstrous-feminine

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whiteness” to describe Rose’s deployment of a fatal, white attraction that I argue also exists in Jesse’s mother (Brown 2020, 115–16). Douglass and Baldwin reveal how racism not only degrades and brutalizes Black bodies but also corrodes the moral character of white people and turns them into monsters. Our outrage and sympathy of course must center on the former. But witnessing the gradual and narrativized moral decay of a white character that explains—but does not justify—how they became monsters allows for some degree of pity. The monsters I examine here, however, provide no such backgrounds, and this makes the twenty-­ first-­century cinematic white monsters of Get Out and Midsommar perform a radical break with how racist white people are represented in horror cinema.

From Literature to Cinema: The Emerging White Monster Archetype The foundational difference between the classic monster in horror cinema and the monster emerging in race-conscious films like Get Out and Midsommar is how their whiteness alone defines them as monsters. This modern trait is absent from a film like Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (William Crain 1976), where Dr. Pride’s alteration into a white monster is triggered by a drug. And while racially coded, the villains of rural horror films like I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi 1978), The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven 1979), and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hopper 1974) are defined more by their class than race. Writing about the “white trash monster,” Shellie McMurdo notes how the “white trash monster inhabits the margins of classification and is coded in rural horror as a temporal discrepancy, part of a long forgotten primitive past, where rules of etiquette did not apply” (2020). The affluent and educated Armitages of Get Out, however, are readymade racist monsters whose racism never requires external triggering. Further, as I examine later, the Armitages and Hårga communes’ white monstrosity is especially frightening because their racism is masked by antiracist and progressive values—the expressed liberal attitudes of Dean Armitage and the inclusive and welcoming nature of the commune. But how else may these monsters diverge from classic horror film monsters? And what similarities do they maintain? The white monster is partly an inversion of the monster who is a monster because they are Black. The Black monster makes its debut filmic

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appearance in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915). In this film that tracks and celebrates the emergence of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction, a white actor in blackface plays Gus, a recently freed man who wishes to marry a young white girl named Flora. When Gus locates Flora in the forest and expresses his desire to marry, she flees from him and threatens to jump off a cliff. Flora jumps and Gus brings her body back to her family. He is then caught and lynched. The use of blackface further reinforces “blackness” as a sign of monstrosity and secures race as a signifier of horror. However, there remains a critical difference between the monstrousness of Gus and other early film monsters. In her book Horror Noire, Robin R. Means-Coleman compares Gus with Frankenstein’s monster. She focuses on a key trait of the monster archetype, their residual humanity: “What made the [Frankenstein] Monster unique, and thereby dissimilar to The Birth of a Nation’s ‘monsters,’ such as Gus and Lynch [another Black character], was the narrative technique of demanding that the audience sympathize with the beast and its miserable plight … Unlike the Monster, Gus and Lynch are far from sympathetic characters” (2011, 25). Viewers of Frankenstein (James Whale 1931) are emotionally encouraged to despair over the violent pursuit of the monster, who becomes trapped and finally burned in the windmill. As Robin Wood argues, “few horror films have unsympathetic monsters” (2018, 85). Sympathy, however, as demonstrated by Coleman’s analysis, is only reserved for those monsters passing as white. The cultural celebration of monsters signals how film fans identify themselves with the monster’s estrangement from “normal” society. Monsters represent the misunderstood, those who cannot function within society’s borders. A fundamental feature of the monster is their capacity to both illustrate and transgress society’s laws. In “When the Woman Looks,” Linda Williams connects the gaze of the woman with the monster and reveals how this connection represents a shared sense of estrangement and, for the woman, an estrangement facilitated by patriarchal oppression. She writes, “The female look—a look given preeminent position in the horror film—shares the male fear of the monster’s freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For she too has been constituted as an exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male” (1996, 21). But the ability to see oneself in the monster is not limited to Williams’ feminist reading that marks both male superiority and vulnerability as factors directing the woman’s gaze toward the monster. Horror film fans find monsters both appealing and terrifying

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because they see traces of themselves within them. Viewers thrill at the sight of zombies infiltrating a mall in Dawn of the Dead (George Romero 1978) but must also grapple with how this very same mass of the undead condemns their own mindless consumption. It is the ability to sympathize—even slightly—with the monster that allows viewers to finally identify with the monster, even if this means facing their own undesirable traits. But does this happen with the unsympathetic white monster we first met in Douglass and Baldwin’s work and will later meet again in Get Out?

Confronting the White Monster Robin Wood’s “An Introduction to the American Horror Film” (1978) remains a foundational examination of the role of repression and the monster. For Wood, the monster embodies what is repressed in bourgeois-­ patriarchal capitalism. I want to slightly update Wood’s essay to account for the shifts in monstrosity afforded by Peele and Aster’s films. Wood’s thesis arrives early in his essay, where he argues, “central to [the horror film] is the actual dramatization of the dual concept of the repressed/the Other, in the figure of the monster. One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses” ([1978] 2018, 79). If there is a “happy ending,” Wood claims this to be the “restoration of repression” (79). White supremacy is fundamental to the founding, and perpetuation, of America that relied on the extermination of indigenous populations, slavery, and following emancipation, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, Jim Crow laws, and voter suppression. But American history has repressed much of this—most strikingly in the South where the civil war is reimagined as a “war of Northern aggression” infringing upon state’s rights and countless statues honoring the confederacy glorify a war disconnected from its goal of maintaining slavery. The invocation of “land of the free” is reiterated ad nauseam as if its repetition alone made it true. The very founding of America’s independence remains tethered to the Declaration of Independence, signed by both slaveowners and non-slaveowners. For the nation to function, it must collectively repress its own contradictory history. And so “slaves” become “workers,” according to one Texas textbook,1 1  See: “Why Calling Slaves ‘Workers’ is More Than an Editing Error,” www.npr.org, October 23, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/23/450826208/ why-calling-slaves-workers-is-more-than-an-editing-error.

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and the myth of the compassionate slaveholder, and the false conflation of Irish indentured servants with African chattel slavery emerge to soothe the guilt and stain of our history. All the while, Black Americans are, according to The Sentencing Project, incarcerated at “nearly 5 times the rate of white Americans” (Nellis 2021). This history remains the great paradox of America. The nation’s repression of its indebtedness to white supremacy set the stage for the emergence of a real-life white monster who would bring all this to the surface—Donald Trump. Following his 2016 election, American society witnessed a gradual mainstreaming of white supremacist ideas that reached a violent and deadly pinnacle with the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, North Carolina, on August 11, 2017. The racist “great replacement” theory that argues diversity threatens the white race with extinction was regularly echoed by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson during the years 2021–2022. While such ideas infused the mainstream, American society continued to witness videos of unarmed Black men being killed during routine traffic stops, Spanish speakers being verbally abused for speaking Spanish, and mass shootings by white supremacists. In the years following George Floyd’s eight-minute-long recorded murder, the United States finally witnessed its “return of the repressed.” And it is the reality of a Trump presidency, the deadly Charlottesville riot, both of which followed the “post-racial” era of Obama, that makes this “return” different from those returns triggered by Emmett Till or Rodney King. Post-Obama America naively assumed itself to be beyond such racism. Trump is the white monster that confronts the American people and reveals the repressed truth of the nation’s history. The release of Get Out and Midsommar during the Trump era is no coincidence. These films and their white monsters, like Trump himself, confront viewers of the Trump era with the crimes of their racist past and show how liberal attitudes undergirding democracy, freedom, and equality mask the disfigured national landscape. I want to now focus on the role of “confrontation” and oppose it with identification. While viewer identification is fundamental to how films build characters and direct viewer emotion, confrontation provides a jarring experience that threatens to shatter the viewer’s sense of self. Those zombie fans will continue shopping after watching Dawn of the Dead. White viewers, however, cannot so easily stop being white and must therefore grapple with their own association with monstrosity. In Wood’s lauding of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, he provides space for sympathizing with the cannibal family. Their family status, according

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to Wood, makes them familiar to the viewer. But it is also their status as victims of capitalism that has replaced the slaughterhouse with automated machinery that attracts our sympathy: “We cannot cleanly dissociate ourselves from them [the Sawyer family]. Then there is the sense that they are victims, too—of the slaughterhouse environment, of capitalism—our victims, in fact” (2018, 100). Of course, our sympathy for a family put out of work due to modernization and automation does not condone their murderous lifestyle, but it does offer an explanation allowing us to regard their victimhood status as our shared condemnation for the ways capitalism has violently disrupted families, communities, and ejected many—mostly people of color—into poverty. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen too argues that viewers “distrust and loath the monster at the same time [they] envy its freedom, and perhaps, its sublime despair” (1996, 17). Although we confront the Sawyer family in Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Michael Myers in Halloween (John Carpenter 1978), these monsters’ past traumas afford them some sympathy allowing for viewer identification. With the white monster— whether Dean Armitage or Donald Trump—we confront our very own national trauma minus the sympathy that softens such confrontation with other classic monsters of horror. Psychoanalysis reminds us it is the very resistance to identifying with such monsters, the claim “I’m not like them!” that suggests there exists some similarity. Confrontation, rather than identification, targets the unconscious and arouses suspicion that viewers are more like monsters than they want to admit. The question is whether this process results in critical self-reflection or further repression.

The White Gaze When the uncanny is raised in critical work on monsters, it is to address the function of repression. As Freud himself writes, “for this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed” ([1919] 2003, 148). I want to put aside the role of repression now and highlight the more neglected—but no less important—aspect of Freud’s theory of the uncanny: this is the “surmounted.” Doing so will help shift our focus from viewer identification onto viewer confrontation. Freud argues how the uncanny triggers superstitions we had assumed to have abandoned:

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We—or our primitive forebears—once regarded such things [omnipotence of thoughts, wish-fulfillment, secret harmful forces and the return of the dead] as real possibilities; we were convinced that they really happened. Today we no longer believe in them, having surmounted such modes of thought. Yet we do not feel entirely secure in these new convictions; the old ones live on in us, on the look-out for confirmation. (154)

Freud suggests there remains the possibility we never fully “surmounted” our superstitions that had been, supposedly, replaced by science. And these superstitions emerge whenever confronted with the uncanny. There exists a link between the science that had extinguished pre-­ Enlightenment ways of thinking and the current use of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) trainings that swept through private corporations and public institutions of higher learning in the early 2020s. The white liberals of both the civil rights era and today differentiate themselves from other white people by insisting they have interrogated their own internalized racism, white privilege, and complicity in white supremacy. If such interrogations did not occur at the behest of education, exposure to difference, or the visceral horror of watching unarmed Black men shot by white police, then such an interrogation was encouraged by the institutional and private development of DEI trainings, usually facilitated by a DEI officer. These trainings address systemic racism and participants’ own placement within racial relations. But the completion of a training, especially if it includes a certificate of completion or proof of attendance, provides the effect that “something has been done”—participants have been successfully made antiracist or, in popular parlance, “woke.” The process of becoming “woke” assumes all previous internalized notions of race have been exhumed and that one has “surmounted” their own racism. White liberalism endorses both the expressed views of Dean Armitage and the socialist politics of communal living in Midsommar. These representations hail the white liberal viewer and require they recognize their own progressivist ideals played out on screen. This ideological familiarity with the white monster—in this case, liberal and progressive politics— operates as a cover for monstrosity. The white viewer is asked to see liberal politics as purely performative and in the service of horrifying behavior and, more importantly, question whether they are included in this assessment. Following Freud, white monsters offer the uncanny “confirmation” that racism “live[s] on in us” ([1919] 2003, 154)

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In The Philosophy of Horror, Noël Carroll unpacks the contradictions that make up the monster by arguing how the monster is an example of “categorical contradictoriness” (1990, 32). He writes that “impurity involves a conflict between two or more standing cultural categories” (43). The monster is not only understood as passing between borders but as containing the very conflict of borders within its composition. How can a character contain liberal and progressive ideals and be a murderous racist? How can a peaceful socialist paradise contain such grisly rituals? It is precisely how the monster hosts this contradiction within themselves that beckons the white viewer to question their own internal contradictions between their progressive ideals and their own behaviors and assumed-to-­ have-been-surmounted attitudes about race. Unlike horror film fans’ celebration of Romero’s zombies that softens any shame over mindless shopping (an undesirable trait), there is no balm available that soothes a confrontation with the white monster. As noted above, the discomfort of witnessing the schism between liberal and antiracist politics and racism on the screen may trigger honest self-reflection of a white viewer’s own place within American racial politics. However, if we maintain the position that horror cinema shows viewers what society (and themselves as components of that society) repress—that these films are, in the words of Wood, “our collective nightmares” (2018, 83)—then it is more appropriate to question if viewers resist these images. In her review of Get Out, Clover Hope wonders if “there’s a weird catharsis in seeing the exorcism of their [white people] own guilt” (Hope 2017). If the white monster is abject because they carry the very transgression of categorical sense-making within them, this contradiction is likely repressed, or in the words of Julia Kristeva, it is unassimilated, “refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live” (1982, 3). The white monster assures the white viewer, “I am not like that.” Therefore, we must acknowledge the potential for the white liberal viewer of Get Out and Midsommar who, by resisting the representation of the white monster and finally cheering on their demise, may self-appoint themselves innocent of racial animus. The white monster requires we foreground Freud’s focus on whether we have surmounted previously jettisoned suspicions and examine how viewers’ unsurmounted beliefs about their own antiracism may redirect their gaze to characters that reaffirm their liberal and antiracist politics— for example, identifying with Chris as he battles the Armitages. What continues to align the white monster with all monsters, however, is their

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abjection that triggers viewers’ refusal to assimilate what, in this case, the white monster stands for. The political ambivalence of these films does not immediately lead to critical self-reflection—one does not become woke by watching Get Out or Midsommar. To “pay one’s dues,” as Baldwin insists in much of his writing, is to resist the larger economic, educational, and institutionalization of racism that many white liberals participate—even unconsciously—within. And it is the white monster who inhabits this white liberal unconsciousness and who stages a confrontation with the white viewer.

Get Out and the White Monster’s Liberalism Get Out was released in the United States on February 24, 2017. Although examples of horror films confronting racism precede it (White Dog, Samuel Fuller 1982; Blacula, William Crain 1972; Candyman, Bernard Rose 1992), Peele’s film is the first to perform the crucial shift from monsters that happen to be white to monsters who are monsters because they are white. Further, the film targets white liberalism or what critic John Patterson writing in The Guardian, labels “white liberal hypocrisy” (Patterson 2017). The Armitage family prey upon Black people by using their attractive daughter to lure Black men and women onto their plantation-­like home. Their brains are replaced with the Armitages’ aging relatives who continue to thrive in these younger Black bodies. The father, Dean, is a neurosurgeon and performs the operations, therefore assuming the “mad scientist” role. His characterization as a liberal pushes Peele’s film into a broader concern with how white liberals see themselves and their place within racial politics. The film borrows from the suspicion 60s-era civil rights leaders expressed over white liberals, or what Martin Luther King in Letter from Birmingham City Jail labels “white moderates” ([1963] 1991, 295). For many Black activists, white liberals said the right things, but their behaviors showed a lack of genuine commitment to Black liberation. While in conversation with the film’s Black lead protagonist Chris, Dean insists he would have “voted for Obama a third time” and that he was the “best president in [his] lifetime.” He brags about how his father was beaten by Jesse Owens in the qualifying round for the Berlin Olympics in 1936: “Hitler’s up there with all of his Aryan race bullshit, this Black dude comes along and proves him wrong in front of the entire world. Amazing!” Of course, Dean’s liberal rhetoric operates as a front for his horrific intentions.

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It is Dean’s white liberal performance that matches both Malcolm X’s characterization of white liberals as “white fox[es]” and “white hypocrite[s]” (2001, 57, 60) and Baldwin’s feeling of being “appalled” by “liberal innocence—or cynicism, which comes out in practice as much the same thing” (1998, 175). Get Out transforms the naïve white liberal into a monster. The white monster in this film uses liberal and antiracist language to disguise their monstrosity. The Armitage family represents those real-world liberals who talk one way but vote another, who gentrify Black and Brown neighborhoods resulting in actual economic terror, who feign to “not see color” while seeing color when their security and comfort are threatened. This form of monstrosity recalls classic monsters like the phantom in Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian 1925), whose mask hides his disfigurement, or Mr. Hyde, the monstrous doppelgänger of Dr. Jekyll. Southern racists who fly the rebel flag and use racist language are coherent, while the white liberal described by civil rights activists and Peele’s film are monsters because of their incoherency or, in the words of Carroll, “categorical contradictoriness” (Carroll 1990, 32). Although far from a horror novel, Baldwin’s Another Country (1962) shares a similar critique of white liberalism as Peele’s film. In the novel, Baldwin distills his ambivalent, at times hostile, feelings about the white liberal. The young, white character Vivaldo establishes a point of identification for the white reader who finds in Vivaldo’s behavior a sincere desire to combat racism, while nonetheless stumbling through all the ways he attempts to do so. Vivaldo is hopelessly naïve, if not completely ignorant of the Black experience. He regards his friendship with Rufus, who is Black, and his eventual relationship with Rufus’ sister, Ida, as stable signs of his liberalism. Throughout the novel, Vivaldo insists he is not “white people”—meaning racist white people (emphasis added 1993, 262). Baldwin’s characterization of Vivaldo provides him the means for talking back to the white liberal. In his biography on Baldwin, David Leeming paraphrases Baldwin’s assessment of his readers anticipating my discussion of confrontation: “Americans found Another Country worth reading because they were more like the people in the novel than they had dared admit to themselves” (1994, 206). As with Get Out, the “unsurmounted” attitudes white readers maintained about race were possibly aroused by Baldwin’s novel. While Vivaldo may present an uncomfortable point of identification for white readers who recognize their own false liberalism in his character, Baldwin reserves plenty of compassion—sometimes pity—for him. But

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Get Out confronts the viewer by requiring they face themselves rather than see themselves in the Armitages. This is a key difference between what it means to identify with and be confronted by images of ourselves on screen. A confrontation is aggressive, even hostile, while identification is reaffirming, even if it affirms traits we would rather ignore about ourselves. A confrontation with one’s monstrous image results in self-­Othering. Judith Butler illustrates a similar process when describing how one narrates an “I” in psychoanalysis: The “I” who narrates finds that it cannot direct its narration, finds that it can give an account neither of its inability to narrate nor of why narration breaks down. It comes to experience itself or, rather, re-experience itself as radically, if not irretrievably, unknowing about who it is … The “I” is breaking down in certain very specific ways in front of the other or, to anticipate Levinas, in the face of the Other. (2005, 68–9)

A confrontation threatens to shatter the very image one maintains of themselves. In the case of Get Out, it is the uncanny feeling that those assumed-to-have-been-surmounted feelings and behaviors regarding race are surfacing and require either self-interrogation—Butler’s “breaking down”—or further repression by cheering on the demise of the white monster. If the white monster in Get Out is too clearly located in a figure, Midsommar offers an opportunity to witness whiteness as a toxic hegemon that informs behaviors, settings, and even characters of color.

Midsommar and the Monstrosity of Whiteness The closing scene of Ruggero Deodato’s infamous film Cannibal Holocaust (1980) attempts to redeem itself with a moral question that fails to justify the gratuitous violence that preceded it. The anthropology professor played by Robert Kerman thoughtfully gazes at the skyscrapers of New York City and muses to himself, “I wonder who the real cannibals are?” The answer is an obvious “we are.” “We” being white, European, and in most cases, academic cultural tourists. Once again, horror cinema makes visible those monstrous traits viewers prefer to ignore, the worst of which is the scopophilia and consequent objectification of others made possible by the cinematic apparatus and, in this specific case, the viewers’ complicity in this matter. In Deodato’s film, “we” are the filmmakers who terrorize the indigenous tribes of the Amazon for sensational

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documentary footage. We only align ourselves with the professor’s gaze at the end once our moral outrage at the filmmaker’s behavior overrides our guilt of desiring sensational scenes of horror. Like the filmmakers in Deodato’s film, the visiting Americans in Midsommar: Dani, her boyfriend Christian, Josh, and Mark are all, except for Dani, unsympathetic characters. Mark is an immature boy who cannot stop thinking about sex and carelessly pees on a family totem. Both Josh and Chris compete in converting their experience into research for their anthropology dissertations—therefore avoiding genuine connection with the Hårga commune by maintaining an objectifying scholarly gaze. In her article on Midsommar, Monica Wolfe examines how the American graduate students regard the Hårga commune as a potential site for the extraction of academic value. She argues, “While the Hårga people may be physically violent, Josh and Christian’s attempts to profit in social capital from the exploitation of the uncharted Other are symbolically violent in that they project their own knowledge and values upon a sovereign community and take it intellectually as their own valuable object” (2021, 216). Like the obnoxious teens in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, viewers may not feel terribly bad witnessing each character’s demise. So, what or where is the white monster in Midsommar? Is it the murderous commune or the visiting Americans? The hegemony of white supremacy makes both monstrous. Unlike Get Out, Midsommar does not stage a clear conflict between a person of color and a white monster. The film demonstrates that representations of white monsters do not require an opposing Black or Brown hero or protagonist. It does this by attributing white monstrous traits to all its characters regardless of their race. Upon its release, critics called attention to the brightness of the film that separates it from mainstream horror. This aspect of the film recalls Toni Morrison’s analyses of American literature, where she discusses the image of a “blinding whiteness” that both racially and visually finds its emergence in the Hårga commune, whose members’ white skin and white robes all presented in searing daylight perform a visual metaphor of white supremacy. The Hårga commune is part of that literary lineage of “figurations of impenetrable whiteness that surface in American literature whenever an Africanist presence is engaged” (Morrison 1992, 32–3). For Morrison, this whiteness is racially invested and illuminates the terrible unknowingness of the new world that required the parallel darkening of others to amplify its own understanding of freedom and righteousness. This blinding whiteness highlights the differences in color—not only those racial differences but also the common clothes the

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visitors wear (jeans, t-shirts). At times the film even blurs the members of the commune while maintaining Christian in sharp focus. The brightness is not just a metaphor for white supremacy; it acts as a cover—paradoxically so—hiding the premeditated murder that has been set into action. In the wake of the many mondo and cannibal films from Italy that rose to popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, viewers witnessing the repulsion of a raced couple who regard an ancient European ritual as both bizarre and disgusting may seem a simple inversion of those films’ racist Othering of indigenous peoples from a Eurocentric position. Connie and Simon, the other two characters of color, express hostility at the Ättestupa ritual, where two senior members willingly leap off a cliff to end their lives rather than be a burden to the collective. The commune sees this as a “gesture” where they “give [their] lives.” But for Simon, the entire scene is simply “fucked.” Although more restrained in his repulsion, Josh can only regard the ritual as an object of study—part of his overall focus on European midsummer traditions—his role in the film closely recalls Lorraine De Selle’s anthropologist character in Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox (1981), who is preparing for her dissertation on cannibalism. Simon and Josh cannot help but map their modernized Western norms onto what they experience in the commune. But as noted in the early criticism of Midsommar, most of the grisly scenes were pulled from a variety of folklore legends, and it should be no surprise that actual Midsommar celebrations are nothing like the film, just like the Amazon is not populated by ravenous cannibals as Italian cannibal films would have us believe. Midsommar flips the narratives of mondo/cannibal cinema so it is white culture that seems “bizarre” and, more accurately, misrepresented and finally monstrous. But more significantly, this makes the raced characters complicit in cultural tourism and objectification—a place typically occupied by white characters.2 Is Midsommar simply giving white culture its turn at being horrifically misrepresented as monstrosity? The BBC published a series of responses to the film from Swedish critics. One asked: “Surely this is about cultural appropriation? I have nothing against the idea of gamely borrowing from other cultures. Are you really allowed to deface the nicest thing we have, midsummer, to this degree? Is it really okay to distort Swedish traditions like this before an international audience?” (BBC Monitoring 2019). 2  To be clear, I am not claiming the raced characters are “racist.” Rather, they are participating in behaviors commonly associated with white supremacy.

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Distortion is, however, one of the key tools of horror cinema. The distortion of the everyday is what makes common things horrific: houses, landscapes, common objects, cities, and people themselves. Midsommar engages the more general “monstrosity of whiteness”—or Morrison’s “impenetrable whiteness”—that emerges from this distortion rather than provides a white monster archetype. From the obvious ritual murders of the commune to the cultural and academic tourism of the visitors, these all have legacies in white supremacy. The horror of Midsommar is how it imbues all characters—regardless of race—with those monstrous behaviors associated with whiteness. Whiteness is a disease whose symptom is a violent act of Othering. And the horror here is how the legacy of whiteness infuses the setting, wardrobe, and architecture and seeps into the consciousness and behaviors of the characters in the film who present imperialistic tendencies, scholarly or exploitative gazes, and who, like the commune, project a blinding whiteness. As noted earlier, while it may seem these films simply flip the common narrative so it is now white culture’s turn at being monstrous or it is now a white character whose race invokes fear, this is only a surface reading. What is revealed when the processes of Othering—especially those processes that reproduce the Other as horrific—are rendered visible by this flip where the dominant racial group is now Othered by the minoritized group is the destabilization of white supremacy. When the cinematic apparatus reproduces the white majority as monstrous, the white viewer’s experience of abjection at the sight of themselves rendered monstrous is directly and chillingly felt by the white viewer. Such an experience recalls Steven Shaviro’s emphasis on how the “deterritorializing and deoriginating force of the apparatus leads directly to the visceral immediacy of cinematic experience” (1993, 35). Yes, the process is turned back on them, but this reversal—a kind of “deterritorialization”—takes a racialized process assumed to be natural and reveals it to be unnatural and constructed by the power and dominance of the white majority. The white viewer’s previous engagement with monsters of horror cinema, from Nosferatu to Michael Myers, has never included an explicit awareness of race. To finally see whiteness itself as horror—not unlike Leatherface’s chainsaw and mask of human skin, Jason’s hockey mask and machete, and Pinhead’s “pinned head” and sadomasochistic torture—represents a radical break in horror film conventions. Race never really mattered before. Therefore, it is especially significant that neither the Armitage family nor the Hårga commune wield any weapon or wear any grisly

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accessory that would distract from the fact it is their very whiteness that is the weapon—a whiteness made possibly by legacies of slavery, genocide, imperialism, colonialism, lynching, police brutality, murder, and knowledge production—especially of anthropology. When in a moment of selfawareness following the Ättestupa ritual Christian admits the Hårga would find their own society’s confinement of seniors to nursing homes to be equally as “weird,” we can partly glimpse at how the majority may be Othered.

Conclusion: The Sorcery of White Supremacy In the years since Get Out debuted, more race-conscious horror films and TV series have appeared. What I hope to provide here is an entryway into thinking about whiteness as a hegemon of horror, whether manifested in a white monster figure representing this hegemon, or as a generalized collection of behaviors and affects infusing a film’s characters and mise-en-­ scène. But I want to maintain that these films are not simply giving white people their turn at being horrifically represented. The greatest crime committed by the white monster may be the very production of racist cinema from The Birth of a Nation all the way through King Kong (Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack 1933; John Guillermin 1976; Peter Jackson 2005) that has reproduced Black people as monsters. This is the sorcery of white supremacy that turns Others into monsters that makes whiteness monstrous. Get Out and Midsommar do not seek revenge on whiteness through a simple inversion of older racist film narratives but confront—albeit aggressively—white viewers with an opportunity to, in the words of Butler, “give an account of themselves” and witness the mechanics behind Othering revealed by a whiteness that now assumes the position of objectification. My own fear is the white viewer may find all this simply unbearable.

References Aster, Ari, dir. 2019. Midsommar. A24. Baldwin, James. [1962] 1993. Another Country. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1963. Perspectives: Negro and the American Promise. GBH Archives. http:// openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_87BBF4475C12493A839B9D890FD36D89. ———. [1965] 1995. Going to Meet the Man. In Going to Meet the Man. New York: Vintage.

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———. 1998. Fifth Avenue, Uptown: A Letter from Harlem. In Baldwin: Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison, 170–179. New York: Library of America. BBC Monitoring. 2019. Midsommar. What Do Film Critics in Sweden Think? BBC News, July 10. https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48937721 Brown, Kimberly Nichele. 2020. “Stay Woke”: Post-Black Filmmaking and the Afterlife of Slavery in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. In Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination, ed. Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal, 106–123. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Butler, Judith. 2005. Giving an Account of Oneself. New  York: Fordham University Press. Carpenter, John., dir. 1978. Halloween. Compass International Pictures. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror or Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. 1996. Monster Culture (Seven Theses). In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 3–23. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Coleman, Robin R. Means. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. New York: Routledge. Cooper, Merian C, and Ernest B. Schoedsack, dirs. 1933. King Kong. RKO Pictures. Crain, William, dir. 1972. Blacula. American International Pictures. ———. 1976. Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde. Dimension Pictures. Craven, Wes, dir. 1979. The Hills Have Eyes. Vanguard. Deodato, Ruggero, dir. 1980. Cannibal Holocaust. Grindhouse Releasing. Douglass, Frederick. (1845) 1996. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself. In The Oxford Frederick Douglass Reader, eds. William L. Andrews, 21–97. New York: Oxford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. [1919] 2003. The Uncanny. Translated by David McLintock. New York: Penguin. Fuller, Samuel, dir. 1982. White Dog, Paramount Pictures. Griffith, D. W, dir. [1915] 2017. The Birth of a Nation. 20th Century Fox. Guillermin, John, dir. 1976. King Kong. Paramount Pictures. Hope, Clover. 2017. Get Out and the Threat of the White Monster. Jezebel, February 27. https://jezebel.com/get-out-and-the-threat-of-the-whitemonster-1792770870 Hopper, Tobe, dir. 1974. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. New Line Cinema. Jackson, Peter, dir. 2005. King Kong. Universal Pictures. King, Martin Luther Jr. [1963] 1991 Letter from Birmingham City Jail. In A Testament of Hope, ed. James M.  Washington, 289–302. New  York: Harper Collins. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Leeming, David. 1994. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Penguin.

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Lenzi, Umberto, dir. 1981. Cannibal Ferox. Grindhouse Releasing. McMurdo, Shellie. 2020. “We Are Never Going in the Woods Again”: The Horror of the Underclass White Monster in American and British Horror. Cine-Excess, May 1. https://www.cine-excess.co.uk/lsquowe-are-never-going-in-the-woodsagainrsquo-the-horror-of-the-underclass-white-monster-in-american-and-britishhorror.html Morrison, Toni. 1992. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage. Nellis, Ashley. 2021. The Color of Justice: Racial and Ethnic Disparity in State Prisons. The Sentencing Project, October 13. https://www.sentencingproject. org/publications/color-­of-­justice-­racial-­and-­ethnic-­disparity-­in-­state-­prisons/ Patterson, John. 2017. Get Out: The First Great Paranoia Movie of the Trump Era. The Guardian, March 6. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/ mar/06/get-­out-­movie-­jordan-­peele-­trump Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017. Get Out. Universal Studios. Rose, Bernard, dir. 1992. Candyman. TriStar Pictures. Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Whale, James, dir. 1931. Frankenstein. Universal Pictures. Williams, Linda. 1996. When the Woman Looks. In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 15–34. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wolfe, Monica. 2021. Mapping Imperialist Movement in Postmodern Horror Film Midsommar. Journal of Popular Film and Television 49 (4): 210–222. Wood, Robin. [1978] 2018. An Introduction to the American Horror Film. In Robin Wood on the Horror Film: Collected Essays and Reviews, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 73–110. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. X, Malcolm. 2001. The Last Speeches. Edited by Bruce Perry. New York: Pathfinder. Zarchi, Meir, dir. 1978. I Spit on Your Grave. Anchor Bay Entertainment.

PART II

Oppression, Abjection, and Race: Black Bodies and Communities

CHAPTER 6

“Tell Everyone”: Abjection and Social Justice in Candyman (2021) Victoria Santamaría Ibor

The line “Tell everyone” uttered by Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), the film’s monster and main character, at the end of Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021) connects the tradition of urban legends in the horror genre with the power of speaking up against racist violence and social abjection.1 Anthony is a frustrated Black artist who moves into Cabrini-­ Green, a ghetto in the process of gentrification, and becomes interested in the myth of Candyman. He intends to use it as a source of inspiration and 1   This chapter was written as part of the research conducted for the  Grant PID2021-123836NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and cofunded by the European Union, the Grant CPH_01_22 funded by Departamento de Ciencia, Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento, Gobierno de Aragón, and the Grant H23_20R funded by Departamento de Educación, Cultura y Deporte, Gobierno de Aragón.  I would also like to thank Marimar Azcona for her feedback on earlier versions of this chapter. 

V. Santamaría Ibor (*) University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_6

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as a manner of revitalizing his career. As a consequence, the legend revives in popular imagination and the monster gains power and assassinates those who dare say his name five times in front of a mirror. Meanwhile, Anthony gradually becomes the monster himself, a transformation that culminates the moment he is unfairly shot by the police. Urban legends and the monsters that emanate from them are a recurrent topic in the horror genre. This is the case of the first version of Candyman (Bernard Rose 1992), but also of other movies like The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez 1999), The Ring (Gore Verbinski 2002), or Slender Man (Sylvain White 2018). The protagonists of these movies summon monsters from supernatural myths, which end up being more dangerous and real than they first expected. In these narratives, the act of telling is essential, since the monsters can only attack the ones who are acquainted with their stories. Once the legend is forgotten, these creatures lose all their power. What is different in Da Costa’s film from previous incarnations of urban legends is the fact that monstrosity is directly linked to social abjection and racist discrimination. The most recent sequel of Candyman recycles the trope of the urban legend in horror cinema and adapts it to the current culture wars context and, in particular, to the demands of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. In this manner, the movie denounces the social abjection that the Black community has endured throughout history. The Candyman is a figure that allows a marginalized Black community, and particularly Black men, to assimilate the trauma of being relegated to the margins of society and to fight back against this systemic violence. When, at the end of the film, Anthony/Candyman tells his former partner Brianna (Teyonah Parris) the phrase “Tell everyone,” he is claiming that he needs to be remembered so that social justice can be achieved. This chapter examines the film Candyman and its re-negotiation of abjection in a culture wars context, bringing forward issues of spatial and social marginalization. Through a theoretical framework on abjection, together with a textual analysis of the spaces and the spatial dynamics of the film, this chapter will explore the portrayal of racism, marginalization, and Black monstrosity in Candyman. It starts with a section on abjection in both horror cinema studies and the social sciences. The analysis of the film is divided into three parts. The first part looks at the gentrified ghetto as an abject space of systemic violence and discrimination. The second part explores abjection as a consequence of not fitting into the standards of Black masculinity. The last section reads storytelling as a manner of

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opposing social abjection, both in this movie and in the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Abjection in this movie is depicted as the result of a history of violence and social exclusion, which is rendered invisible, but which is also part of society and must be remembered. Hence, Candyman uses the urban legend as a reminder of systemic injustice, which ensures that the stories of the socially abject are heard.

From Psychoanalytical Abjection to Social Abjection Abjection is a key term in both horror film studies and the social sciences. Since the publication of Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine (1993), abjection has been used to analyze femininity and motherhood in horror cinema from a psychoanalytical perspective. Creed’s book adapts Julia Kristeva’s idea of the mother as abject to horror cinema. For Kristeva, a baby lives in harmony with the mother and nature, but in order to enter the symbolic order of the father, s/he has to reject the mother, and, therefore, the body of the mother becomes a source of abjection (1982, 12). For Kristeva, the abject challenges borders and clear-cut divisions (12). It fascinates and seduces us, but it has to be expelled in order to establish our subjectivity and set up the limits of our identity and culture (2). However, since abjection is also part of us, we expel ourselves in the process (3). That is, for Kristeva, while abjection helps us settle the borders between “us” and “other,” it also disrupts every system of order and makes us confront meaninglessness (2). Following this, Creed argues that “the archaic mother is present in all horror films” (1993, 35). Portraying filth, blood, and other bodily wastes, horror films take spectators back to the union of mother and child, offering a space in which they can break the taboo that the law of the father imposes on them (10). However, unlike Kristeva, who considers abjection a necessary process for the subject to become independent, Creed remarks that women’s abjection is a patriarchal construct and the horror film an ideological product that perpetuates the notion that women are monstrous Others (83). In the social sciences, the word abjection describes states of exclusion and marginalization. George Bataille was the first author to use this term in 1934 to refer to a social divide between the rich and the poor (2006, 11). As he argues, this class struggle is not based on active physical violence but on a “prohibition of contact” (9). The abject, for him, are those who are oppressed, treated with aversion, and excluded from the moral community (10). This view is also shared by some contemporary authors:

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Imogen Tyler, for instance, explains that abject citizens are those “laid to waste by neoliberal economic, political and social policies” (2013, 8) and used as scapegoats for the effects of market deregulation (9). As she explains, this term does not refer to a cohesive group but to several marginalized categories: migrants, the poor, the unemployed, people with disabilities, etc. (8) For her, these groups are not only excluded, but they also produce disgust. And, as Tyler claims, disgust is political; there is a social consensus that establishes which bodies are treated as disgusting (23–4). Accordingly, for Anne McClintock, the abject are those who “inhabit the impossible edges of modernity: the slum, the ghetto, the garret, the brothel,” and so on: those who are excluded from the modern state but are also a necessary part of it (1995, 72). The Creed-Kristevan framework marked the beginning of the study of abjection in the horror genre, and some authors continue to rely on these ideas in order to analyze contemporary films (Berlatsky 2016; Harrington 2017; Pisters 2020). Yet, the social perspective on abjection has rarely been used to describe horror films. Influenced by the current culture wars context and in particular by the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the 2021 film Candyman, as this chapter argues, does not represent abjection in its psychoanalytical sense, but a social abjection related to the spaces of precarity and exclusion which Black people have occupied throughout US history.

The Gentrified Ghetto as an Abject Space Near the beginning of Candyman, we find Anthony and Brianna hosting an informal dinner for Brianna’s brother Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarret) and his boyfriend at their new apartment in the now-gentrified Cabrini-­ Green neighborhood in Chicago. Troy tells them the story of the neighborhood: before being Cabrini-Green, this part of the city was called “Smokey Hollow,” later on “Little Hell” and then “Combat Alley,” a variety of terms that suggest the violent past of the now gentrified space. Anthony explains that Cabrini-Green was at first a group of housing projects for people who could not afford to live somewhere else, but, some time later, the buildings were torn down, and the neighborhood was gentrified. As Brianna puts it, “White people built the ghetto, and then erased it when they realized they built the ghetto.” In this sense, Candyman seems to mirror Saskia Sassen’s views on the spatialization of cities and gentrification in particular. As she argues, the spaces of a city are organized

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according to power structures (2003, 16). The precarious classes, which can be used as cheap labor, are excluded and isolated and gradually expelled to welcome more affluent classes (16). Precarious workers are necessary for the city, but at the same time, they are relegated to the ghetto and later expelled from it, as abject Others. The dinner scene is not the movie’s only reference to the process of gentrification in Chicago. In the very first scenes, the movie portrays the history of Cabrini-Green, from the ghetto to the gentrified neighborhood. First, there is a flashback to the 1970s, when Cabrini-Green was a housing project for the working class. According to Rashad Shabazz, the housing projects in the city of Chicago were presented first as an opportunity for Black people to move to affordable and spacious houses and achieve a better social position (2015, 55). Nevertheless, “city planning, architecture, and the injection of security measures all contributed to enhanced carceral power” (57). This can be seen in Cabrini-Green’s architecture and spatial design: the neighborhood portrayed in this flashback shows long lines of houses in the same brown brick close to each other, resembling cells in a prison. As Shabazz argues, the housing projects intended to accommodate as many Black people as possible, seeing racial integration as “an obstacle for modernity” (59). In this scene, the people who inhabit these housing projects are Black, in contrast with a group of white police officers patrolling the area. For Shabazz, these areas not only concentrated Black people in isolated and intergenerational spaces of precarity, but the projects were also regulated through punitive measures that erased the borders between the prison and the home (56–57). In line with these arguments, in Candyman, the Cabrini-Green of the 1970s is portrayed as a space of racial segregation and state policing whose inhabitants become abject Others. Yet, this is also a place in which Black people are able to form a community. The streets are filled with people talking to each other and spending time outside. The inhabitants of the ghetto might be excluded from the rest of the city, but, as the next scene portrays, gentrification renders them to non-existence. There is a visual contrast between the scene described above and the following one, which is supposed to take place fifty years later. The latter shows low-angle shots of the new buildings. They are gray, black, and white, and most of them are taller than the previous ones and have many windows. This is not the architecture of a working-class neighborhood, like the one from the previous scene, but the type of modern buildings that are characteristic of a city’s financial center. Particularly, one of them

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emulates Greek architecture. For Sassen, this type of building is used for stock markets, and it symbolizes economic power (2003, 16). Yet, the foggy atmosphere, the disturbing non-diegetic music, and the use of low angles convey an ominous feeling. In opposition to the previous scene, the buildings and not the people are the protagonists. With the old buildings, gentrification has also displaced the people who lived in them. However, the fog also seems to suggest that the abject individuals that once lived there still hide in the shadows. Gentrification hides but does not erase the ghetto. The violence and discrimination of an entire community persists in the place in which it happened. At one point in the film, Anthony decides to visit some of the few remaining houses in the Black ghetto. For Chris Hudson, global cities combine, on the one hand, spaces of extreme poverty and, on the other hand, protected spaces for the wealthy (2010, 439). In this manner, cities, according to Hudson, “are structurally integrated but socially fragmented” (339). Candyman portrays this disparity within the same neighborhood. This is only a small area between the new tall buildings that have not been remodeled yet. On-screen, behind the small houses, we can see the tall buildings rising. The looming building seems to suggest that gentrification is imminent and that those remaining houses will be replaced as well. The houses are the same that appear in the flashback of Cabrini-Green in the 1970s, but this time the windows are broken, and the streets are totally empty. It looks like a ghost town, totally abandoned and forgotten. Bauman describes the urban ghettos as places that are rendered “invisible by not looking and unthinkable by not thinking” (2004, 27). For him, an orderly space is one in which the law divides inside and outside (32). In Candyman, this is portrayed by fences surrounding the ghetto and demarcating its limits within the now-gentrified neighborhood. This can also be related to Bataille’s argument on the prohibition of contact as a form of violence against the abject ([1934] 2006, 9). It is in this area where Anthony meets William (Colman Domingo), the Black owner of a laundromat, who tells him that there is: “a police car on either side of the block, keeping us safe… or keeping us in.” The few inhabitants of the projects are segregated from the rest of the neighborhood and excluded from the law, since the police do not protect them but protect others from them. They live in what Tyler calls “the border zones within the state” (2013, 4). And according to Tyler, the state legitimizes abjection, choosing which citizens must be protected and which are abject Others (46). In Candyman, the old houses from the ghetto are abject spaces suffering

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from institutionalized marginalization. And even if gentrification replaces these precarious old houses with new buildings, their abjection is not going to disappear, but stay there, haunting the area. In its representation of the haunted ghetto, Candyman comments on but also challenges the trope of the haunted house in horror cinema. Troy warns Anthony and Brianna that Cabrini-Green is haunted. The horror genre has a history of haunted houses as settings: this is the case of movies like The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg 1979), Poltergeist (Tobe Hooper 1982), Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli 2007), or The Conjuring (James Wan 2013), among others. According to Mikal J. Gaines, haunted house narratives imply the sense that home ownership is “an inherently guilty act,” which “cannot be done without disturbing the dead or conjuring up past injustices” (2020, 185). In Candyman, the gentrification of the ghetto represents an injustice against the Black community and, as it happens in previous haunted house narratives, the violence that has occurred in a place will always be there, haunting it so that social injustice is never forgotten. Yet, Candyman also separates itself from these movies. Russell Meeuf argues that haunted house horror usually portrays the “white family home” as a space of anxiety because of the financial instability and loss of privilege of white middle-class families (2022, 28). In Candyman, it is not the white middle-class house that is haunted, but the gentrified Black ghetto. It is not the American Dream of a white family that is at stake, but the survival of the Black community. In fact, the movie portrays a strong contrast between the flat in which Anthony and Brianna live and the houses of the ghetto. The former is a new and spacious flat with white walls, big windows, and high ceilings. Anthony’s paintings decorate the walls. Some are abstract, and others depict Black people, as is the case of the one showing a Black man with a rope around his neck. Although the history of discrimination and racism is part of Anthony’s and Brianna’s lives and of their identity, their apartment and the fact that they are able to transform that experience into art also suggest that they have achieved a rather distinguished status. In opposition, when Anthony enters one of the abandoned houses of the ghetto, this is a dark space, nearly empty. There is a broken mirror on the floor and graffiti on a wall of a man with a jacket; both things evoke the legend of Candyman. This might mean that in this social context of precarity is where monsters are formed. The abjection of the space transforms the characters who occupy said space into abject Others. Anthony does not become an abject in the comfort of his upper-middle class apartment, but

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when he discovers that this new apartment hides a history of violence and social abjection and when he engages with the lives of the people who inhabited this ghetto, in particular, the life of Sherman Fields (Michael Hargrove) and his transformation into Candyman. Yet, even if the people inhabiting the ghetto are constituted as an abject class, this film focuses on the abjection of Black men who are not able to fit into mainstream standards of Black masculinity, as will be argued below.

Negotiating Black Masculinity Through Abjection According to Robin R.  Means Coleman, Black horror films are those which focus on “racial identity, in this case Blackness—Black culture, history, ideologies, experiences, politics,” and so on (2011, 8). The movie Candyman represents the complexities of performing Black masculinity in contemporary America. Anthony has to negotiate his status as an artist living in a luxurious flat built on a space with a history of racism and violence that persists in the present. And eventually, as a Black man who feels invisible and excluded, he will align himself with the abjection of the ghetto and with those suffering from institutionalized discrimination. At the beginning of the film, Anthony is not portrayed as part of this displaced community of the ghetto. He is an artist, and he has just moved with Brianna to a new apartment in Cabrini-Green. When he talks to Anne-Marie (Vanessa E. Williams), an art critic, she tells him that the artists are the ones to blame for gentrification. Anthony responds: “The city cuts off a community and waits for it to die. Then they invite developers in and say, ‘Hey, you artists, you young people, white preferably—or only—please come to the hood, it’s cheap.’” For Anthony, artists are only pawns at the mercy of the free market. The spatialization of the city depends not on artists but on bigger economic interests. He also remarks that race is an important aspect of class belonging. Black people usually are part of the ghetto and are therefore marginalized, excluded, and suffering from social abjection. Brianna and their immediate circle are only an exception, and Anthony, even if at first he also seems part of this group, becomes a socially abject man in the course of the film. Candyman is supposed to murder the ones who say his name five times in front of a mirror. Yet, when Anthony does it, he is not killed, but transformed into Candyman instead. The more evident reason for this is the fact that Anthony was born in the ghetto, as he later discovers, and, therefore, he is part of the history of social exclusion and marginalization of the

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ghetto. In fact, Anthony is supposed to be the baby that Candyman tried to kill in the first version of Candyman (Bernard Rose 1992) through Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen). Even if Helen eventually resists Candyman’s influence and Anthony survives, it is clear that his past is haunting him. As an adult, Anthony is chased by this monster and is destined to die for the sake of the legend. However, there is another explanation for Anthony’s transformation into the Candyman since, as will be argued below, Anthony is unable to constitute himself as an artist and as a successful Black man. In spite of his apparent success as a painter, Anthony is presented as a Black man unable to fit the standards of Black masculinity. As we learn in the course of the film, Anthony has not been able to paint in two years (for lack of inspiration) and is financially supported by Brianna, who also paid for the apartment they are living in. As Serie McDougal III argues, from the civil rights movement onwards, African American men have been expected to be the providers for their families (2020, 65), as well as to maintain a hyper-masculine behavior that hides their precarious and vulnerable situation (75). It could be argued that it is Anthony’s inability to comply with what society expects of him as a Black man that leads him to look into the Candyman legend. In fact, when the manager of an art gallery tells Anthony that he sees him as “the great Black hope of the Chicago art scene,” he also urges him to “dig into that history of yours.” As a failed artist and provider, Anthony feels invisible. However, Candyman attracts him because he offers Anthony the opportunity to become relevant. Anthony feels excluded from the world of art. This is conveyed when Anthony goes to Brianna’s business dinner. There is a shot of Anthony with a blurred background, and the voices of those around him are indistinguishable. This might suggest that, while Anthony is at the restaurant with a group of people from the world of art, his mind is somewhere else. Anthony is an outsider to the conversation, and therefore it is implied that he is also an outsider to the artistic panorama. Then, there is a close-up of Anthony’s injured hand. For Xavier Aldana Reyes, blood, injuries, and other corporeal threats are abject because they draw attention to the “vulnerability of the body” (2016, 58). This physical wound, together with his invisibility and exclusion, constitute Anthony as an abject Other. Moreover, the injured hand is also connected to Candyman’s hook. Anthony’s transformation into the Candyman is more and more apparent, and his outsider status in the world of art is directly linked to this transformation. Candyman represents a physical threat for Anthony. Yet, he also feels attracted by the monster. According to Kristeva, the abject is that which is

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at the border and haunts the subject, because it attracts the self but cannot be assimilated (1982, 1). There is a scene in which Anthony is on an elevator with mirrored walls, listening to Helen’s tapes. In the 1992 film, Helen is a PhD student investigating the social effects of the urban legend of Candyman, and, as a consequence, she becomes haunted by the monster. In her tapes, Helen describes Candyman’s haunting as “intoxicating” and “inexplicably alluring.” When Anthony listens to this, the elevator lights go out, and a piece of candy falls on the floor. Anthony picks it up and cuts himself with a blade placed inside. Candyman endangers the integrity of his body, but at the same time seduces him, just as Helen describes. Anthony looks up and sees Candyman covered in blood in the reflection in the same position as he is. Looking at the mirror and seeing Candyman in the place he should see himself threatens Anthony’s identity. When Anthony goes to Anne-Marie’s house, he also sees Candyman in his reflection. At first, he gets scared, but then he closely observes Candyman in his own reflection, concretely the similarity between his injured hand and the monster’s hook. Anthony fails to reject the abject, and the borders between Candyman and him eventually disappear. In the course of the movie, these physical similarities become more extreme. Anthony’s hand putrefies until it is cut by William, and his skin burns just like Candyman’s. This physical connection between them symbolizes a deeper social connection. The Candyman whom Anthony first becomes acquainted with is Sherman Fields, who shares with Anthony his inability to fit into the sociocultural standards of Black masculinity. In the flashback of Cabrini-Green in the 1970s, Sherman comes out from a hole in the wall and offers the young William candy. William, influenced by mainstream opinion, thinks that Sherman is a monster and screams. Then, the police come for him. Later in the film, William, now an adult, tells Anthony that at that moment, he “saw the face of fear.” According to him, Sherman was actually an innocent man who was afraid of the police. As an unconventional Black man who gave candy to children, society framed him as a monster. Tyler argues that the abject citizens work as scapegoats for social fears and this is what happened to Sherman. He was marginalized because he was unable to fit into mainstream Black masculinity. Yet, he transformed into an abject monster only after he was assaulted by the police. At that moment, he accepted that his only option was to be the monster that people thought he was and seek revenge. According to Sylvère Lotringer, abjection is not just a result of being treated like an object, but of feeling like an object oneself (2020, 38). As Lotringer argues, to be abject is to be “exposed to

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the vertiginous experience of existing apart from the human race” (38). Both Anthony and Sherman are excluded from successful Black masculinity: Anthony as a failed artist who cannot provide for his family, and Sherman as an adult who gives candy to children. Still, they become abject monsters not only because they feel rejected by mainstream society, but also because they accept Otherness as part of themselves. Yet, Sherman and Anthony are not the only Black men who have transformed into Candyman and rendered into an abject state. In the next section, the urban legend of Candyman will be discussed as a manner of giving voice to intergenerational abjection.

Storytelling, Abjection, and #BlackLivesMatter The very first scene in Candyman portrays the shadows of two puppets on a white background. One represents a Black man, and the other a policeman chasing him. William as a child emulates the voice of the puppet of the policeman and says: “you’re under arrest,” and then the puppet of the Black man screams: “I didn’t do anything.” This first scene not only depicts one of the main themes of the movie, systemic violence, but also shows the perception that Black people, and particularly Black children, living in the ghetto have of the police. According to Bauman, “There is no law for the excluded” (2004, 32). And along the same lines, in Candyman, the police do not protect the Black people living in the ghetto, but only exclude them. This is a reality that is part of the daily lives of the people inhabiting the ghetto, and because of this, it is embedded in children’s play and in the narratives that they tell themselves. In Candyman, storytelling is the main medium in order to pass on the urban legends and the different manners in which the community makes sense of the world, and it is mainly represented on-screen through a shadow theatre. While Troy tells Anthony and Brianna the version that he has heard of Helen’s story, shadows appear on the screen representing the narration. Later in the film, Anthony’s mother explains that Helen was an innocent woman who saved him from the hands of Candyman. Yet, in the shadow theater at the beginning, Helen is depicted as a crazy woman who murders indistinctly. This is how society sees Helen and the stories told about her. The shadows have strings that are pulled by unknown hands, which might imply that what is shown on-screen is a construct. These are not the facts themselves, but the re-production of the events in popular imagination.

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Moreover, the shadows might also be a manner of implying that these stories are ignored by the mainstream and unrepresented in official history, but they are part of society nonetheless. These urban legends are abject because they are violent and loathsome, and also because they offer an alternative history, one that includes the people erased by the dominant culture. Later in the film, William tells Anthony the story of the Candyman that Helen found, who was not Sherman, but Daniel Robitaille. Robitaille was a painter who had an affair with a wealthy white woman in the 1880s. When she got pregnant, Robitaille was tortured. He had his hand cut off and a hook put in its place, had honey put on his chest so that bees would sting him, and was set on fire while a crowd looked at him. On-screen, like in Helen’s story, shadows appear to represent this. The violence of both stories is repressed by the mainstream, and the only thing that prevails is the urban legend haunting the community. As William explains later, “Candyman is how we deal with the fact that these things happen.” That is, the legend of Candyman is the popular negotiation of the horrific events that occur to the community, relegating them to an abject state because they cannot be assimilated without dismantling the status quo. Robitaille suffered from systemic violence and racism. He was a member of the society of his time as a painter, but he was excluded because of his race. His death had neither legal consequences nor social ones: a crowd of people watched while he was being tortured, and nobody said a word. Robitaille became Candyman as an act of revenge on a society that excluded Black men. From this moment onwards, Candyman encompasses different generations of Black men who have become abject because of racial discrimination. William mentions the examples of William Bell, who was lynched in the 1920s, and Samuel Evans, who was murdered in the housing riots of the 1950s. These examples are related to the Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation in the US from the late nineteenth century to 1965, and the lynching of Black men at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan. At the end of this movie, Anthony McCoy, after being shot by the police, also becomes one of them. Candyman links the violence and discrimination against Black people that persisted after the Civil War with contemporary forms of violence that the Black community still suffers today. As Anthony is explained, “Candyman ain’t a he, Candyman’s the whole damn hive.” This is not an individual case, but a social problem which has affected Black men throughout history, rendering them invisible and forcing them to become monsters. Storytelling and in particular

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urban legends ensure that their stories are heard instead of forgotten only because they are not part of the dominant culture. Candyman’s take on abjection is especially relevant in a culture wars context. The last decade has seen, on the one hand, the political rise of the alt-right, promoting politics of exclusion against part of the population, and on the other, social justice movements, fighting for the rights of those who live in the margins. This movie especially engages with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and its attempt to give voice to the victims of racist crimes. The movement originated in 2014 with mass protests in the United States in response to the assassination of Michael Brown, a Black man, at the hands of the police. According to Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “what began as a local struggle” escalated to a “national movement against police brutality and daily police killings of unarmed African Americans” (2016, 2). The movie Candyman reflects this social panorama. At the end of the movie, Brianna and Anthony are kidnapped by William, who wants Anthony to become the Candyman and bring the legend back to life. William cuts off Anthony’s hand and replaces it with a hook. Then, he calls the police and tells them that he has seen the murderer that they are searching for. He wants to create his own version of Candyman as a response to the violence of gentrification, putting Anthony as the abject monster-victim and the police as the representative of the society that rejects him. The story itself is artificial; it has been designed by William. Yet, Anthony becomes the Candyman because the social abjection emanating from racism and systemic violence is real. In the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the police brutality in Candyman is portrayed as the social inheritance of lynching in a society that has continued to abject Black people throughout history. When the police arrive, Anthony is nearly dying, and Brianna calls them for help. As Taylor explains, the mainstream discourse is that race is not important in contemporary society, when the reality is that people of color still suffer from racism (4). Brianna is a successful Black woman with a prominent reputation in the world of art, and because of this, she thinks that the police will help them. Yet, the police officers shoots Anthony, who is unarmed and lying on the floor. On-screen, only their shadow is projected on the wall. This evokes the shadow theater previously mentioned and suggests that Anthony’s story is going to become another urban legend. Afterward, a policeman threatens Brianna with a lifetime in jail if she does not cooperate in framing Anthony as a dangerous murderer. The police also want to tell their own story, the dominant story in which the abject

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are the scapegoats for their crimes. Then, Brianna says Candyman’s name five times in the mirror, and Anthony appears and kills the police officers. Candyman fights against injustices and brings social justice. As Anthony puts it, he is “the writing on the walls,” “the sweet smell of blood on the street,” “the buzz that echoes in the alleyways”: as an abject, he is almost imperceptible but still there, repressed but part of society nonetheless. He adds: “They will say I shed innocent blood. You’re far from innocent, but they’ll say you were. That’s all that matters.” The dominant version will repress Candyman and frame him as a monster, while placing the police as innocent victims. As an abject, his version is never the official one. Yet, he ensures that the stories of the victims of institutionalized racism are heard, challenging the dominant narrative. The link between Candyman and some social movements in the twenty-­ first century is even more obvious if we compare them with the 1992 version. This first movie already places the Black male body, which is also a victim of lynching, as a source of abjection. Yet, the movie focuses on the story of Helen, a white woman who is writing her PhD dissertation on urban legends. She gets interested in Candyman and is haunted by him and framed for his crimes. This movie illustrates Linda William’s ideas about the female gaze in horror cinema: as she argues, the female protagonist and the monster share a common status in patriarchal society because both of them are treated like objects of their looks (2015, 20). Thus, for Williams, when the woman looks at the monster, there is a certain identification between them (22). In the first version of Candyman, Helen’s investigation is not taken seriously in part because of her gender, and, as a Black man, Candyman is also a victim of discrimination. This allows them to achieve a common understanding and equates female and racial abjection. DaCosta’s version of Candyman, created in the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, focuses on the similarities between a contemporary Black man suffering from police brutality and other forms of racism with a history of socially abject Black men. While the former movie portrays Black monstrosity in relation to the monstrous feminine, the latter puts racist abjection in the center. In the context of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Candyman (2021) uses storytelling and the trope of the urban legend in order to denounce the abjection that Black men have endured throughout history and still experience nowadays. According to Hennefeld and Sammond, in order to resist abjection, the borders between self and Other must be eliminated (2020, 12), because abjection is the result of perceiving the individual as

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autonomous and sovereign and the “repressed violence” emanating from this (12). The film opposes abjection and blurs the lines between self and Other. Anthony abandons his individuality and joins his predecessors, becoming part of the Candyman legend. In this manner, Candyman portrays that, even if times have changed, Black men still suffer from racism, discrimination, and forms of violence which should indeed be contested. Judith Butler aims for a “politicization of abjection,” that is, to consider the abject not as a failure but as a threat to the system (2011, xxix). Tyler holds a similar view, claiming that social abjection exposes the fact that discrimination is not natural and unavoidable, but rather a social, historical, and political set of circumstances which can be changed (2013, 38). Through storytelling, Candyman interrogates social abjection as the consequence of a history of discrimination against the Black community. In the film, the ghetto in the process of gentrification is not an abject space per se, and neither is a Black man who does not fit into the parameters assigned to Black masculinity. Society excludes them and renders them invisible. Yet, Candyman does not stay passively in the shadows, but fights back, contesting and making visible social abjection. Just as the supporters of the #BlackLivesMatter movement repeat the names of the victims, Candyman’s name must be spread to bring violence and discrimination to the spotlight and, therefore, to an end. In Candyman, storytelling is an active response against social abjection.

Conclusion In conclusion, Candyman uses storytelling and the trope of the urban legend in order to denounce the social abjection suffered by those who occupy precarious spaces in the margins of society, in particular Black men from the ghetto whose masculinity does not fit into mainstream expectations. As has been argued, this movie uses the haunted house narrative and adapts it to the gentrified neighborhood. The ghetto is portrayed as a space of segregation and social exclusion which is part of the city, but made invisible, and the gentrified neighborhood as a haunted space in which the economy displaces but does not erase the community. Thus, those who are first relegated to the margins of the ghetto and later expelled from their place of residence become an abject class. Anthony, as a failed Black artist who was born in the ghetto, feels invisible and ends up identifying with Sherman Fields and with Candyman. The fact that Anthony cannot provide for his family and that his talent is constantly put into

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question leads him to investigate the story of Candyman and to prioritize fame and recognition. Thus, the borders between Anthony and Candyman blur, which is depicted through his identification with the monster in mirrors and by Anthony’s bodily transformation. Anthony becomes an abject, and the abject cannot be fully accepted in the mainstream. As Sherman became a scapegoat in his time for not fitting the standards of Black masculinity, Anthony also becomes one. Being shot by the police for a crime he did not commit, Anthony becomes one in a history of socially abject Black men who were victims of the systemic violence of their time. Through storytelling, the story of these abject Black men is remembered and remains in the social unconscious throughout the decades. This is portrayed by means of shadow theater, which suggests that the stories that people tell themselves are constructions and that Candyman is a device to mediate the trauma of abjection. The use of the urban legend is different from the one in the first Candyman movie (1992) in that it resonates with a #BlackLivesMatter context and with the social abjection endured by the Black community through time. In this movie, abjection emanates from spatial violence and social stereotypes, but it is fought against by means of storytelling and urban legend. The only manner to achieve social justice in Candyman is to tell the stories of the socially abject so that they are not forgotten.

References Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. Horror Film and Affect. London and New  York: Routledge. Bataille, Georges. [1934] 2006. Abjection and Miserable Forms. In More and Less, ed. Yvonne Shaffir, 9–13. Cambridge: MIT Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Cambridge: Polity Press. Berlatsky, Noah. 2016. Fecund Horror: Slashers, Rape Revenge, Women in Prison, Zombies and Other Exploitation Dreck. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Butler, Judith. 2011. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge Classics. Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge. Creed, Barbara. 1993. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge. DaCosta, Nia, dir. 2021. Candyman. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

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Gaines, Mikal J. 2020. They are Still Here: Possession and Dispossession in the 21st Century Haunted House Film. In The Spaces and Places of Horror, ed. Francesco Pascuzzi and Sandra Waters, 179–202. Delaware: Vernon Press. Harrington, Erin. 2017. Women, Monstrosity and Horror Film: Gynaehorror. Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge. Hennefeld, Maggie, and Nicholas Sammond. 2020. Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Hooper, Tobe, dir. 1982. Poltergeist. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Hudson, Chris. 2010. Global Cities. In The Routledge International Handbook of Globalization Studies, ed. Bryan S. Turner, 429–446. London and New York: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press. Lotringer, Sylvère. 2020. The Politics of Abjection. In Abjection Incorporated, ed. Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond, 30–39. Durham: Duke University Press. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. McDougal, Serie, III. 2020. Black Men’s Studies. Black Manhood and Masculinities in the U.S. Context. New York: Peter Lang. Means Coleman, Robin R. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. New York: Routledge. Meeuf, Russell. 2022. White Terror: The Horror Film from Obama to Trump. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Myrick, Daniel, and Eduardo Sánchez, dirs. 1999. The Blair Witch Project. Artisan Entertainment. Peli, Oren, dir. 2007. Paranormal Activity. Blumhouse Productions. Pisters, Patricia. 2020. New Blood in Contemporary Cinema: Women Directors and the Poetics of Horror. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rose, Bernard, dir. 1992. Candyman. TriStar Pictures. Rosenberg, Stuart, dir. 1979. The Amityville Horror. American International Productions and Cinema 77. Sassen, Saskia. 2003. Reading the City in a Global Digital Age: Between Topographic Representation and Spatialized Power Projects. In Global Cities: Cinema, Architecture, and Urbanism in a Digital Age, ed. Linda Krause and Patrice Petro, 15–30. New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London: Rutgers University Press. Shabazz, Rashad. 2015. Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2016. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

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Tyler, Imogen. 2013. Revolting Subjects. London: Zed Books. Verbinski, Gore, dir. 2002. The Ring. Ring Distributor, 2002. Wan, James, dir. 2013. The Conjuring. Warner Bros, 2013. White, Sylvain, dir. 2018. Slender Man. Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group. Williams, Linda. 2015. When the Woman Looks. In The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant, 17–36. Austin: University of Texas Press.

CHAPTER 7

“Say His Name”: Candyman (2021) as a Critique of Black Trauma Porn William Chavez

Introduction The gothic conventions deployed in Candyman (Bernard Rose 1992), hereafter CM92, shape most psychoanalytic reading interpretations of the film. Elspeth Kydd (1996) analyzes Candyman’s “grotesque attractiveness,” his uncanny death-state that complicates arousal associated with his “erotic function” (aristocratic demeanor, phallic weapon, orgasmic killings). Jon Towlson (2018) examines the taboo of disseminating Candyman’s name (17–32), the suppression of trauma, and the “return of the repressed” tropes evoked throughout his tale (59–94). I use Vera Dika (1987) to uncover the stakes and implications of this film and its 2021 reboot (Nia DaCosta, hereafter CM21). Though Dika covers films from 1978 to 1981, her work requires consideration due to the recent nostalgia-­ fueled revival of late twentieth-century horror cinema.

W. Chavez (*) Stetson University, DeLand, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_7

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CM92 and CM21 function as interactive temporalities—converting nostalgia into hauntology, revealing a horror-themed portrait of the American psyche. This discursive dynamic occurs both in-universe and out, diegetically and not. As Robin Wood writes, “The true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilisation represses or oppresses” (2003, 68). Monsters symbolize a “return of the repressed in the form of the Other which poses a threat to the dominant order” (Towlson 2018, 59). But the “return of the repressed” trope, in this case, conveys an Afro-pessimistic sentiment. If Candyman rises from the grave, his return signifies that the socio-economic conditions that plague Black America have not changed. Candyman never disappeared, nor should we let him. His mythos demonstrates how the scholarly analysis of American religion necessitates a gothic component. This franchise reflects the cultural implications of Black horror/trauma and the popular media production of brutality. In CM92 and CM21, Candyman, the fictional revenant, is presented as a terror for Black communities set alongside “real life” dynamics of social subjugation. Nia DaCosta, co-writer/director of CM21, presents her film in conversation with its predecessor, directed by Bernard Rose; it features numerous discursive allusions demonstrated below. CM21, especially given the diegetic punishment of its protagonist, functions as an artistic response to critiques of depicting Black brutality on film—an introspection on the politics of “Black trauma porn.”

Gothic Horror The killer of CM92 is neither white, mask-wearing, nor mute. The film is set not in a mythic small town representing idealized middle-class America (cf. Dika 1987, 93), but in an existing geographical location: the housing projects of Cabrini-Green on the Near North Side of Chicago, demolished, in part due to the film’s vilification, from 1995 to 2011. The film’s narrative events of the past incite a multitude of killings (via commemoration and/or retribution), but are not restricted in meaning relative to a local collective memory. The film functions as a “national allegory” (Thompson 2007, 26), a “story in which the terror of America’s racial history comes to life” (Poole 2018, 82) in the form of a 6-foot-5 “hulking, bloodthirsty, black [man]” (Towlson 2018, 40) played by Tony Todd. Candyman is a destroyer, illustrating the sentiment that “the price of historical amnesia will be apocalyptic” (Thompson 2007, 59).

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CM92 follows Helen Lyle, a white doctoral student researching urban folklore. According to legend, Candyman’s ashes (following his lynching in 1890) were scattered across what later became Cabrini-Green. Helen’s interviews and site visits to the vulgar and intimidating projects garner the romantic interest of Candyman himself. Though the revenant upheaves her reputation and career (framing her for his murders), Helen is mesmerized by his charm. Candyman presents an intervention to her disenchantment with white patriarchy. His charisma contrasts men that exert social power over Helen throughout the film—e.g., her cheating husband, her antagonizing dissertation reader, and her arrogantly dismissive psychologist (assigned to her case following arrest). The horror pairing of a Black man and white woman, two positionalities “prone to … liminality” (Parezanovic and Lukic 2020, 86) and figured as monstrous (Pinedo 1997, 131), represents a history of sexualized racial violence perpetrated by white men seemingly doomed to repeat itself (Lott 2017, 30). Gothic horror, indeed, repeats. The theme of gothic doubling in CM92 is threefold. First, Helen researches the death of Ruthie Jean, a Black woman killed by a hook-wielding assailant in her apartment identical in layout to Helen’s own building. Helen learns that her apartments were originally built as public housing projects, gentrified and resold as condominiums, a city effort to limit the “ghetto” to the other side of the highway and L train. Candyman’s later attack on Helen mirrors the medicine cabinet assault on Jean—itself inspired by non-fictional Ruthie Mae McCoy, a woman murdered in similar fashion in 1987 in the ABLA homes of Chicago’s Near-West Side (Bogira 1987). Candyman considers Helen the reincarnation of his original lover. She is historically tied to the interracial affair that cost him his life (as Daniel Robitaille). The film generates critiques from spectators of color for perpetuating racial stereotypes (Coleman 2011; Burgin 2019)—portraying Black men as monstrous, “violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh” (Bogle 2001, 14). The “myth of the Negro’s high-powered sexuality” and the idea that “every black man longs for a white woman” are colonialist distortions popularized in American cinema such as The Birth of a Nation (D.  W. Griffith 1915), King Kong (Merian C.  Cooper and Ernest B.  Schoedsack 1933), and I Walked with A Zombie (Jacques Tourneur 1943). The preservation of white womanhood remains central to the popular horror genre even when movie monsters appear separated from Blackness—e.g., Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold 1954), the

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Hammer horror films of the 1950s to 1970s, A Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven 1984), and Leprechaun (Mark Jones 1993). Robin R.  Means Coleman writes that Frankenstein (James Whale 1931), the scene where the monster accidentally kills a little girl, “highlight[s] and signif[ies] monstrosity through the juxtaposition of a triumvirate of purity—Whiteness, womanhood, and child” (2011, 24). The final confrontation of CM92 follows convention. Helen gives her life to rescue a child who Candyman steals. The revenant uses the boy to lure Helen into a resident bonfire. Should the flames consume this Madonna and child, their spirits will haunt Cabrini-Green as he does: “Our bones will soon be ashes and we shall never be separated again.” As Ben Austen (2018) observes, this celebratory “purge exorcis[es] the phantasm—and the horrors of public housing.” Stacked furniture pieces, boards, and disposable waste form a simulacrum of the Cabrini towers, a ritual to entrap Candyman until he, inevitably, returns. Helen dies returning the baby, her story consumed and reproduced through Black folklore thereafter. Thus, in the third gothic doubling, Helen mirrors Candyman himself. “You’re mine now,” he says. “It’s time for a new miracle.” Similar to the legend of “Bloody Mary,” revenant Helen is thereafter summoned through recitation of her name in a mirror. She makes a name for herself not in academia as a scholar but in folklore as a murderous ghost.

Discursive Reclamation Candyman emerges, in the words of Jordan Peele, as the “patron saint of the urban legend” (Burgin 2019). According to Helen’s department, those who disseminate his name do so in recognition of the terror that befalls project-living. To believe in Candyman is to believe in the gothic dread of generational poverty, city neglect, and, to a certain extent, Black inferiority or nihilism. Diegetically, Helen is punished for supporting this interpretation—in horror, suffering befalls “those who think they know [versus] those who know better” (Cowan 2008, 63). Helen’s death is gothic judgment resulting from her extraction of Candylore from Cabrini “congregants” while dismissing folk interlocutors (emic perspectives) in favor of explanatory, academic reduction. This gothic sanction carries into CM21 when a local Black artist is consumed by the forgotten dead after he exploits their stories for commercial gain. The reboot follows separate trajectories for its two protagonists. Brianna Cartwright works as a local gallery director, promoting contemporary art

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from communities of color, and future curator for Chicago Project Room. Anthony McCoy is her loving boyfriend, a frustrated painter struggling for artistic inspiration and public recognition. After casing the few Cabrini projects that remain, Anthony learns various iterations to the Candyman legend. Seeking to impress critics of Chicago’s gentrified art district with his depictions of Black abjection, Anthony designs an art installation for Brianna’s gallery: a gateway, accessed via bathroom vanity, to depictions of Black suffering. “I’m trying to align these moments in time that exist in the same place,” he explains, “the idea is to almost calibrate tragedy into a focused lineage that culminates in the now.” He invites spectators to glimpse a past yearned to be forgotten, historic horrors disregarded as an act of collective disremembrance. Though one could celebrate Anthony’s artistic resistance to “post-racial” hegemony, the film punishes its protagonist, like Helen, for attempting to exploit Cabrini trauma in self-service. Anthony garners the attention of the Candyman revenant. Following an ominous bee sting, a horrifying infection that consumes his right hand, Anthony McCoy, infused and deformed by Cabrini’s history of Black persecution, unwittingly transforms his body into a portal for the Candymen of past to return once more. CM21 mediates the dark side of cultural heritage (collective identity born through trauma) but with further gothic punishment reserved for the sins of cultural oppressors. Anthony, the new Candyman, is killed through police brutality on the grounds of Cabrini-­ Green. He rises from the grave as a form of Black wrath to kill those who gentrify and terrorize his Black community. As Tananarive Due writes in promotional material: Nia DaCosta’s CANDYMAN [is a] reclamation of our story … our history … our trauma. [W]hile the original film is steeped in discussions of racism, poverty, and violence, the story is very much told through a white lens. … The 2021 reboot … is a fun-house mirror showing us what CANDYMAN looks like through a Black lens. (Langston League 2021, 7–8)

CM21 is summoned through Black self-representation. “[T]he story of an unwilling martyr, a person’s descent into madness, and race and violence in America,” DaCosta narrates in an interview (Waititi 2020). “It felt like exorcising my own trauma of growing up in such a racist country, and doing it in my chosen language [of art].” The writer/director notes how the film’s reclamation of the past adjusts the vilification of Cabrini-Green and its residents.

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DaCosta “preserve[s] the scariness of the original film while separating the monster from the community itself,” Andrew Chow (2021) writes. CM92 presents Candyman as an internal source of terror for Chicago’s segregated slums, “the unselfconscious reflection of the fears of urban society.” His havoc is set alongside drugs, criminality, and violence. Tenant Anne-Marie McCoy is hailed as Cabrini exception, disconfirming the film’s negative Black stereotypes with her perspective and behavior yet reaffirming the danger that lies within public housing. Anne-Marie tells Helen: What you gonna say [in your study]? That we’re bad? We steal? We gangbang? We all on drugs, right? We ain’t all like them assholes downstairs. … I just wanna raise my child good. Got my eye on this one, big time. Yeah, they’re not gonna get him.

DaCosta re-signifies Candyman’s mythos of terror: “The original film … fed into a fear of the Black community, and the Black man in particular,” she tells TIME (Chow 2021). “I didn’t want to do this approach of, ‘Oh, god, this terrible place where terrible things are happening, because these brutes are living here.’ This is a community that was chronically underserved for a very long time.” DaCosta’s Candyman signifies external sources of terror. In CM92, Candyman is handsome and suave though monstrous under his coat; the housing projects are presented as daunting and defiled inside and out. Gentrification emboldens both films but CM21 reverses these two manifestations of abjection. The area of Cabrini, outside the few projects that remain, is a thriving art district with luxury condominiums. Candyman is presented as the abject monster; his face brutalized following police violence. He is ugly, just like the history he represents. In both films a protagonist pursues legacy, just as the revenant returns in search of communal recognition and propagation. As DaCosta explains: It’s all about, My name is to be remembered, My story is to be remembered—by this community in particular. … Because [in CM21] the community doesn’t exist anymore. … [G]entrification changed the demographics of the community. (Frederick 2021)

Before the final act, DaCosta films Anthony standing in the street wearing his painting suit in failure. Disillusioned, he stands witness to the vast

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distinctions that separate his gentrified apartments in the distance and the unoccupied “honeycomb buildings,” as DaCosta calls them (Meyer 2021), set in the foreground. “What hauntings result when an entire community becomes a ghost?” Tananarive Due asks (Langston League 2021, 8). Left of the frame, ominous light flashes, illuminating a man’s shadow on the wall. Anthony receives a premonition of his death, later murdered by police in the same room under the presumption he is responsible for Candyman’s murders. Unlike Helen, Anthony isn’t arrested, questioned, or sentenced to psychiatric treatment. Despite attempts to stay clear of the “hood” (engaging it only in artistic representation), Anthony’s life is claimed by the haunted Cabrini grounds. Before death, he must contemplate such gothic questions as “Am I property?” and “Is this where I belong?” CM21 constructs a “chain of memory” (Hervieu-Léger 2000) with dreadful implications. Individuals collapse within the Candyman lineage into a single, abject personage; links are assembled through a victim chain that extends into the past and future of Black America. There is something gothic about this dreadful realization that the past will repeat; powerful feelings of helplessness in the face of inescapable horror, inevitable given the characters and circumstances. But what does it mean for the history of Black persecution and brutality to become popularly mediatized in the form of art and entertainment? Tananarive Due asks: “How do you depict Black fears without retraumatizing audiences or creating fear of Blackness?” (Langston League 2021, 8). These are the politics surrounding “Black trauma porn” and the significance of Candyman.

Black Trauma Porn Around 2013, the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, a wave of Black self-representation intersected the entertainment industry. Depictions of violence against contemporary African Americans, fictional and biographical, were popularly mediatized along with coverage of various brutalities associated with the ethnogenesis of Black America: chattel slavery, lynching, and other hate crimes, disenfranchisement under Jim Crow and racial propaganda, criminalization of drug use and high incarceration rates, and police brutality. Films include Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler 2013), 12 Years A Slave (Steve McQueen 2013), Detroit (Kathryn Bigelow 2017), Monsters and Men (Reinaldo Marcus Green 2018), Harriet (Kasi Lemmons 2019), Antebellum (Christopher Renz and

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Gerard Bush 2020), Judas and the Black Messiah (Shaka King 2021), and Till (Chinonye Chukwu 2022). The intended audience of such media is ambiguous. Arguments made for Black consumption—far fewer than those critical of said depictions—praise the social catharsis available for Black spectators, an artistic resistance to the “post-racial” political culture that systematically erases Black suffering through a denial of white accountability. Janell Hobson (2021) writes: If we’re going to heal, sometimes we have to tell our stories straight, without the filter of humor or escapism. As Hooded Justice told his granddaughter Angela Abar in HBO’s Watchmen: ‘You can’t heal under a mask. Wounds need air.’ Some of our Black storytellers are finally airing the wounds.

In a conversation between Black content creators and scholars hosted by UC Riverside, Southern author Kiese Makeba Laymon defends the mass-mediation of Black suffering as an opportunity to create “Black joy” (“Black Horror Salon” 2023). He references a scene in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) where Georgina, housekeeper to the Armitage family estate, whose Black consciousness is already banished to a psychic void, attempts to warn the protagonist, Chris, that he faces a similar fate. Chris confides in her: “All I know is sometimes if there’s too many white people, I get nervous, you know?” Georgina recomposes herself and delivers a reassuring statement: That’s not my experience. Not at all. The Armitages are so good to us. They treat us like family.

Prior to this consolation, Georgina commiserates and breaks down for about thirty seconds, tears sliding down her face, hypnotically regaining control through a rhythmic recitation of denial. Laymon cites this scene as evidence of the power of Black horror cinema. “The experience of going to see Get Out in a Black theater in Baltimore—[with] all Black folks— made it the most abundant Black experience of my watching life. … When Georgina cries … the awareness of what is happening in that moment … is Black joy … in a Black horror film” (“Black Horror Salon” 2023). To expose the public secret achieves “Black joy.” Ryan Poll writes that “African Americans have developed a sixth sense, one that immediately intuits if a particular geography is marked by [(impending)] horror” (2018, 70). Laymon envisions Black audiences celebrating such a

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recognition of systemic oppression and cultures of anti-Blackness; a rare opportunity to share Black collective experience on the big screen. He favors when audiences leave theaters “contemplative and thinking,” pondering the division between text and reality (“Black Horror Salon” 2023). Regarding the upcoming cinematic adaptation of his memoir Heavy (2018), Laymon addresses the dilemma of whether to compromise his artistic vision to reach a wider audience. The producing studio appears interested in his “flirtation” with the genre of Black horror but insists that a positive, “uplifting” message resonates at the story’s conclusion. “That, to me, is a horror!” Laymon shares. “Have the responsibilities of the Black artist—who might be creating some art that is Black and horrific—changed [given this new era of criticism]?” he asks (“Black Horror Salon” 2023). “What sorts of imperatives should we have to create Black horror in a culture that seems to be dominated, partially, by this idea of ‘trauma porn’?” Early drafts of the Get Out script reflect the creator’s struggle with this “uplifting” imperative. In the original ending, Chris, bloodied, escapes the Armitage estate only to be apprehended by the police, an allusion to Night of the Living Dead (George A.  Romero 1968), where Black protagonist Ben, the sole survivor of a zombie onslaught, is gunned down by a local, entirely white posse that mistakes him for infected or uses the opportunity to kill a Black man without reprisal. This ending shows Chris imprisoned, visited by his friend Rod six months later. Despite Rod’s plea to keep fighting, Chris accepts his sentence and asks Rod to accept it as well. Peele, who wrote the script around 2008, amended the film’s ending amidst the changing socio-political climate (Galuppo 2017); the original ending was a “gut-punch,” he now says, that audiences really didn’t need (“Alternate Ending” 2018). For Ryan Poll (2018, 70), aestheticizing racism into entertainment leads to the likely propagation of Afro-pessimist sentiment. In Afro-­ pessimism Black Being, first, is interpreted as “the ontological terror” of colonialist invention (Warren 2018). Similar to spirit possession discourse observed by Paul Christopher Johnson, Black Being challenges the dominant semantic and ideological fields related to discursive subjugation— issues of “personhood, will, action, things, and power” (2011, 400). Second, Black Being, as the antithesis of “self-possessed,” “free-thinking” individuality, denotes Black subjects as internal enemies of civil society. Regimes of anti-Black violence (systemic persecution) contend for the unending domination and/or eradication of the “ontological terror” that is Black Being.

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Third and thus, Afro-pessimism, as a philosophical school, approaches Black Being as residually nihilistic. Christina Sharpe argues that Black subjects live “in the wake” of Black death and trauma, in “the aftermath of property” (2016, 15). Sharpe’s construction of Black Being necessitates an ongoing subjugation of Blackness through both historical and contemporary social conditions. But to envision Black Being as perpetually suffering is only the initial conceit of Afro-pessimistic thought, for Black subjects are routinely terrorized in society and function as a spectacle of “ontological terror” through subjugation. “Black people [become] the carriers of terror, terror’s embodiment,” she posits (15). Poll charges that films like Get Out, especially its original ending, pontificate that no change is possible, that social progress is the “great [white] fiction” of America (2018, 71). Below I survey film and television reviews written by Black spectators available through blogs and popular news sites to exhibit this complex wave of criticism. The challenge to Black trauma porn is fourfold. First, like Poll, critics of Black trauma porn interpret the white media production of Black brutality as a way to “deter Black Americans from challenging white supremacy” (Preston 2020). Consumption and dissemination of Black violence spread across social media, with videos capturing the murders of Walter Scott, Eric Garner, George Floyd, and others. “And by re-sharing, liking, or posting videos of Black people being murdered,” Ashlee Marie Preston notes, “you’re inadvertently helping to spread [a boastful display of white power].” Such “art is, in essence,” as Jason Okundaye (2021) adds, “a continuation of the violence it seeks to represent.” Ernest Owens (2021) writes in his review of Amazon’s Them (Lena Waithe 2021), a series which follows the gothic torment of a Black nuclear family (the Emorys) who move into an all-white suburban neighborhood in the 1950s: “It’s like with each episode, Them was saying ‘come for the Blackness, but stay for the dozens of bizarre ways we attempt to torture it.’” Given America’s pluralistic and neoliberal political construction, such “hate crime fantasies” may inadvertently attract the wrong audience. Tony Todd shared in 2014 that CM92 was popular not only among inner city gangs but “redneck horror fans in the South” (Cooper 2014). “I’ve had full Klan members come up to my table and say, ‘I love the way you kill people,’” said Todd. Second, the various communities that lament the creation and promotion of Black trauma porn critique the catharsis available for white spectators, a ritual expulsion of white guilt. As Brittany Johnson (2020) says of The Help (Tate Taylor 2011):

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[This film] isn’t about Black people [but] about Black pain relative to the white savior complex. … It is a feel good movie for white people that they reference often. Meanwhile [t]here is nothing “feel good” about The Help for Black people. Our resilience and trauma is not for your entertainment.

Ashlee Marie Preston (2020) and Sonia Kovacevic (2021) note the “vicious cycle of voyeurism”; that to simply produce, consume, and/or share graphic depictions of Black brutality nevertheless translates into a problem of “amplification without action.” As Aisha Harris (2021) writes of Them: “[The series] suffers from the same predicament that has arisen in the wake of Black people becoming hashtags in death—the public knows far more about their last moments on Earth than all the moments that made up their life before. Viewers who make it through all ten episodes will know plenty about how the Emorys have suffered and been traumatized, but they won’t come away with much else.” Third, Black trauma porn embroils communities that lament the promotion of this type of content over others. Maryam Muhammad (2019) writes that “every Fruitvale Station should have a Black Panther, and every The Hate U Give should have an A Wrinkle in Time.” “I don’t want to see the young Black boy get shot by the police and die,” she adds. “I want to see him sprout wings and fly away instead for a change.” This form of criticism examines how Black horror films should end and why Black horror is currently so popular. Similar arguments were made following the critically acclaimed wave of 1990s “hood” films made by young Black filmmakers. Such depictions of Black living were raw and authentic, but why not support the production of other stories? Thus, Black horror, Black trauma porn, and Black brutality period pieces are problematic given their intended audience and heavy saturation of the market. Fourth and finally, those Black content creators depicting graphic violence are, arguably, participating within a larger aesthetic framework of Western convention. Zoé Samudzi (2020) laments genres that restrict Black imagination as a form of assimilation: “In another world, Black artists would be able to create, primarily, for audiences with whom they share a culture. But today, more often than not, they are assimilated into, and made legible within, the Western visual regime.” The media criticized as Black trauma porn then warrants a reconsideration of genre and structure according to the conventions of established subgenres like body horror, torture porn, and gothic horror. Queen & Slim (Melina Matsoukas 2019) is a popular target by critics of Black trauma porn as it presents Black

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suffering (with a snuff-like ending) before a white (guilt) gaze. A young Black couple runs from the law after killing a police officer in self-defense during a traffic stop. Its viewers reflect on fugitivity as related to contemporary Black ontology, while acknowledging subversion to other road-­ crime films like Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn 1967) and Thelma & Louise (Ridley Scott 1991). This contextual approach to film informs my analysis of CM21. Its final act, I argue, marks a potential “line of flight” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) from the racial trappings summarized above. Though CM21 honors the mythology established by its 1992 predecessor and gothic conventions more generally, the film succeeds in severing a particular relationship between horror and Black subjugation—though it remains unclear how long this “line” extends. To tease this revelation, consider the following review of Them from Brandon Taylor (2021): [T]he operative curse in Them stems from [white guilt]. [W]hite people’s pain and their suffering, etc., and the show is very interested in teasing out its effects. What happens when black people move to a place where white people do not want them. [T]hose same black people were driven from the South by white people who did not want them to know peace. Throughout Them, I wondered, What about the black people’s curse. What about the curse flung from the mouths of the enraged black people stripped of their liberty and forced to endure untold humiliations. I want a Black Horror about that curse. Not blackness as eternally afflicted and suffering. But black wrath visited upon our enemies and their children and their children’s children and on. Let’s see their heads roll for once. Give me a furious black ghost.

Them, with Taylor’s review, released in April 2021. CM21 followed four months later, presenting the very ghost Taylor requested (or foretold) in clear awareness of Black trauma porn criticism. White bodies, subversive of convention, are then tortured on screen in service to Black horror and trauma.

Temporal Terror CM21 presents haunting and possession phenomena as distinctly racialized ontologies: positionalities of subjugation maintained through social dynamics such as police brutality, apartheid, gentrification, systematic erasure, and, indeed, Black trauma porn. Amidst Anthony’s Candyman

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research, he meets an ominous doomsday prophet named William Burke, one of the last residents of Cabrini-Green. In line with the “two-part temporal structure” of classic slasher films observed by Vera Dika (1987, 93), CM21 opens with a flashback of Burke as a child in 1977. Dika extrapolates: The first part … presents an event occurring years earlier: the killer is driven to madness or is seen as already mad because of an extreme trauma. This trauma is caused by his viewing of, knowledge of, or participation in a wrongful action that has often been directly or indirectly perpetuated by the members of the young community. The killer experiences a loss and responds with rage, either expressed immediately in an act of vengeance or withheld until the second part of the film.

Burke’s flashback, without sensationalism, depicts the police beating of Sherman Fields, a homeless man living in the walls of the laundry room. CM21 writers Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, and Nia DaCosta subvert the feelings of liberation typically associated with police arrival in horror films, while also recontextualizing the staples of Candyman iconography. Young Burke’s screams alert the authorities to Fields’ position. Soon after, the officers “swarm him” like bees, “kill[ing] him right there on the spot.” It was at that moment that Burke witnessed “the true face of fear,” he says. Though Fields was innocent of any wrongdoing, the “swarm” claimed him nonetheless. Dika’s structure (1987) continues, “In the second, or present-day, section of the film, the killer returns to take vengeance on the guilty parties or on their symbolic substitutes” (94). These present-day events include a narration of past trauma, usually by “a seer [that] warns the young community” of their impending doom, “the killer[‘s] return to the site of a past crime,” and the “commemoration of an event that reactivates the killer’s force” (93). In CM21, Sherman Fields returns as the most recent Candyman iteration, another fulfillment of the gothic revenge motif. The film subverts audience expectations as the two protagonists never directly witness the killings until the conclusion, nor is there a dramatic confrontation between protagonists and killer, nor is the killer ever subdued or vanquished. Candyman grows more powerful as his story develops. Burke emerges as an overzealous disciple who seemingly conjures Candyman back into existence; Fields’ Candyman return is a religious byproduct of the trauma Burke witnessed as a child. As Dika concludes in her analysis of such localized terrors: “In that the killer rises from the community itself

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and comes into conflict with the members of that community, the stalker film dramatizes a struggle of interior forces, of opposing attitudes in a single society” (99). Burke muses on the relationship between Black America and local law enforcement when he first meets Anthony in the abandoned and verboten Cabrini-Green. They’d almost never come ‘round here back in the day. Unless it was to take someone in. … Now they can’t seem to stay away. At night, they post up where the last of us still live, a police car on either side of the block. “Keeping us safe” … or keeping us in.

CM21 understands Black horror to engage racial and classist tensions, namely how the institutions of structural racism create and perpetuate class stratification in the United States through a functional system of apartheid via “redlining,” police-enacted segregation, and forces of gentrification. CM21 addresses this afilmic reality from multiple fronts, considering that Anthony’s diegetic experience differs from Burke. As a Black artist, Anthony is privy to a unique experience of liminality, being a potential insider and ambiguous outsider in his upscale community. He confronts the notion that artists partake in the gentrification of a community, as he tells one critic: [You think] artists gentrify the hood? Who do you think makes the hood? The city cuts off a community and waits for it to die. Then they invite developers in and say, “Hey, you artists, you young people, you white,” preferably or only, “please come to the hood. It’s cheap.” “And if you stick it out for a couple of years, we’ll bring you a Whole Foods.”

Where Anthony McCoy belongs is central to his journey. Through his Candyman research—and delirium sparked through various surreal and paranormal experiences—Anthony learns he was born within the projects, the baby stolen by Candyman for whom Helen died rescuing. This history was suppressed by his mother, Anne-Marie, following the events of CM92. DaCosta’s film casts a dreadful conclusion to the Anne-Marie subplot. Her struggle to protect her son from urban horror is ultimately in vain, though he doesn’t die as she expects. A gothic force lures Anthony back to the “exclusionary” setting of his birthplace (Dika 1987, 93). Burke’s bizarre commemoration of the Candyman lineage transfigures Anthony

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into a conduit for the trauma of Black past, fusing the latter’s liminal identity with the abject continuum of Black untimely dead. Anthony’s gradual obsession with the dark side of heritage—horrors enacted onto Chicago’s historic Black population—reflects the ethnogenesis of Black Being, the process by which African Americans became ethnically, historically, and socially distinct as a people, the social creation of an imagined community. In CM21, African American men systematically targeted and lynched are reborn as vengeful revenants, wrathful wraiths seeking folk dissemination. The Candyman heritage transcends time and space, able to be historically summoned via performance utterance (“Say My Name”). CM21 illustrates larger themes of collapsing identities and spontaneous self-annihilations, a “plurality of identities,” Laura Kranzler writes about gothic horror more generally, that “proves to be neither liberating nor productive, but rather fragmenting and disabling” (2004, xiv). For Burke, Anthony’s discovery of his Candyman doppelgänger is partially conceived as a folk hero origin story (a gothic hero origin story). Kidnapping Brianna, Burke commemorates the Candyman legend with a makeshift altar at the site of an old Cabrini church. The altar lies before a mural of Black Jesus and his disciples, solidifying a religious association of Burke’s service to the Candyman revenant. Brianna acts as a religious witness, as Burke consecrates Anthony in preparation for death: [in a 9–1–1 call] The “Say My Name” killer [is] roaming the row houses at Cabrini! A Black man, around 30 … waving a hook and talking crazy. I think he’s killing people down there! [hangs up] [Isn’t it beautiful? I was baptized here.] [But the whites] tore down our homes, so they could move back in. We need Candyman. ‘Cause this time, he’ll be killing their fathers, their babies, their sisters. … Here we have the story of Anthony McCoy, artist who lost his mind, and the cops showed up and shot him down in cold blood without even saying a word. Well, say his name, if you dare! Say it five times in a mirror. See what happens. When it’s all done, they’ll tell his story, and Candyman will live … forever.

Though Burke meets his demise as Brianna breaks free, this Candy-­acolyte is ultimately correct: Anthony becomes the latest innocent Black man claimed by the “swarm.” In a cop car, Brianna is pressured by an officer to corroborate a false narrative that Anthony warranted execution. Embittered and broken, she recites the revenant’s name five times in the rearview mirror, summoning the aw(e)ful might of the Candyman specter. “Who are

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you?” a terrified officer asks while his entire squad is butchered. The Candyman replies: I am the writing on the walls. I’m the sweet smell of blood on the street. The buzz that echoes in the alleyways. They will say I shed innocent blood. You are far from innocent, but they’ll say you were. That’s all that matters.

At the film’s conclusion, Candyman, a hybrid form of Anthony McCoy, Sherman Fields, and Daniel Robitaille, depicted by Tony Todd, releases Brianna and says: “Tell … everyone.”

Black Trauma Resignified Place and predicament are predestined for Anthony McCoy. Gothic themes tie him to Cabrini-Green, themes of fatalism, hereditary doom, self-destruction, intergenerational trauma, and the horrors of history. CM21 presents time as a malevolent entity, entrapping Black victims of the past, present, and future in a tragic “chain of memory” and cyclic suffering. CM21 laments this construction of Blackness as eternally afflicted yet sacrifices many of its characters to the “Cinema of Cruelty” (Rockett 1988). The motif of gothic doubling pervades CM21, for Anthony’s story mirrors Helen Lyle’s, mirrors other Candymen like Daniel Robitaille and Sherman Fields, and, finally, mirrors Brianna’s self-destructive father. Brianna lives in the shadow of Gil Cartwright and the story of his “psychotic break.” She channels the trauma of her father’s suicide into her promotion of Black contemporary art. She curates the art of “tortured” artists like her father and ultimately supports Anthony in the hope of reclaiming the life that could have been Gil Cartwright’s. This tragic backstory inspires Danielle Harrington and other directors of the Chicago Project Room to recruit Brianna, attempting to exploit her tragedy for artistic promotion. Danielle It’s crazy [to hear about the death of your art dealer] Clive. I heard you were the one to find the bodies. Brianna Yeah …. Danielle You’ve really emerged as an interesting figure amidst all this. … I mean, between the recent tragedies and your father’s legacy, you’ve got a fascinating story. Brianna Right.

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Danielle And your eye for emerging talent. … My board members are buzzing about [Anthony] McCoy’s work. Feels like a Project Room show is something we could start talking about. And, of course, any other artist you have your eye on. Jordan Peele’s Nope (2022), like CM21, invites viewers to reflect on the relationship between exploitation and spectacle, opening the film with a sinister verse from Nahum 3:6: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.” To paraphrase, Peele presents a message of gothic dread: “I will make you an ontological terror.” Brianna is subjugated as such by art directors who intend to market her dark “legacy” as a brand for spectacle, exploiting her tragic ties to both Gil Cartwright and Anthony McCoy along with the brutality represented in each of their art styles. The Blu-Ray release of CM21 includes a deleted scene of Brianna’s flashback to her father’s suicide. “Wanna See Me Fly?” is a reference to Gil’s last words delivered to young Brianna before jumping to his death. Behind Brianna, on the floor of Gil’s studio, the camera frames three paintings, warm in color, of distorted Black faces (cf. Lowe 2021). Their expressions imply anger and contempt. The promotional still of this same scene depicts a fourth portrait in Gil’s monochromatic style: a distorted face of pain and dread—possibly Gil’s final artistic creation. The trauma of Gil’s suicide echoes into the current-day events of CM21. Brianna finds murdered bodies within her art gallery. She is unable to save Anthony as a “tortured artist” suffering from a “psychotic break.” Moreover, Anthony’s final art, created in Candy-madness, resembles the style of Gil’s distorted portraits. Anthony compiles a list of innocent Black males claimed by the defiled history of Cabrini-Green. The macabre faces he paints are the collapsing identities of the Candyman revenant: faces of “ontological terror” but, arguably, not “Black trauma porn.” Compare these defaced portraits to Anthony’s earlier work. His art installation depicts Black bodies suffering in spectacle (i.e., a noose around the neck, hands consumed in fire, a face battered by white fists). Brianna, representative of a community in search of constructive meaning in self-­ representation, requests from Anthony a less “literal approach” to the depiction of Black violence. As such, the film is ambivalent toward the propagation of Black historical horror, itself a reflection of the cultural anxieties related to the discussion of race and racialized history within contemporary American discourse.

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DaCosta, along with co-writer/producer Peele, presents CM21 as a cultural contemplation about the stakes and implications of Black horror and trauma. Echoing the concerns of Kiese Makeba Laymon, the film doesn’t end with an “uplifting” message. It resists the “post-racial” political culture that systematically erases Black suffering through a denial of white accountability. The film problematizes the responsibilities of Black artists interested in aestheticizing racism and trauma into discursive terror and popular entertainment. Viewers ponder the division between text and reality.

Conclusion CM21 explores the power of controlling discourse, the culturally sustaining custom of self- or communal narration. Laurie Maffly-Kippwrites: African Americans are forced to see the world through the eyes of their oppressors rather than freely through their own self-understandings. While the trope of double consciousness sometimes suggests that blacks have a heightened awareness of the world around them and particularly of racial issues, it more often implies a fragmentation of self exhibited in a struggle to find a coherent sense of community. (2010, 2)

This “struggle to find a coherent sense of community” characterizes the film’s ambivalent reception to mediatized Black brutality. Anthony’s sensationalized rendering of Cabrini violence provides space to reclaim a history lost by collective disremembrance. He uses art (criticism) to chastise white socialites for elitist gatekeeping. Yet, Anthony is punished for exploiting anti-Black hostility and the dread associated with “ontological terror” as social currency. Candyman, whether revenant (proper) or entity metaphysically conjured through the power of belief, derives his supernatural existence from the “chain of memory” at Cabrini-Green. Following Danièle Hervieu-­ Léger, religious belief functions as a temporal construction. “[T]here is no religion without the authority of a tradition being invoked (whether explicitly, half-explicitly or implicitly) in support of the act of believing” (2000, 76). “Seen thus, one might say that a religion is an ideological, practical and symbolic system through which consciousness, both individual and collective, of belonging to a particular chain of belief is constituted, maintained, developed and controlled” (82). William Burke

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mythologizes the Candyman “hive” of collapsed and collapsing identities, rendered such by structural social dynamics like police persecution, city neglect, and, to some extent, Black reactionary nihilism, and resentment. Aided by an unexplained gothic force, Burke weaponizes Anthony’s body to punish the sins of his oppressors. He calls upon Candyman to enact retribution for centuries of systemic oppression. CM21 proposes mythological Black wrath as a temporary solution to feelings of Afro-pessimism and trends of Black trauma porn in media. The Candyman commemoration ritual reifies the social bonds of Burke’s fallen and displaced community by preserving collective memory (cf. Maffly-Kipp 2010, 15). If history is easily forgotten, it must be narrated in popular form. As Hervieu-Léger (2000, 87) adds: [W]hat comes from the past is only constituted as tradition insofar as anteriority constitutes a title of authority in the present. Whether the past in question is relatively short or very long is only of secondary significance. The degree of ancientness confers an extra value on tradition, but it is not what initially establishes its social authority. What matters most is that the demonstration of continuity is capable of incorporating even the innovations and reinterpretations demanded by the present.

CM92 and CM21 present interactive temporalities for which to process “real life” dynamics of social subjugation: chattel slavery, lynching and other hate crimes, police-enacted segregation and brutality, gang violence, drug addiction, generational poverty, apartheid, gentrification, systematic erasure, and Black trauma porn. CM92 recasts the gothic revenge motif of the erotic dead to center on the story of a postbellum educated Black man, son of a slave, tortured and killed for miscegenation. CM21, as an act of reclamation, adapts this mythology according to present-day social and artistic sensibilities. For a similar reconstruction of Black wrath, consider the recent comic book Harriet Tubman: Demon Slayer (Crownson 2018). In the fifth issue, Harriet Tubman is reimagined as a sword-wielding warrior backlit by a burning plantation. Behind her, hanging lynched from a large tree, are a dozen hooded Klansmen, their white clothing contrasted by the night sky and Tubman’s black robe. Popular culture provides a site for the collective process of “selective forgetting, sifting and retrospectively inventing” history (Hervieu-Léger 2000, 124)—in the Tubman case, a combat myth set on a fulcrum of racial fugitivity. Meanwhile the past of CM21 is engaged

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via nostalgia and hauntology. This reboot reconfigures the mythology, iconography, and gothic sensibilities of its predecessor, accordingly from a contemporary Black perspective. The message is clear: African American history is a gothic tale until further notice. Acknowledgments  This chapter is a continuation of Chavez (2023). Due to the popularity of dark supernatural content, phenomena like possession, brainwashing, exorcism, and ritual abuse act as culturally available idioms for the creative expression of social subjugation. I expand this analysis beyond age and gender (The Exorcist, William Friedkin 1973) to include other power dynamics like race (Bad Hair, Justin Simien 2020), class (Vivarium, Lorcan Finnegan 2019), sexual maturity (Turning Red, Domee Shi 2022), indigeneity (Blood Quantum, Jeff Barnaby 2019), immigration status (Culture Shock, Gigi Saul Guerrero 2019), civil disorder (Juan de los Muertos, Alejandro Brugués 2011), and more. I remain grateful to Rudy Busto, Dwight Reynolds, Elizabeth Pérez, Ruth Yuste-Alonso, Valeria Dani, Aaron Ullrey, and Stefany Olague for developing my ideas on this matter.

References Alternate Ending with Director’s Commentary—Get Out (Oscar Winning Movie). 2018. Fear: The Home of Horror. YouTube, January 24. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=JUMGzioWST4 Arnold, Jack, dir. 1954. Creature from the Black Lagoon. Universal Pictures. Austen, Ben. 2018. Cabrini-Green and a Horror Film that Captured the Fears of Public Housing. Chicago Tribune, August 16. https://www.chicagotribune. com/opinion/commentary/ct-­perspec-­flashback-­cabrini-­green-­candyman-­ public-­housing-­austen-­0819-­20180815-­story.html. Barnaby, Jeff, dir. 2019. Blood Quantum. Elevation Pictures. Bigelow, Kathryn, dir. 2017. Detroit. Annapurna Pictures. Black Horror Salon: A Literary Conversation Confirmation. 2023 [2021]. UCR Center for Ideas & Society. YouTube, February 8. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=1R_8rSEWeiY. Bogira, Steve. 1987. They Came in through the Bathroom Mirror: A Murder in the Projects. Chicago Reader, September 3. https://chicagoreader.com/news-­ politics/they-­came-­in-­through-­the-­bathroom-­mirror/. Bogle, Donald. 2001 [1973]. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks. New York: The Continuum Publishing Company. Brugués, Alejandro, dir. 2011. Juan de los muertos. ADS Service. Burgin, Xavier, dir. 2019. Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. Shudder. Chavez, William S. 2023. Old Stories, New Victims: Possession of Men in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 (1985) and Demon (2015). Journal of the American Academy of Religion 9 (1): 154–173.

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Chow, Andrew. 2021. How Candyman Reclaims the History of Cabrini-Green. TIME, August 27. https://time.com/6092375/candyman-­cabrini-­greentrue-­story/. Chukwu, Chinonye, dir. 2022. Till. Universal Pictures. Coleman, Robin R. Means. 2011. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. New York: Routledge. Coogler, Ryan, dir. 2013. Fruitvale Station. The Weinstein Company. Cooper, Patrick. 2014. Tony Todd Talks Candyman, Filming in the Projects, and His Legacy. Bloody Disgusting, October 28. http://bloody-­disgusting.com/ inter views/3319027/inter view-­t ony-­t odd-­t alks-­c andyman-­f ilmingprojects-­legacy/. Cooper, Merian C. and Ernest B. Schoedsack, dirs. 1933. King Kong. RKO Pictures. Cowan, Douglas E. 2008. Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen. Waco: Baylor University Press. Craven, Wes, dir. 1984. A Nightmare on Elm Street. New Line Cinema. Crownson, David. 2018. Harriet Tubman: Demon Slayer—Chapter 5. Kingwood Comics. DaCosta, Nia, dir. 2021. Candyman. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dika, Vera. 1987. The Stalker Film, 1978–81. In American Horrors: Essay on the Modern American Horror Film, ed. Gregory A.  Waller, 86–101. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Finnegan, Lorcan, dir. 2019. Vivarium. Vertigo Releasing. Frederick, Candice. 2021. Nia DaCosta on Candyman and the Power of Terrifying Legends. New York Times, August 30. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/ 30/movies/nia-­dacosta-­candyman.html. Friedkin, William, dir. 1973. The Exorcist. Warner Bros. Pictures. Galuppo, Mia. 2017. Jordan Peele on Writing Get Out during the Obama Administration and a “Post-Racial Lie.” Hollywood Reporter, October 22. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/jordan-peelewriting-get-obama-administration-a-post-racial-lie-1050979/. Green, Reinaldo Marcus, dir. 2018. Monsters and Men. Neon. Griffith, D. W., dir. 1915. The Birth of a Nation. Universal Pictures. Guerrero, Gigi Saul, dir. 2019. Culture Shock. Blumhouse. Harris, Aisha. 2021. Them: The Trauma, The Trauma. NPR, April 8. https:// www.npr.org/2021/04/08/984614649/them-­the-­trauma-­the-­trauma. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. 2000. Religion as a Chain of Memory. Piscataway: Rutgers University Press. Hobson, Janell. 2021. Why Airing Black Wounds on Screen Isn’t “Trauma Porn.” CNN, April 22. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/22/opinions/them-twodistant-strangers-black-trauma-porn-hobson/index.html.

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Johnson, Paul Christopher. 2011. An Atlantic Genealogy of ‘Spirit Possession’. Comparative Studies in Society and History 53 (2): 393–425. Johnson, Brittany. 2020. What Trauma Porn Is, and Why It Hurts Black People. The Mighty, October 12. https://themighty.com/2020/10/trauma-­porn/. Jones, Mark, dir. 1993. Leprechaun. Trimark Pictures. King, Shaka, dir. 2021. Judas and the Black Messiah. Warner Bros. Pictures. Kovacevic, Sonia. 2021. The Unhealthy Obsession with Trauma Porn. The Mission, March 11. https://missionmag.org/trauma-­porn-­unhealthy-­obsession/. Kranzler, Laura. 2004 [2000]. Introduction. In Elizabeth Gaskell, Gothic Tales, xi–xxxii. New York: Penguin Books. Kydd, Elspeth. 1996. Guess Who Else is Coming to Dinner: Racial/Sexual Hysteria in Candyman. CineAction 36: 63–72. https://link.gale.com/apps/ doc/A30536139/LitRC?u=ucsantabarbara&sid=googleScholar&x id=a0e90d31. Langston League. 2021. Candyman—The Official Companion Guide: An Exploration of Themes. https://www.candymanmovie.com/impact/resources/. Lemmons, Kasi, dir. 2019. Harriet. Focus Features. Lott, Eric. 2017. Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lowe, Robert Aiki Aubrey. 2021. Candyman (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack). United States: Waxwork Records. Maffly-Kipp, Laurie. 2010. Setting Down the Sacred Past: African-American Race Histories. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. McQueen, Steve, dir. 2013. 12 Years A Slave. Entertainment One. Meyer, Joshua. 2021. How Candyman Makes Chicago a Character and Tackles Gentrification through Horror. SlashFilm, August 24. https://www.slashfilm. com/583887/how-­c andyman-­m akes-­c hicago-­a -­c haracter-­a nd-tacklesgentrification-­through-­horror/. Matsoukas, Melina, dir. 2019. Queen & Slim. Universal Pictures. Muhammad, Maryam. 2019. Getting Off: What Black Trauma Porn Is and Why We Hate It. Medium, June 2. https://medium.com/@smartbrainiac101/ getting-­off-­what-­black-­trauma-­porn-­is-­and-­why-­we-­hate-­it-­e2dc12b5b0e. Okundaye, Jason. 2021. “Black Trauma Porn”: Them and the Danger of Jordan Peele Imitators. The Guardian, April 21. https://www.theguardian.com/tvand-radio/2021/apr/21/black-trauma-porn-them-jordan-peele-amazon. Owens, Ernest. 2021. Skip Them to Avoid Another Lena Waithe-Produced Trauma Porn Flick. The Grio, April 21. https://thegrio.com/2021/04/16/ them-­lena-­waithe-­trauma-­porn/. Parezanovic, Tijana, and Marko Lukic. 2020. Dark Urbanity. In The Palgrave Handbook of Contemporary Gothic, ed. Clive Bloom, 77–90. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017. Get Out. Universal Pictures.

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Penn, Arthur, dir. 1967. Bonnie and Clyde. Warner Bros. Pictures. Pinedo, Isabel Cristina. 1997. Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing. Albany: State University of New York Press. Poll, Ryan. 2018. Can One Get Out? The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism. The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 51 (2): 69–102. Poole, W. Scott. 2018 [2011]. Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting. Waco: Baylor University Press. Preston, Ashlee Marie. 2020. Sorry, Consuming Trauma Porn is Not Allyship. Marie Claire, June 9. https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a32802688/ stop-­sharing-­trauma-­porn-­black-­deaths/. Renz, Christopher, and Gerard Bush, dirs. 2020. Antebellum. Lionsgate Films. Rockett, Will H. 1988. Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty. New York: Greenwood Press. Romero, George A., dir. 1968. Night of the Living Dead. Continental Distributing. Rose, Bernard, dir. 1992. Candyman. TriStar Pictures. Samudzi, Zoé. 2020. The Sculptural Politics of Cacao. Art in America, September 15. https://www.artnews.com/art-­in-­america/features/congolese-­plantationworkers-­art-­league-­cacao-­sculptures-­1234570834/amp/. Scott, Ridley, dir. 1991. Thelma & Louise. MGM-Pathé. Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. Shi, Domee, dir. 2022. Turning Red. Walt Disney Studios Simien, Justin, dir. 2020. Bad Hair. Hulu. Taylor, Tate, dir. 2011. The Help. Walt Disney Studios. Taylor, Brandon. 2021. How Come These Ghosts Is White? On: Them, Black Horror, and Northrop Frye’s Theory of Modes. Sweater Weather, April 12. https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/how-­come-­these-­ghosts-­is-­white. Thompson, Kirsten Moana. 2007. Strange Fruit: Candyman and Supernatural Dread. In Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium. Albany: State University of New York Press. Tourneur, Jacques, dir. 1943. I Walked with A Zombie. Universal Pictures. Towlson, Jon. 2018. Candyman. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Waithe, Lena, creator. 2021. Them. Sony Pictures. Waititi, Taika. 2020. “The Spectacle Can Never Be Trauma”: Nia DaCosta and Taika Waititi on Exorcism through Art. Interview Magazine, October 26. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/film/nia-dacosta-and-taika-waititi-onthe-exorcism-of-art-candyman. Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological Terror. Durham: Duke University Press. Whale, James, dir. 1931. Frankenstein. Universal Pictures. Wood, Robin. 2003. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan … and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press.

CHAPTER 8

“It’s Probably the Neighbors”: Identity, Otherness, and the Return of the Oppressed in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) Thomas B. Byers

While Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) is a popular and financially successful horror movie, it is also a philosophical and political film with themes ranging from the uncanny nature and constitution of self-identity to specific current political issues such as extreme inequality, the repression of history, migration, and insurrection.1 Indeed, Us is, among other things, a warn1  Readers who want or need a plot summary of Us are referred to Atavia Reed, “A detailed plot summary for everyone too scared to see US,” at https://fansided.com/2019/03/26/ us-detailed-plot-summary-ending/  (Reed 2019). Reed’s summary does not, however, describe the last long drone shots as the family drives south. These include an overhead view of the Tethered standing in a long line, side by side and hand in hand, across the landscape, reminiscent of the views of Americans participating in the 1986 “Hands Across America” event; and ultimately a view of what may be combat, as helicopters hover over a distant, smoking landscape.

T. B. Byers (*) University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_8

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ing about, and some would say a justification for, the coming of a US revolution—though, as is the case in many popular films, the ending seems to shy away from endorsing a radical politics, instead retreating into genre conventions for closure. In addition to considering all of these matters, what follows will read the backstory and motivations of the film’s primary antagonist, Red, in relation to the ongoing philosophical debate about the relation of ethics to politics. The hinge point between these two is also the hinge between identity and difference and, as we shall see, it is embodied in the dual and opposing faces of the figure of the neighbor. The title word Us, as first-person plural pronoun, opens up questions of selfhood, identity, similarity, and affinity: Who am I? Who is most like me? Whom do I include along with myself? At its most intimate level, the word “us” suggests the realm of love and family and, perhaps most proximate of all, of identical twins and mirror images. This realm, of course, is where the film’s action begins, with the encounter of the young girl Adelaide with her physical twin in the house of mirrors. At the same time, “us” opens the question of Otherness, as an “us” is necessarily dependent on, indeed constituted by, the existence of a “not-us,” usually a “them.”2 The familiar is defined by the strange, the familial by the stranger, the Heimlich by the Unheimlich. Peele’s film of course troubles these categories from the get-go, as Adelaide’s mirror reflection is not a reflection, and the apparent twin is a stranger. In the film’s present, the uncanny twins meet again as adults, now Adelaide Wilson, a bourgeois mother, and Red, the leader of the home invasion by the Wilson family’s “tethered” doubles (both women brilliantly played by Lupita Nyong’o). In the big reveal at the end, when Red is unveiled as the original Adelaide, now one of the Tethered, and the adult Adelaide Wilson turns out to be the original tethered girl who emerged from below, the us/them binary is deconstructed. Thus the film embraces a complication already prefigured by Arthur Rimbaud, Sigmund 2  Usually but not always: sometimes the other is unspecified, or is an anonymous force against which “we’re all in this together.” That expression, however, though valid at times, can also be a way of minimizing the perception of difference in the interest of masking inequality or injustice. There is a sense in which “we’re all in this together” with regard to climate change: it affects the whole planet. But some of us are at once more part of the problem than others, and also more likely to be insulated from the worst aspects of climate disaster. If “we’re all in this together” is a way of arguing for disproportionate sacrifices from the disadvantaged, it becomes a way of reinforcing a hierarchical us/them binary and perpetuating injustice.

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Freud, Émile Benveniste, and others: the notion that the first-person is not self-identical, that, in Rimbaud’s formulation, “Je est un autre” (“I is an other”) (Rimbaud 1871)3 or, in this case, that “us” may be “them.” Further, in the case of Nyong’o’s two characters, Us poses the question of who is the subject/protagonist, who the double/antagonist, and hence, at least through much of the film, whose story it is that is being told. The us/them binary in general, and ultimately the Adelaide Wilson/ Red binary in particular, also implies issues of larger group membership and belonging, of exclusion and shunning, and hence too of hierarchy. Here the binary opens onto the field of the political, and even potentially of battle (if, indeed, war is politics by other means). This opening to the political is at once widened and particularized by the fact that the title puns on the initials for the United States. The pun directs our attention to the film’s allegorical and political meanings, which are further spotlighted by a line that jumps out at the viewer in the early stages of the invasion of the Wilson family’s vacation home. Confronted by a group who are physically their doubles yet radically alien in their behavior, Gabe Wilson (Wilson Duke), the father of the house, in beleaguered puzzlement, asks Red, “What are you people?” Red answers, in no uncertain terms, “We’re Americans.” In thus equating (their) identity exclusively with nationality, she moves to the forefront questions of “us”ness as “US”ness, of national belonging and exclusion. The wording of Gabe’s question suggests one of many levels of the invaders’ uncanniness: they are both “people”/familiar/us and, in Gabe’s use of “What” rather than “Who,” not people/unfamiliar/them—perhaps some alien lifeform. The formulation “you people” is actually itself a form of Othering, often identified as a microaggression because it is a way of hinting at, without directly speaking, racist or ethnic stereotypes, or of identifying an interlocutor as someone who does not really “belong” or who is “a lesser being.”4 Red’s answer, in its turn, suggests that the group labeled as “you people” are not excluded but included in the nation—that they belong to it not in the sense of being subjected to its rule or “owned” by it or its citizens, but in being themselves members of the national 3  In our introduction to the adult Adelaide, she is initially asleep in the family car as her husband drives them to their summer house. Janelle Monáe’s “I Like That” is playing on the car stereo. At the precise moment when Adelaide’s eyes pop open, the words of the song are “a walking contradiction” (Monae n.d.). 4  See the last page of the New  York State Office of Mental Health’s pdf listed in References (“A Guide for Supervisors: Discussing Race Issues in the Workplace” 2020).

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category, legitimate subjects of the nation’s predicates. This exchange, when placed over against the backstory Red tells, raises the longstanding issue of “second-class” citizenship: the de facto existence of separate tiers of citizenship, one hierarchically beneath the other—a status literalized in the film’s topography, where the tethered literally live below ground. Us is, as the title of an article by Vice staff writer Noel Ransome puts it, “notso-­secretly about class” (Ransome 2019) and class inequality (though it is about other forms of injustice as well). Before proceeding to the full political analysis, however, I want to stir into the mix the idea of the neighbor and the question of the relation of ethics to politics. When the invaders first appear in the Wilson family’s driveway, and the Wilsons are looking out at them and trying to figure out who they are, the father, Gabe, says “It’s probably the neighbors.” Gabe says this almost as a throwaway, a way of dismissing the significance of the shadowy figures. But the neighbor is a very interesting, and overdetermined, figure in terms of questions of “us” and “them.” On the simplest and most literal level, neighbors are defined spatially as the ones closest to the family while being outside the home. If spatial closeness is complemented by close personal relationship, a neighbor can (all but) collapse the boundary between us and them, becoming “one of the family,” or at least like one of the family. Even without such closeness, the common assumption is that neighbors are at least somewhat alike, given their similar choices about where to live. Such choices may express similar socio-­ economic status (rich or poor, white or Black); tastes (e.g., urban or suburban); and even political leanings. On the other hand, the neighbor can be radically Other, a more or less complete mystery or unknown, even a hidden monster—think of the stereotypically astonished family whose neighbor is suddenly arrested as a serial killer, and who seem almost invariably to say something like: “Well, we don’t really know him. He pretty much kept to himself.” Or the neighbor can be an open antagonist, an enemy, for instance, in disputes over property lines or invasive noise or, as Kentucky Senator Rand Paul painfully found out, over yard waste (see Schreckinger 2017). Neighbors can be figures of what Kenneth Reinhard calls “unbearable proximity,” who may have to be distanced by police and judicial intervention (2005, 37, 38). In short, neighbors can be uncanny, frighteningly embodying both sameness or similarity and radical alterity, nearness and distance, at the same time—as the Tethered family clearly do when, after they have taken

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control of the house, the Wilsons’ son Jason looks at them and says, with a combination of awe and recognition, “It’s us.” Or, the neighbors are liminal figures, living on and marking the border, or what Kenneth Reinhard, commenting on Levinas, calls “the unbridgeable gap” between ethics and politics: insofar as ethics involves the encounter of the two of the neighbor and the self, it cannot conceive of the three, the symbolic representation and mediation on which politics is based; ethics is inherently apolitical, must willfully ignore what would be fair or for the general good. To shift the other as neighbor into mediation with the other in the polis is precisely to give up on ethics; moreover, to try to bring politics to the immediate level of the singular face of the other, to see the other as a singularity, can only mean to give up on politics. Slavoj Žižek …radicaliz[es Levinas’s] insight into the incommensurability between politics and ethics, which he represents as the opposition between justice and love. (2005, 49)

In this line of thinking, the demand of ethics is the demand of love: the demand that one privilege the immediate encounter with the specific Other above all else. The demand of politics, on the other hand, is that one treat the Other as unexceptional, as one of the polis, one owed not special but equal and mediated treatment, not love but justice: that in encountering the Other one wear justice’s blindfold to refuse the all-­ exceeding obligations of love. In sum, the neighbor sits on the line between these two demands: between ethics and politics, between “us” and “them,” between personal and civil relations, between the face-to-face “two” of love and the faceless “three” of justice. If the tethered family are “probably the neighbors,” as Gabe says, then their uncanny doubling of the Wilsons puts into play both love and justice, as well as the tension between the two.5

 The reader should be advised that (to the degree that the two intentions are separable) my primary intent is not to use Us as a way of joining the argument on ethics and politics of which Reinhard’s “political theology of the neighbor” is a part, but rather vice versa: to use Reinhard, and through him Slavoj Žižek, Emmanuel Levinas, and others, for the purposes of analyzing the film. Were I to attempt a response directly to Reinhard’s argument, I would be tempted to claim that, even though he repeatedly insists on the “unbridgeable gap” between ethics and politics, Reinhard’s project is ultimately, as he says, to discover a space “where the one truth procedure passes into the other, love into politics or politics into love… the seam where the equality and sameness of the political encounters the singularity and difference of love” (2005, 64). In doing so, he is doing pretty much precisely what he has (in my view wrongly) declared to be impossible. 5

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For readers who are of the lineage of the “people of the book,” at least, a consideration of the position of neighbors also, implicitly but pretty much inevitably, brings to bear the complications of a longstanding theological and philosophical discourse about the neighbor, going all the way back to God’s command in Leviticus 19:18: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (KJV). Thus the faithful are commanded to identify with the neighbor, to treat them not as Other but as self, so that self plus neighbor equals “us.” This command, however, also raises a crucial question, the one asked of Jesus by the lawyer in the Christian Bible’s book of Luke 10:29: “And who is my neighbor?” (KJV). Who, in other words, is included; who are “us”? And in addition, in an echo of Gabe’s question referenced above, “What are you people?”—what is a neighbor? What is the nature of neighbor-hood? Jesus’s answer to the lawyer’s question is the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan, in which we are commanded to do as the Samaritan does, to treat the stranger as a neighbor. Here is the text: And Jesus answering said, A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. 31 And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. 32 And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. 33 But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, 34 And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. 35 And on the morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. 36 Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves? 37 And he said, He that shewed mercy on him. Then said Jesus unto him, Go, and do thou likewise. (Luke 10: 30–37, KJV) 30

Here Jesus clearly instructs the faithful to behave as the Samaritan does (“Go, and do thou likewise”)—to treat strangers with compassion, to love them as one loves oneself. However, the text is tricky; for Jesus does not

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actually say that the Samaritan has obeyed the commandment to love the neighbor; rather, he concludes that the Samaritan is the one who is the neighbor of the man he helps. It is possible to read the parable as saying that the neighbor, the one whom one must love, is the one who themself performs acts of love and mercy—and thus that the priest and the Levite, in contrast, who simply walk by the victim, are therefore not neighbors, and hence not included as objects of the imperative to love. In this reading, the Samaritan attains the status of neighbor by performing acts of love and mercy, by doing unto others as one would have them do to oneself. If we pair this reading with the verse from Leviticus, we see that the one who is one of “thy people,” one of us, and who is thus protected from vengeance by God’s commandment, is the one who behaves as the Samaritan does. We should also note that if someone is my neighbor, then I am also that someone’s neighbor; neighbor-hood is a reciprocal relation. If the Samaritan becomes the victim’s neighbor by helping the victim, the victim becomes the Samaritan’s neighbor by needing and receiving help. Thus in the parable the neighbor is re-defined, not by proximity, but by need and/ or compassion. Certainly this reading complicates the question of what obligations one has to the people next door. In the film, of course, the neighbors in the driveway and those in the house, hostile to one another from the first, spend most of their time trying to kill each other, thus demonstrating that they are not neighbors in the parable’s sense. Readers who find themselves impatient with this line of biblical interpretation should bear in mind that the film itself invites it by repeatedly invoking another Old Testament verse, Jeremiah 11:11. There are two explicit references to the verse: they appear on the sign held by the man on the boardwalk in Adelaide’s childhood and again when the same man is being put into the ambulance as adult Adelaide and her family drive into Santa Cruz. The verse is further referenced in the frequent repetitions of the numbers 11 and 1111.6 The verse from Jeremiah refers specifically to what God will do to those who do not obey Him: “Therefore thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.” In this jeremiad, God promises retribution upon the people of 6  For complementary lists of the film’s use of the number 11 or 11:11 or 1111, see Matt Singer in ScreenCrush (Singer 2019)  and Eric Francisco (Francisco 2019)  in Inverse. It is particularly notable that Red and her family appear in the Wilsons’ driveway at 11:11 pm.

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Jerusalem and Judah for their “conspiracy” to break His covenant with them and to serve other Gods (Jeremiah 11: 9, 10, KJV). The merciless attack of the Tethered as a whole, as they apparently randomly kill others in the streets, seems to embody this god-sent “evil.” But how does all this bear on the Wilsons, who seem fairly innocent, indeed almost like a sitcom family at first? Pursuing the biblical line a bit further, one could claim that they, and their class, have broken the covenant by (metaphorically) serving not God, but mammon (see Matthew 6: 24, KJV). The Wilsons are clearly part of the Black middle class, as evidenced not only by their possession of a house near Santa Cruz, but also by the Alvin Ailey Dance poster in the house, by Adelaide’s ballet lessons as a youth, by Gabe’s envious comparisons of their car and boat to those of their white friends, and so on. Along with other members of the middle class, they are part of a “conspiracy” of privilege, and of repression of what their privilege means for others—indeed repression of the very existence of others. As they drive into Santa Cruz to go to the beach, the family comes upon the scene of an old “street person” who apparently has just died and is being loaded into an ambulance. Adelaide tells her children “Don’t look,” which might seem natural enough for a mother protecting her children from traumatic sights. But not to look is also to pass by as the priest and the Levite did, to refuse the encounter that makes one a neighbor. Moreover, the specific man at whom they are not to look is the man carrying the “Jeremiah 11:11” sign; hence not to look is also to repress the warning the sign conveys. Because not to look is not to be a neighbor as the Samaritan is, it is hence not to earn protection from vengeance (see again Leviticus 19:18, KJV); and, indeed, it is to become subject to God’s own vengeance by ceasing to be among God’s people (see again Jeremiah 11:11, KJV). The conspiracy of middle-class privilege naturalizes itself through repression—through the repression of the history of class conflict, and indeed of the very existence of what Michael Harrington long ago dubbed the “Other America” (Harrington 1962).  The violent irruption of the Tethered, their invasion of the bourgeois home, marks the return of that repressed. As the great British expert on American horror Robin Wood points out, “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses, its re-emergence dramatized, as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror, and the happy ending (when it exists) typically signifying the restoration of repression” (2003, 68). The nightmare history

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repressed in the Wilsons’ world is brought to light in two key speeches by Red, the first simply about her grim, painful, shadowed material experience growing up; the second about the origins and history of the Tethered. Here is the first speech, framed as a gruesome fairy tale: Once upon a time, there was a girl, and the girl had a shadow. The two were connected; tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was given to her, warm and tasty, but when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit, raw and bloody. On Christmas the girl received wonderful toys, soft and cushy, but the shadow’s toys were so sharp and cold they’d slice through her fingers when she tried to play with them. The girl met a handsome prince and fell in love, but the shadow, at that same time, met Abraham. It didn’t matter if she loved him or not, he was tethered to the girl’s prince after all. Then the girl had her first child; a beautiful baby girl. But the shadow, she gave birth to a little monster. Umbrae was born laughing. The girl had a second child, a boy this time. They had to cut her open and take him from her belly. The shadow had to do it all herself. She named him Pluto. He was born to love fire. So you see, the Shadow hated the girl so much for so long, until one day the shadow realized she was being tested by God.

This speech explains the basic situation of tethering and the general motive for Red’s hatred of Adelaide. It also carries connotations of enslavement, particularly in the relation of Red to Abraham, who is her husband because he is tethered to Gabe. As Johanna Isaacson has pointed out, “Red’s nonconsensual ‘marriage’ and subsequent childbearing connot[e]…rape and forced reproduction under slavery” (2019). Thus although Red herself saw her oppression as theological (“She was being tested by God”), we are certainly invited to begin to see it in political terms of injustice and inequality. Indeed, the link of tethering to captivity and bondage is clear earlier in the scene, when Red orders Adelaide to shackle herself to the coffee table: “Tether yourself,” she says. The “Untethering,” the insurrection Red is leading, is clearly an analogue for casting off the chains of enslavement. The political turn is screwed tighter in the second speech, which tells the Tethereds’ history as a group: How it must have been to grow up with the sky. To feel the sun, the wind, the trees. But your people took it for granted. We’re human too, you know. Eyes. Teeth. Hands. Blood. Exactly like you.

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And yet, it was humans that built this place. I believe they figured out how to make a copy of the body, but not the soul. The soul remains one, shared by two. They created the Tethered so they could use them to control the ones above. Like puppets. But they failed, and they abandoned the Tethered. For generations the Tethered continued without direction. They all went mad down here. And then, there was us.

At this point Red proceeds to tell the story specifically of herself and Adelaide, briefly digressing from the political to the personal. As we see a flashback to the night the two met as little girls in the hall of mirrors, Red says, “I never stopped thinking about you. How things could have been. How you could have taken me with you.” She goes on to tell how she received her divine mission to free the Tethered, how she carefully planned their insurrection, and how the latter needed to be not just random violence or personal vengeance but a political utterance: “Everything had to be perfect. I didn’t just need to kill you. I needed to make a statement that the whole world would see. It’s our time now. Our time up there.” Here Red’s turn to political rhetoric and political action, and her turn from herself and Adelaide to herself and the other Tethered as the antecedent of “us,” seems to be a reaction to an ethical failing on the part of Adelaide, a failure in a relationship of two. Red has never stopped thinking about Adelaide’s desertion of her—her failure to act as a Good Samaritan, her failure to become Red’s neighbor in the parable’s sense. With this failure to make Red part of an “us,” Adelaide turns the hinge between good neighborliness and the adversarial relation of “unbearable proximity” (Reinhard 2005, 37). Adelaide turns Red from one who could be included by love to one who is excluded by privilege—from one whom one embraces ethically to one whom one Others and keeps away by systemic and structural means. Moreover, within that system the Tethered are, as mentioned earlier, second-class citizens: their existence and history having been completely repressed, their human rights under the system are secondary to the bourgeois property rights Gabe invokes against them in the early driveway sequence: “Now, I need y’all to get off my property,” he says. When they do not do so, he immediately goes into the house and says, “Yeah, let’s call the cops,” emphasizing the latter’s role in, indeed their existence for the purpose of, defending property rights. The Tethered have no means of redress within the social/governmental/judicial complex; it serves class interests, not justice. All of this suggests how Adelaide’s

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rejection of the ethical role of neighbor ultimately moves Red to lead a revolution.7 Although the details of the history of the Tethereds’ existence do not bear a clear or direct one-to-one correspondence with the history of any US minority, or of minorities in general, the Tethereds’ story is highly evocative. Here is what it suggests: there was a time when the relationship between the Tethered and their more privileged doubles was closer, or at least more visible—when the Tethereds’ existence was not “forgotten” or repressed, because the government thought the Tethered could be used to control the “ones above,” since the two, though of two bodies, shared a single soul. One way of reading this would be that the two had natural empathy even across class boundaries, and that such empathy might be used as an ideological weapon to manage the ones above. Liberal democracy is founded on a notion of essential if not existential equality between haves and have-nots, and this notion can be invoked by the state when it curbs excesses of inequality so as to assure the preservation of the controlled inequality of the existing order. However, this “experiment” failed—the visibility of the Tethered ceased to have the force to set limits to the inevitable inequity of capitalism—so the experiment was forgotten and the Tethered were abandoned to a life of invisible misery. It is not far-­ fetched, I think, to see this as the equivalent of a radical left reading of the New Deal, the safety net, government regulation, and other such phenomena as an experiment in (at least temporarily) keeping capitalism’s inequality from expanding intolerably and producing revolution, and to see the Reagan era as the experiment’s abandonment. The problem, as told in Red’s mini-history, is that the exploitation of identity between haves and have-nots failed to control the haves, so the project was abandoned, and the existence of the have-nots, together with their common humanity with the haves (“We’re human too, you know,” Red reminds Adelaide), was simply repressed. Thus, the Tethered were left unremembered, unsupported by government, in misery, and “without direction,” left behind by supply-side economics, the undoing of the safety net, and the massive increase in economic inequality. As a result, “They all went mad down there. And then [in the film’s world, at least], there was 7  Reinhard and Žižek see this notion that politics results from a failure of ethics, a failure of (Christian) neighborliness, as an error. See Reinhard 48–49. My claim is not that the position implied in Us is philosophically correct, but that it is the film’s account of how Red comes to be as she is and do what she does.

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us”—a revolutionary class at once proclaiming its historical triumph (“It’s our time now. Our time up there”) and seeking bloodthirsty personal vengeance.8 Having been effectively excluded from the “us” of the nation, Red and her followers have formed a new “us,” perhaps even in the end a new US, as symbolized by their joining hands in a parodic, but more radical, re-enactment of the liberal feel-good charitable media event “Hands Across America.” Before the turn away from the Tethered, direction had been provided for them by the myth of the American Dream, which has been (and arguably still is) a powerful ideological tool, partly because it has not been a complete fiction. It linked the oppressed and the privileged, not only in common belief but also because those now privileged who (or whose ancestors) had become upwardly mobile might remember their families’ history and thus feel some identification with those below. This was especially the case with regard to migration: all Americans except the small minority descended from indigenous people had come to the US as migrants and, especially since the nineteenth century, most had come as members of groups that were racially or ethnically Othered by US society. These included not only the kidnapped and enslaved Black Americans and the juridically excluded and oppressed Chinese and other Asians, but also all those white people whose groups were initially socially excluded and only later generally (if not universally) accepted as “legitimate” Americans: people of Irish, Italian, Slavic, and Jewish descent, for instance. Even though the Dream remained only aspirational for many, and ultimately a source of disappointment, alienation, and bitterness for them, it was an ideological bond, part of what made the US into an exceptional (if still largely ideological) “us.” The specific issue of migration is certainly a prominent part of current concerns about “Who is my neighbor?” Who is an American? Who is one of “us”? especially as we go through yet another cycle of right-wing 8  Although Red’s implicit politics seem to be consistent with the left’s version of class struggle, the notion of a group forgotten by the elite, excluded politically while oppressed and downwardly mobile economically, also fits with the right-wing populist view of the fate of under-educated white people (especially outside the big cities) in the contemporary US. This group are also perhaps the ones who have most visibly gone “mad down there,” among whom the most outlandish paranoid conspiracy theories have taken hold. We must remember that in the film the Tethered are not just those excluded by race or ethnicity: recall the quick and thoroughgoing slaughter of the Tyler family, the Wilsons’ white friends, by their brutal doubles.

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nationalist populism. Though the film’s references to migration are subtle, they are nonetheless there. Perhaps the most obvious is Red’s identification of herself and her family: “We’re Americans.” This is not only a general riposte to Gabe’s Othering question, “What are you people?” It also specifically resonates with naturalized citizens or their descendants constantly being forced to repudiate the assumption of their non-belonging— a form of Othering particularly acute for migrants of color. There are a number of other details suggesting migration as well. From the opening credits onward, the underground inhabited by the Tethered is seen as heavily institutional, prominently featuring huge barracks with long lines of bunk beds, as well as classrooms with adult-sized desks. If the former are reminiscent of the better of the ICE detention camps at the US southern border, the latter may remind us of the classrooms in which generations of migrants learned, or tried to learn, English. In addition, early on we learn that in general the Tethered do not speak English and, indeed, Red, the only one who is fluent in it, speaks with a slow and labored intonation. Also, in an extended sequence of images intercut with Red’s speech about the history of the Tethered, we see the Tethered trying, extremely awkwardly, to participate in simulacra of the pleasurable activities of the aboveground, and to mimic the behavior of the privileged. These images point toward the history of colonialism, of which the current migration into the US is largely a consequence, as well as to the specific attempts of migrants to assimilate. The encouragement of such imitative performance, which generally marks the “them”ness of those who do not have the means to carry it off convincingly, is yet another mode of Othering: it is, as Homi Bhabha has pointed out, “a flawed colonial mimesis, in which [for example] to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English” (Bhabha 2004, 125, emphasis in original).9 The issue of migration is also raised, ironically, by the fact that Adelaide is trying to take her family across the southern border to Mexico to escape the insurrection. For decades the American bourgeoisie has been represented by two parties whose only real debate on migration seems to be about how militarized and Draconian its efforts to keep “them” away from “us” should be. The discourse of the neighbor comes to mind again here, as one thinks of the expression “our neighbors to the south,” which 9  Of course, Bhabha famously goes on to point out the “menace of mimicry,” which “is its double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority” (Bhabha 2004, 126).

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is a condescending and Othering way of referring to the less privileged who are kept out by the border. We can also see how far the nation is from the parable of the Good Samaritan when we remember that it has become a crime to leave supplies of water for thirsty migrants as they cross desert land. In the film, however, the shoe is on the other foot, and the “us” is positioned as the Other, trying to seek asylum across the southern border. This irony is compounded by the fact that the Tethereds’ version of “Hands Across America” is uncannily reminiscent of Donald Trump’s border wall as it snakes across the undulating landscape. Thus it seems that Us is a film that is ethically, politically, and even theologically angry at the obliviousness of the privileged in the face of the brutal oppressions that maintain their (our) status. It can be seen as saying that the privileged have brought upon themselves (ourselves) the possibility of a bloody revolution in which they (we) will be wantonly slaughtered. Nevertheless, as in so many other popular films with such radical implications, the ending turns away from them. It does so by making Adelaide, not Red, the heroic point of identification at the end. We identify with her to the point where we are relieved when she kills the revolution’s one leader. Adelaide indeed becomes a kind of grown-up version of the “final girl.” Moreover, not only does she save her family, but she exhibits a pleased recognition (silently shared with her son) of who she is and of her competence to continue to protect them and herself going forward, even with extreme violence. While she is not returning to the repressive normalcy from which she previously benefitted, she is certainly not about to join the revolution. She just thinks she and, with her help, her family can survive it. Thus the film offers a highly tempered happy ending, in which the culture has not managed, and may not manage, the overall “restoration” of the repression that typified its old order (Wood 2003, 68), but the protagonist has successfully repressed her doppelgänger and seems positioned to ward off threats to her family. In this way, Us seems to combine elements of the traditional happy ending (specifically for Adelaide’s family) with elements of the more radical horror films of the 1970s, in which, as Wood has pointed out, “the monster cannot be destroyed, the repressed can never be annihilated” (78). This mixed ending, I would argue, parallels an ambivalence in Peele himself about the film’s political implications and its political work. On the one hand, much of the film seems not only to warn the bourgeoisie of the threat of revolution, but to suggest that it is a proper response to the bourgeoisie’s repressions and oppressions. On the other hand, the

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revolution as portrayed in Us does not seem to have any particular plan or program except bloody vengeance. The notion that it’s “our turn up here” might offer positive change, but it might offer nothing more than a change of players while the game of oppression remains largely unchanged. The hands-joined solidarity of the Tethered at the end may be as ominous as it is promising—or it might finally be as empty as the “Hands Across America” that it parodied. As Sheri-Marie Harrison has said, “Us operates entirely within a middle-class perspective fearful of lumpen revolution. The movie’s brilliance is to depict revolution as it might appear from that middle-class perspective” (Harrison 2019). However, where Harrison sees brilliance in this perspective, I see incoherence, in the sense in which Robin Wood sees  incoherence as “underl[ying] most of the important American films of the late 60s and 70s.” Wood explains that in that period the questioning of authority spread logically to a questioning of the entire social structure that validated it… The possibility suddenly opened up that the whole world might have to be recreated. Yet this generalized crisis in ideological confidence never issued in revolution. No coherent social/economic program emerged, the taboo on socialism remaining virtually unshaken. Society appeared to be in a state of advanced disintegration, yet there was no serious possibility of the emergence of a coherent and comprehensive alternative. This quandary—… not necessarily consciously registered—can be felt to underlie most of the important American films of the late 60s and early 70s… largely accounting for their richness, their confusion, and their ultimate nihilism. (2003, 44)

The combination of richness and confusion seems to me true also of Us, as is evidenced by the many reviews that specifically use the two words “ambitious” and “messy” to describe Peele’s film (see, e.g., Darghis 2019; Elkind 2019; Lawson 2019; Yoshida 2019). On the one hand Red’s history is appalling, her case for the Tethered, and for insurrection, compelling. On the other, our identification with Adelaide when she kills Red, coupled with our feeling that she is a strong, matriarchal female hero (a badass in a good sense), never feels sufficiently ironized to allow for an unequivocally pro-revolutionary reading of the film. To the degree that we can read Peele as an auteur across this film and his other directing, writing, and producing efforts, we find repeatedly in his work an identification with middle-class Black characters, and an

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anxiety about the precarity of their position. In the recent remake of Candyman (Nia DaCosta 2021), which Peele co-wrote and co-produced, as in Us, he recognizes and highlights the injustices done to and the pain inflicted on the underclass, but he also portrays that class as a return of the repressed that threatens the Black bourgeoisie of which he is a part. In the case of Us, I confess I do not know how to square the generic satisfactions of the ending with what I think the film is doing overall. Partly because of that problem, I do not read the film as a positive cry for revolution. But I think it remains the jeremiad it has suggested it is: a warning about what will be reaped from the horrors sown by repression and oppression. It is a warning about a failure within the status quo both of individual ethics and of collective politics. It is a warning to the privileged not to turn away, not to think that if we pass by we will be passed over when the day of reckoning comes.

References A Guide for Supervisors Discussing Race in the Workplace. 2020. New York State Office of Mental Health, September 2020. https://omh.ny.gov/omhweb/ cultural_competence/guide-­f or-­s uper visors-­d iscussing-­r ace-­i n-­t he-­ workplace.pdf. Bhabha, Homi K. 2004. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. DaCosta, Nia, dir. 2021. Candyman. Universal Pictures. Darghis, Manohla. 2019. ‘Us’ Review: Jordan Peele’s Creepy Latest Turns a Funhouse Mirror on Us. The New  York Times, March 20. https://www. nytimes.com/2019/03/20/movies/us-­movie-­review.html. Elkind, George. 2019. Review: ‘Us’ is a Messy, Genuinely frightening Sophomore Effort from Jordan Peele. Detroit Metro Times, March 27. https://www.metrotimes.com/arts/review-us-is-a-thoughtful-horror-filmand-genuinely-frightening-20998473. Francisco, Eric. 2019. ‘Us’ Jeremiah 11:11: How the Bible Verse Explains Jordan Peele’s New Movie. Inverse, March 25. https://www.inverse.com/article/ 54328-­us-­jeremiah-­11-­11-­spoilers-­jordan-­peele-­ending. Harrington, Michael. 1962. The Other America. New York: Macmillan. Harrison, Sheri-Mari. 2019. Us and Them. Commune, June 6. https://communemag.com/us-­and-­them/. Isaacson, Johanna. 2019. Beach Blanket Barbarism. Commune, June 7. https:// communemag.com/beach-­blanket-­barbarism/. Lawson, Richard. 2019. Jordan Peele’s Us Stabs Itself in the Foot. Vanity Fair, March 20. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/03/jordan-­peelesus-­stabs-­itself-­in-­the-­foot.

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Monáe, Janelle. n.d. I Like That. Dirty Computer. Wondaland, Badboy, and Atlantic. Peele, Jordan, dir. 2019. Us. Universal Pictures. Ransome, Noel. 2019. Jordan Peele’s Us Is Not-so-Secretly about Class. VICE, March 25. https://www.vice.com/en/article/d3mqaa/jordan-peeles-us-is-notso-secretly-about-class. Reed, Atavia. 2019. A Detailed Plot Summary for Everyone Too Scared to See Us. FanSided, March 26. https://fansided.com/2019/03/26/us-­detailed-plotsummary-­ending/. Reinhard, Kenneth. 2005. Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor. In The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, 11–75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rimbaud, Arthur. 1871. Lettre De Rimbaud à Paul Demeny—15 Mai 1871. Wikisource. Fondation Wikimedia, Inc. https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/ Lettre_de_Rimbaud_%C3%A0_Paul_Demeny_-­_15_mai_1871. Schreckinger, Ben. 2017. The Bizarre True Story of the Neighborhood Scuffle that Left Rand Paul with Six Broken Ribs. GQ, November 20. https://www. gq.com/story/inside-­rand-­pauls-­neighborhood-­fight. Singer, Matt. 2019. Why Are There So Many 11s in Us? ScreenCrush, March 22. https://screencrush.com/meaning-­of-­11-­in-­us/. Wood, Robin. 2003. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… And Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. Yoshida, Emily. 2019. Jordan Peele’s Us Is a Messy, Chilling Descent into the American Nightmare. Vulture, March 9. https://www.vulture.com/2019/03/ jordan-­peele-­us-­movie-­review.html.

PART III

Economic Exploitation and Neoliberalism: Privilege, Class and the Other

CHAPTER 9

The Revenge of the Serves: The Wounds of Neoliberalism in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) Fabián Orán Llarena

My friends, remember this, that there are no bad herbs, and no bad men, there are only bad cultivators. —Victor Hugo, Les Misérables It is their innocence which constitutes the crime … this innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. —James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

F. Orán Llarena (*) University of La Laguna, San Cristóbal de Laguna, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_9

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Us or US? Horror Film and Its Allegories In Us (Peele 2019a), Jordan Peele doubles down on the blending of horror tropes and political commentary that made his directorial debut Get Out (2017) a critical and box-office success.1 The body-swap horror satire of lily-white suburbia as an incubator for racism gives way to an equally bold premise in Us: an African American middle-class family is chased down by scissors-wielding doppelgängers, only to find out that all human beings have their so-called Tethered—lookalike human copies who live underground and have decided to mount a bloody rebellion against their peers on the surface. Once again, Peele managed to please global audiences and critics alike.2 While there are unquestionable continuities between Get Out and Us in terms of style, themes, and genre, Peele’s sophomore film departs from the more straightforward and readable political delivery of his debut—as does the horror-tinged sci-fi adventure Nope (2022), his third and latest film so far. Critics like Manohla Dargis (2019) and Peter Bradshaw (2019) wrote how Us feels like a more ambitious and ambiguous endeavor. Others, such as Emily Yoshida (2019) and John DeFore (2019), noted that the film is patently more obscure, offering a sociopolitical subtext which, albeit sensitive to racial matters, seems to go beyond the issue of racism. While recognizing the very merits of Get Out3 and Nope, I concur that the arguably more undiscernible mythology and imagery of Us beg for a reading that locates the film in a theoretical context where its allegorical dimensions and political intent can be delineated, gauged, and reflected upon. 1  This work is part of the research project “Narratives of Happiness and Resilience” (Subproject One: “The Premise of Happiness: The Function of Feelings in North American Narratives,” ref. PID2020-113190GB-C21), funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities. Research contributing to this chapter was also funded by the research project “Narraciones en Crisis: Respuestas del Cine Norteamericano a la Gran Recesión y sus Consecuencias (2008–2020),” ref. 180403AA 423.B5, funded by the University of La Laguna. Most of the research for this chapter was conducted at the JFK Institute for North American Studies (Freie University of Berlin). 2  Although Us ($20 million) had a far more generous budget than Get Out ($4.5), both were major box-office hits. Each film made over $255 million worldwide and had almost unanimously positive reviews (Rotten Tomatoes; IMDb). 3  Get Out has been the subject of substantial scholarly probing. A companion to the film came out just three years after the film’s release, collecting writings from key figures within horror film scholarship (Keetley 2020). The film has inspired a UCLA seminar on the portrait of African Americans in US horror film (Wolf 2017).

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During a holiday trip to their beach house near the iconic Santa Cruz beach area, Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) and her family—her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) and her two children Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and Jason (Evan Alex)—have to face their Tethered. We learn these doppelgängers are about to initiate a rebellion, spearheaded by Red (also played by Nyong’o), to leave the underground world and replace the humans above. The present-day plotline, built through spectacular set pieces and eerie encounters between the protagonists and their Tethered, is interspersed with flashbacks of Adelaide in 1986 as a little girl. This back-and-­ forth narrative reveals that Adelaide knew of the existence of the Tethered all along. In a dramatic final twist, it is disclosed that Adelaide was originally a Tethered who assaulted and changed places with Red, confining the latter to a life underground.4 My central argument is that Us offers a reflection on neoliberalism and its impact on the social fabric of the US. The trope of the doppelgänger, the home invasion plotline, and, overall, the film grammar of the horror genre become the visual and thematic means to address the signature byproduct of the neoliberal era: inequality. I wish to perform a close textual analysis that may frame Us as a cultural text that represents the US as a fractured polity, wounded by neoliberal politics and its accompanying patterns of income inequality and retrenchment of systemic violence. In terms of critical methodology, the starting point of this chapter is the work of Linnie Blake and Adam Lowenstein. Their research on horror films as a means to negotiate representations of historical trauma and national identity provides key tools to analyze horror cinemas vis-à-vis their national contexts, especially those marked by patterns of violence and institutional neglect.5 Taking their cue from trauma studies, Blake and 4  For the sake of clarity, I will call the character living on the surface in the 2019 plotline “Adelaide” and the leader of the Tethered “Red.” However, it should be the other way around, since Red was not originally a Tethered but was made one by, shall we call her, fake Adelaide. 5  Blake and Lowenstein are not, of course, total outliers in this regard. Scholars have examined the often subversive politics of the horror film. Christopher Sharrett has shed light on the many subtexts concerning patriarchal violence found in The Haunting (Robert Wise 1963) and Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanksi 1968) (2014, 56–62); Reynold Humphries has read films like The Amityville Horror (Stuart Rosenberg 1979), Poltergeist (Tobe Hopper 1982), and Candyman (Bernard Rose 1992) as critiques of the reification and commodification of the dead (2002, 102–8); Noël Carroll has noted the anti-racist and anti-consumerist politics of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985) (1990, 198), as has Robin Wood (2003, 101–7). On this note,

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Lowenstein contend that horror films make use of carnage, disgusting imagery, and abject violence to signify historical traumas inflicted upon the national body politic such as war, genocide, terrorism, and economic destitution. In horror films, writes Blake, “one may witness a purposeful ‘unbinding’ of the wounds wrought to totalizing or essentializing formulations of national identity by traumatic events, a process that simultaneously exposes and unpicks those reductive or hegemonizing assertions of nationhood with which said wounds are dressed” (2008, 9). In this vein, Lowenstein argues that horror films are rich in what he terms “allegorical moments,” that is, images and storylines that produce political and historical meanings by juxtaposing and creating a dialectic between time frames: An allegorical moment [is] situated at the unpredictable and often painful juncture where past and present collide… that elusive sign of the allegorical representation of history, may be found where we least expect it—as the past erupts in the present, in the flicker of a cinematic image, in a disorienting turn of phrase… Allegory resists fantasies of strictly teleological history in favor of fleeting instants where “meaning” is forged between past and present. (2005, 9–15)

Both Blake and Lowenstein analyze how US films like George A. Romero’s The Crazies (1973), Martin (1977), and Dawn of the Dead (1978) or Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (1972) mobilize horror genre staples such as the zombie, the vampire, the slasher, or the home invasion story to elaborate metaphors concerning the national traumas of the Vietnam War, the consolidation of the military-industrial complex, and the state-sanctioned violence unleashed upon the antiwar and the civil rights movements (Blake 2008, 78–100; Lowenstein 2005, 111–129). Theirs is a critical endeavor which conceptualizes horror films as encoding the ills and maladjustments that afflict nations in specific historical settings and material conditions. Blake contends that “horror cinema can be seen to fulfill a function that sets it apart from other more ‘respectable’ branches of the culture industry: providing a visceral and frequently non-linguistic lexicon in which the experience of cultural dislocation may be phrased” ( 2008, 189). Therefore, just as Romero and Craven deploy the zombie it would be remiss not to mention Seigfreid Kracauer’s influential analysis of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene 1920) as an allegory of Weimar Germany and its predisposition during the interwar period for authoritarianism and homogeneity (1947, 61–76).

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uprising, the vampire, and the issue of sexual violence toward teenage girls to express the violence and social fault lines of the 1960s and 1970s in the US, Peele utilizes the horror genre and its aesthetic, visual, and thematic toolkit to concoct imagery that engages with neoliberal inequality.6 Thus, this chapter is fundamentally driven by the view that horror films are particularly well suited to address fractures affecting the body politic and that horror tropes and horror iconography inherently express wounds in the social context. A detailed summary of neoliberal thought far exceeds the purview of this chapter. My view of neoliberal politics is informed by the following accounts: Brown (2016), Dardot and Laval (2013), Gerstle (2022), Harvey (1990, 2005, 2010), and Peck (2010). Although slightly different in scope and approach, they all draw on Marxist tenets as well as the Foucaldian notion of neoliberalism as a political rationality. I also rely on a set of contemporary Marxist theorists who have outlined some of the tendencies not just of neoliberalism but of capitalist accumulation in general. In this sense, key to my reading of Us are these theoretical elaborations: the concept of capitalist realism as authored by Mark Fisher, Slavoj Žižek’s notion of objective violence vs. subjective violence, and David McNally’s study of capitalism and its relation with fictional monsters. Fisher explains that end-of-history capitalism has managed to present itself as the domain to which all political projects must subject, irrespective of their ideological inclinations and aspirations. “Capitalism,” avers Fisher, “seamlessly occupies the horizon of the thinkable” (2009, 8). Along the same lines of materialist critique, Žižek distinguishes two forms of violence operating in contemporary capitalist-liberal societies. On the one hand, Žižek talks about objective violence, which is not assignable to specific persons but describes all those forms of normalized violence “inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism, which involve the ‘automatic’ creation of excluded and dispensable individuals from the homeless to the 6  In this sense, it is worth noting that Jordan Peele has been grouped with other auteur filmmakers like Ari Aster, Alex Garland, or Robert Eggers as exponents of the so-called elevated horror—a body of 2010s horror films that rely heavily on narrative strategies typical of art cinema and focus more on psychological drama than gore (Thompson 2022). The term is quite confusing as plenty of horror films feature stylistic sophistication, psychological depth, and subtlety in depicting violence. However, Thompson convincingly argues that the label, albeit misleading and conceptually weak, is useful in that it sets apart Peele, Aster, Garland, Eggers, and similar filmmakers from both “conventional mainstream horror film” and the “torture porn” of the 2000s and 2010s.

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unemployed” (Žižek 2009, 12). Against the backdrop of all those frameworks of supposedly natural violence, subjective violence refers to violent phenomena socially perceived as unnatural, disruptive, and enacted by “social agents, evil individuals, disciplined repressive apparatuses, fanatical crowds” (Žižek 2009, 10). As a companion to these two approaches, McNally studies the linkages between market-spawned mass violence and their representation and metaphorization through fictional monsters. Building a genealogy from William Shakespeare and Mary Shelley to US zombie films and contemporary literatures from Central Africa, McNally sheds light on how horror tales across disciplines, “both past and present, manifest recurrent anxieties about corporeal dismemberment in societies where the commodification of human labor—its purchase and sale on markets—is becoming widespread” (McNally 2011, 4). McNally mobilizes Marxist categories to argue that monsters in certain fictional texts can be viewed as “systemic, not accidental,” expressions of the dynamics of violence unleashed by market forces (114). These insights from Fisher, Žižek, and McNally can be helpful in order to make out the different processes that naturalize capitalist logic. Many an element in Us actively engages with the phenomena discussed by these authors—the Tethered themselves; the importance of duality in the film; the manner in which the Tethered revolt; or the plot twist revealing Adelaide’s real nature and background. The significance of the doppelgänger in literature and film is rich and well known; dualistic identities in fiction have been interpreted as the return of the repressed, the battle of good vs. evil, the friction between normativity and Otherness, and the foreshadowing of death (Balló and Pérez 1995, 235–248; Ruddell 2013, 55–68). “Split characters,” writes Caroline Ruddell, “key into cultural concerns and anxieties around fundamental definitions of who we are” (2013, 56). In this regard, and given the film’s mythology and how much of it rests upon inequality and duality, the Tethered can be productively read as an interface where different critiques of neoliberal capitalism get articulated.

Reaganism as Original Sin The film eschews a clear-cut explanation as to the origin of the Tethered. Toward the end of the film, Red claims that some unspecified elite created the Tethered, duplicating the human beings living above in order to control the latter. But this theory does not hold up. It is the Tethered who are

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clearly shown to be compelled to reflexively mimic their equals above, as if they were automata, moving, walking, and gesturing exactly as their peers on the surface. The Tethered exist as duplications of the people inhabiting the surface, deprived of all agency up until the present day, when they seem to have developed a will of their own.7 One fundamental critique of the film is presenting the Reagan Era as the starting point for the rise of inequality. A good deal of the mythology and subtext of the film is imbued with some of the political idioms of Reaganism—namely, distrust toward the welfare state, reliance on charity and philanthropy as engines for social cohesion, and a refusal to grant legitimacy to the idea of public goods. Us pivots on a two-strand narrative perspective that switches from 1986 to 2019. The plot starts in 1986 and then flash-forwards to 2019 to remain there for most of the narrative, introducing recurring short flashbacks to 1986. The film opens with the following lines: “There are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the continental United States. Abandoned subway systems, unused service routes, and deserted mineshafts. Many have no known purpose at all.” This sets the stage for introducing the Tethered later on since the viewer has been informed that there are vast unattended spaces available for the Tethered to dwell in and go unnoticed. The very next scene is a slow tracking shot showing a TV ad for “Hands Across America,” the iconic 1986 fundraising event where millions of Americans held hands for a few minutes trying to form a contiguous human chain across the country. The goal was to raise funds to fight poverty in the US through small donations. The image of a miles-long human chain will play a central role in how the Tethered rise up against their peers on the surface. Thus, the film starts by signaling, on the one hand, the abandonment of public spaces and, on the other, an event that symbolizes that socioeconomic problems like poverty are to be primarily tackled through philanthropy and charity, not public policy. Those two trends that the film so poignantly singles out, and upon which much of its subtext and iconography is articulated, were, indeed, integral to the politics of Reaganism. The presidency of Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) has come to embody the rise of neoliberalism in the US and 7  Although Peele has never clarified what the Tethered stand for metaphorically, he has stated that Us definitely addresses inequality and social privilege: “One of the central themes in Us is that we can do a good job of collectively ignoring the ramifications of privilege… I think it’s the idea that what we feel like we deserve comes at the expense of someone else’s freedom or joy… For us to have our privilege someone suffers” (Peele 2019b).

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the legitimization of a popular will based on the idea that there is no such thing as public goods and that public ownership must be reduced to a bare minimum.8 One key component of Reaganism as a political order, notes Mark Lilla, is that it enshrined the notion that “the good life is that of self-­ reliant individuals—individuals embedded perhaps in families, churches, and small communities, but not citizens of a republic with common goals and duties to each other” (2017, 30–31). The abandonment of and disinvestment in public goods, symbolized in Us by the unattended tunnels the Tethered are made to inhabit, speaks to the retreat and assault on the welfare state that characterized the Reagan Era. In fact, the spaces the Tethered live in seem like a blend between a school and a prison—two eminently government-run places. In the same vein, that the film places such iconographic emphasis on the “Hands Across America” campaign suggests how social policy and the social safety net started to be perceived throughout the 1980s as unwanted vestiges from the postwar era. By starting the film with those hints at the politics of the 1980s, and by switching from 1986 to 2019 on a regular basis, the film oscillates from the beginning of the neoliberal era to the present, as if to cast the 1980s as some sort of original sin that initiated the trends toward income inequality that have characterized neoliberal economics. After all, it is in the 1986 plotline that Adelaide attacks and changes places with Red, setting up completely different socioeconomic realities for both of them. Moments before Red enters the hall of mirrors where she is swapped, she is seen holding a candy apple that will later drop to the floor. A close-up of the apple, as she unwittingly walks toward the hall of mirrors, highlights the original sin subtext of the sequence. The film represents the 1980s as the incubator for later inequalities—both symbolically, by positioning the beginning of the film and key sections of the plot during the advent of Reaganite neoliberalism, and more literarily through the Red/Adelaide swapping, a clear-cut instance of injustice which dramatically separates the two characters at the socioeconomic level. 8  The body of scholarship on Reaganism is ever-increasing. A comprehensive overview of the Reagan Era is well beyond the scope of this chapter. I have relied on the following sources for the comments and assertions made above: Reagan’s cuts to welfare (Aronowitz 1992, 420–422; Kemp 1990, 220–222; Sugrue 1999, 246–250; Taylor 2016, 72–73); Reaganism as a form of antigovernment populism (Frank 2020, 209–215; Glickman 2019, 229–253; Kazin 1995, 260–266; Wilentz 2008, 135–137); and the start of patterns of income inequality in the 1980s (Gill 2004, 167–169; Formisano 2015, 13–14; Piketty 2014, 294–296; Wells 2003, 122–123).

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The influence of Reaganism in the film also connects with the idea of capitalist realism, which Fisher defines as the ability of late capitalism to hegemonize sociopolitical imagination, so much so that utopian thinking and the possibility of a post-capitalist world become entirely unimaginable even in speculative or sci-fi fiction (2009, 1–4). This can be seen in the way the Tethered mount their so-called untethering—their becoming autonomous from their peers above the ground and the subsequent attempt to substitute the latter. The untethering may be easily construed as the classically Marxist movement from class in itself to class for itself9 inasmuch as the Tethered gain awareness of their common material conditions and goals as opposed to those of their adversary—their doppelgängers living on the surface. The fact that the Tethered decide to wear identical red jumpsuits reinforces their uniformity as an underclass of sorts. What connects these instances with Fisher’s capitalist realism is that this class rebellion is couched in the quintessentially Reaganite imagery of the “Hands Across America” theatrics. That is, a clear-cut expression of class consciousness and anger is channeled through the visual idioms of Reaganism and its political culture of volunteerism and philanthropy, emphasizing how neoliberalism is so deeply inscribed in political imagination that even a class insurrection cannot escape relying on neoliberal tropes and imagery.

The Violence of Capital and the Tethered Violence is a crucial gateway to the film’s subtext and political disclosures. The different forms of violence depicted in the film require looking into the agents perpetrating such violence and whether said acts take place against the backdrop of other, yet larger, frameworks of violence. The narration is packed with carefully staged set pieces filled with blood, jump scares, and a sustained atmosphere of danger. In one of the most striking sequences in the film, Adelaide’s friends Dahlia (Elizabeth Moss) and Josh (Tim Heidecker), along with their twin daughters, get gruesomely slaughtered by their Tethered; a long shot from outside the house of the whole family being stabbed segues into an equally brutal scene from the inside in which they are finished off. We also witness the Tethered wreaking havoc all across the country, murdering their equals on the surface and holding hands imitating the “Hands Across America” human chain. In short, the 9

 See Elster (1986, 129–134).

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film features plenty of instances of the Tethered committing violence in a merciless fashion. Žižek’s distinction between objective violence and subjective violence can be useful to gauge, on the one hand, the violence practiced by the Tethered and, on the other, the violence the Tethered themselves embody and have been subject to. The violence enacted by the Tethered, murdering innocent people on the surface, is consistent with what Žižek defines as subjective violence in that such acts of violence are presented and experienced as unusual and unnatural phenomena, clearly attributable to the agents who perpetrate them—i.e., a scissor-wielding, menacing-looking underclass exacting revenge for a life of deprivation in what can only be defined as an underground prison. Horrific as these acts of violence may be, they are not one bit less horrific than the predicament the Tethered find themselves in. While the people on the receiving end of the Tethered’s violence are, in every respect, innocent, the Tethered have been subject to an extreme form of normalized and continued violence and oppression: they have been forced to live deprived of freedom and agency, ventriloquized by the human beings above. In this sense, the Tethered symbolize, and bear the brunt of, objective violence. Their existence serves no other purpose than to be compelled to mimic the lives of their peers above. In explaining the notion of objective violence, Žižek writes: [I]t is the self-propelling metaphysical dance of capital that runs the show, which provides the key to real-life developments and catastrophes. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism,… this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ intentions, but it is purely ‘objective,’ systemic, anonymous. Here, we encounter the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: ‘reality’ is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract,’ spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality. (2009, 11)

The Tethered literalize objective violence or, in Lacanian terms, the abstract, spectral logic of capitalism that functions to lay the groundwork and normalize the violence, oppression, and marginalization necessary for a productive process to take place in capitalist societies. The film renders that flow of objective violence of capitalist society tangible in the form of an underclass that exists for the sake of anything other than being specters of the people living in social reality. In many respects, Adelaide killing Red

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at the end of the film represents the stabilization of such systemic relations, for Adelaide’s murder of Red embodies objective violence being reinstated and enacted on an actor—Red—willing to call into question the configuration and execution of the reigning patterns of violence.10

The Tethered: Symptoms of the Neoliberal Era Dualities dominate the visual grammar and the thematic overarch of the narration. Visual composition and editing repeatedly highlight dualities, whether to express the central concerns of the film or to create small-scale parallels and symmetries. Examples of this abound throughout the film. The Tethered seem to be driven by the Bible verse Jeremiah 11:11—an announcement of God-spawned evil unleashed on humanity and for which God is to offer no relief, in what appears to be a metaphor for the attack of the Tethered. The Bible verse is made up of the same number repeated twice (11:11). Later on, there is an extreme close-up, focalized through Adelaide, of a small spider crawling out of a larger plastic spider, in reference not just to the duality integral to the film but to the children’s song “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” which Red was whistling just moments before being swapped by Adelaide. The recurrent image of Adelaide and Red in the hall of mirrors, shot in bluish light, works as a visual leitmotif and foreshadows the swapping, while the last act of the film relies extensively on cross-­ cutting to compare people walking around the Santa Cruz Beach Fair with the Tethered moving below, in zombified manner and in perfect sync with their equals above the ground. In this vein, it is worth paying attention to what could arguably be the two most carefully crafted and choreographed sequences in the film: the first time Adelaide and her family face their Tethered and the final standoff between Adelaide and Red. In the former, the viewer is first introduced to the Tethered in a manner reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) in terms of staging and violent atmosphere. The scene takes place at the beach house and is shot not just to enhance terror and uncanniness, but to distinctively show how identical both families are—the actors and actresses are playing two parts simultaneously—and, at the same time, how their respective socioeconomic contexts have made them totally disparate beings. The Tethered 10  It is worth noting that Nyong’o says she modeled Adelaide’s facial gestures and body language by studying famous impostors and by paying close attention to footage of war criminals (Nyong’o 2019).

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look scrawny, brutish, and intimidating, to the extent that the scene seems calibrated to subtly dehumanize them. The precise symmetry of the shot/ reverse-shot patterns, accomplished through the careful framing and staging of the characters, drives home the eerie interplay of both total similitude and disparateness. The fight scene between Adelaide and Red, on the other hand, is an aesthetic and visual tour de force where virtually all the visual and thematic motifs of the film blend together. A virtuoso use of cross-cutting merges the highly stylized and physical fight between Adelaide and Red with two additional streams of images of young Adelaide and Red as they dance the pas de deux of The Nutcracker—the former in an actual, properly lit theater stage above the ground; the latter in the dark corridors of the Tethered underworld.11 This array of aesthetic and visual emphases on duality and parallel experiences is encoded in every level of the narrative. They play out thematically, visually, and aesthetically, not just as the mere result of the film being a doppelgänger story, but as an active engagement with the idea of duality. Following Marx, one way to analyze these dualities the film so carefully concocts is to view them as means “to estrange us from the familiar so that we might actually see it for what it is… a dialectical language of doublings and reversals” (McNally 2011, 115). The iconography and imagery around the Tethered, their being voiced and visualized so eloquently, serve to unveil the systemic relations that govern neoliberal capitalism. The fact that the Tethered are bodied, non-abstract humans endowed with a will of their own, expendable and yet existing beings with agency, works to signal that inequality and imbalance are but key components of social life under—neoliberal—capitalism. The metaphor of the Tethered as a symbol of inequality, intuitive as it may be, is conceptually connected with Marxist thinking in that Marx, as well as many fictionists in the horror milieu, strenuously drew attention to laboring bodies and the horrific toll that the commodification of life takes on them. In his comprehensive study of fictional monsters vis-à-vis capitalism, McNally 11  In this sense, a strategy Peele deploys throughout the film is presenting potentially feelgood elements as terrifying experiences. We hear the quintessentially feel-good pop hit “Good Vibrations” by The Beach Boys as a family is brutally murdered; a day at the beach is depicted as something utterly unsettling and tense by paying due homage to The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock 1963) and Jaws (Steven Spielberg 1976); the Santa Cruz Fair is turned into a place fraught with danger in a clear nod to Joel Schumacher’s 1987 The Lost Boys. In the fight sequence between Adelaide and Red, a suspenseful orchestrated remix version of the rap classic “I Got 5 on It” by Luniz (1995) comes on extradiegetically to great effect.

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explains how Marx’s focus on workers and the brutalization and destruction wrought by capitalism on their bodies is a key way to pinpoint and critique capitalism and the occluded processes that render it possible. McNally elaborates as follows: In order to de-fetishise capital’s logic of abstraction and disembodiment, Marx’s critical procedure involves disruptive strategies of re-embodiment— by way of reinstating the labouring bodies that are the precondition of value. Marx thus de-fetishises by way of re-embodiment…. In attending to labouring bodies, Marx is in fact inside the dialectic of capital, tracking with irony and horror the way it subverts and reverses itself. After we enter the hidden abode, the dark cave of capitalist production, we are submerged in the shadowy underworld of labouring bodies…. Alongside the accumulation of capital, he accumulates reports on workers’ bodies. As he graphically describes labour-processes, machineries, hours of work, wages, injuries, diseases, we feel the heat of the factory, the strain of bodies adapting to machines, the cramped quarters that distort the human frame, the industrial processes that make the body ill. (135)

The passage seems to be a partial account of the Tethered and their predicament; the “dark cave of capitalism production… the shadowy underworld of laboring bodies” reads like a description of the underground world the Tethered are made to inhabit. The more pertinent aspect of the passage, though, is the idea of “de-fetishizing” capitalism and its logic of abstraction and disembodiment “by way of re-embodiment.” To use less of a Marxian phraseology, foregrounding workers, their being exploited, and their bodies being utilized as raw material is not just denouncing capitalism as occasionally cruel or violent; said foregrounding draws attention to occluded and taken-for-granted processes of violence and human degradation without which capitalism cannot exist. The centrality of dual imagery and parallel yet terribly unequal experiences in Us works, precisely, to de-fetishize the rise of inequality under neoliberalism, emphasizing that the social life on the surface is inextricably linked to the suffering and misery of the Tethered living underground. Extreme inequality is thus cast, through the Tethered, as an in-built feature of neoliberal capitalism and its development—the Tethered exist just as duplications of their human peers above, as a cog in the machine, their bodies mere receptacles. In light of this, Red’s startling monologue when she first confronts Adelaide as adults is another instance of this de-fetishizing by re-­ embodying, as her speech and her ghoulish presence, carefully staged and

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framed, reminds Adelaide that her life of privilege and stability is the direct result of Red’s torment. Her shocking account is worth quoting in full: There was a girl. And the girl had a shadow. The two were connected, tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit, raw and bloody. On Christmas, the girl received wonderful toys, soft and cushy. But the shadow’s toys were so sharp and cold, they’d slice through her fingers when she tried to play with them. The girl met a handsome prince and fell in love, but the shadow, at that same time, met Abraham. It didn’t matter if she loved him or not. He was tethered to the girl’s prince, after all. Then the girl had her first child, a beautiful baby girl. But the shadow, she gave birth to a little monster. Umbrae was born laughing. The girl had a second child, a boy this time. They had to cut her open and take him from her belly. The shadow had to do it all herself.

Not only does this string of parallels reinforce the de-fetishizing of neoliberal inequality, but, bearing in mind the film’s final twist, it also exacerbates the cruelty of Red’s situation. Ultimately, Red’s life as a Tethered is the result of utter injustice—and Adelaide’s malice. In this vein, David Harvey famously talks about accumulation by dispossession, a process of massive wealth extraction that enables and perpetuates extreme socioeconomic disparities; something typical of capitalism and particularly central in its neoliberal iteration through processes of financialization and shock doctrine (Harvey 2005, 162–163, 2010, 244–245). In many ways, Adelaide switching places with Red represents a dramatic example of accumulation by dispossession, which helps unveil the ontology of capitalism as fundamentally unjust. Adelaide robs Red of her social capital—i.e., her life above—condemning her to an existence deprived of all the social goods attached to being on the surface. The story sheds light on how Adelaide’s life is an experience intrinsically and irremediably built on a massive extraction of social capital that has provided her with opportunities that would not have been available had she not engaged in identity theft. Moments after delivering her monologue, a bewildered and frightened Gabe asks, “What are you people?” to which Red says, “We’re Americans,” in yet another instance of de-fetishization, for the Tethered are, as an embodied symbol of socioeconomic inequality, as much a part of the social fabric of the country as their doubles living above them.

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Conclusion: A Horror Film Lexicon for the Age of Inequality Us is a narration that speaks to the age of inequality; its most memorable creation—the Tethered—remains an arresting metaphor conveying all of the ills and injustices that stem from a polity being organized by a political rationality as distinctively inequality-driven as neoliberalism has turned out to be. Peele builds a mythology and an iconography which can be interpreted as a sort of placeholder for a number of critiques of neoliberal capitalism to get voiced—as I have argued, capitalist realism, the duality between objective and subjective violence, and the de-fetishization of capital through re-embodiment are but a partial selection of the possible reading strategies for Us. I have referenced some of the films of George A. Romero throughout this chapter and the fact that a number of scholars have examined his work from the 1960s and 1970s as engaging with the prevailing socioeconomic and political concerns of said historical context. In analyzing Romero’s films, as well as some other trailblazers working in the genre at the time, Blake explains how they “pioneered specifically filmic lexicon which set out to expose the historically specific traumas” of their epoch—in Romero’s case, militaristic authoritarianism, widespread violations of civil rights, and urban decay and poverty in the US (2008, 73). Although Jordan Peele’s career is still in the making, his three films show analogous intentions. Just as Romero saw a number of wounds inflicted upon the US polity and deployed the toolkit of the horror genre to expose and undress them, Peele relies on well-known horror tropes such as the doppelgänger and the home invasion, as well as a potent collection of chilling images, to draw attention to the current wounds wrought to the social fabric of his country. In this sense, it is worth going back to one of the critical underpinnings of the present chapter—Lowenstein’s allegorical moment—since there is now a plethora of examples isolated and examined that can clarify how consistently Us functions along the lines of Lowenstein’s insight. As has been discussed, a whole array of strategies is mobilized so that the past and the present merge and clash, to the extent that the political commentary found in the film is forged thanks to carefully crafted parallelisms, visual symmetries, and narrative contrasts, both large and small in scale. As argued by Lowenstein, allegorical moments in horror films function, precisely, in that manner, as an instance where meaning is accomplished through a fleeting and problematic dialectic between past and present.

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Beyond the more or less intuitive perception that Us is an allegory of sorts—any viewer would wonder about what the Tethered symbolize—the fact that dualities are inscribed in the film right down to the very last detail and gesture helps foreground the profoundly allegorical nature of the film á la Loweinstein. Only when past and present are narratively interwoven is the film rendered politically intelligible and compelling. In so doing, the film honors, and becomes part of, a tradition that has used the grammar and tropes of the horror genre to encapsulate socioeconomic wounds, creating very human monsters who may help us identify and de-fetishize the occluded and naturalized logics and processes that sustain neoliberalism and capitalist accumulation.

References Aronowitz, Stanley. 1992. False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class. Durham: Duke University Press. Baldwin, James. 1963. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press. Balló, Jordi, and Xavier Pérez. 1995. La semilla inmortal: Los argumentos universales en el cine. Barcelona: Anagrama. Blake, Linnie. 2008. The Wounds of Nations: Horror Cinema, Historical Trauma and National Identity. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bradshaw, Peter. 2019. Us Review: Jordan Peele’s Brash and Brilliant Beach Holiday Horror. The Guardian, March 11. https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2019/mar/11/us-­r eview-­j ordan-­p eeles-­b rash-­a nd-­b rilliantbeach-­holiday-­horror Brown, Wendy. 2016. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge: Zone Books. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror; Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Craven, Wes, dir. 1972. The Last House on the Left. Lobster Enterprises. Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. 2013. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Translated by Gregory Elliot. New York: Verso. Dargis, Manohla. 2019. Us Review: Jordan Peele’s Creepy Latest Turns a Funhouse Mirror on Us. New York Times, March 20. https://www.nytimes. com/2019/03/20/movies/us-­movie-­review.html DeFore, John. 2019. Us: Film Review. The Hollywood Reporter, March 8. https:// www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-­reviews/us-­review-­1193550/ Elster, Jon. 1986. An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.

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Formisano, Richard P. 2015. Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Frank, Thomas. 2020. People Without Power: The War on Populism and the Fight for Democracy. London: Scribe. Gerstle, Gary. 2022. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. New York: Oxford University Press. Get Out. 2017a. IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5052448/ ———. 2017b. Rotten Tomatoes. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/get_out Gill, Troy. 2004. Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Glickman, Lawrence B. 2019. Free Enterprise: An American History. New Haven: Yale University Press. Haneke, Michael, dir. 1997. Funny Games. Wega Film. Harvey, David. 1990. Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. London: Profile Books. Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. 1963. The Birds. Universal Pictures. Hopper, Tobe, dir. 1982. Poltergeist. MGM. Hugo, Victor. [1862] 1992. Les Misérables. Translated by Charles E.  Wilbour. New York: The Modern Library. Humphries, Reynold. 2002. The American Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kazin, Michael. 1995. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. New York: Basic Books. Keetley, Dawn. 2020. Jordan Peele’s Get Out: Political Horror. Ohio: Ohio State University. Kemp, Tom. 1990. The Climax of Capitalism: The U.S. Economy in the Twentieth Century. London: Longman. Kracauer, Siegfried. [1947] 2004. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lilla, Mark. 2017. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. New York: Harper Collins. Lowenstein, Adam. 2005. Shocking Representations: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and The Modern Horror Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Luniz. 1995. Got 5 on It. Noo Trybe. McNally, David. 2011. Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism. Boston: Brill. Nyong’o, Lupita. 2019. “The Monsters within Us” (Interview. Bonus Feature in the 4K Bluray version of Us).

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Peck, Jamie. 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017. Get Out. Blumhouse Productions. ———. 2019a. Us. Blumhouse Productions. ———. 2019b. Us: Jordan Peele Gives Us a Glimpse into Us. Universal Pictures All-Access (Interview by Universal Pictures) (2019). ———. 2022. Nope. Monkeypaw Productions and Universal Pictures. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twentieth-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Polanksi, Roman, dir. 1968. Rosemary’s Baby. Paramount Pictures. Romero, George, dir. 1968. Night of the Living Dead. Image Ten. ———. 1973. The Crazies. Pittsburgh Films. ———. 1977. Martin. Laurel Entertainment Inc. ———. 1978. Dawn of the Dead. Laurel Group. ———. 1985. Day of the Dead. Laurel Communications. Rose, Bernard, dir. 1992. Candyman. Polygram Filmed Entertainment. Rosenberg, Stuart, dir. 1979. The Amityville Horror. American International Productions. Ruddell, Caroline. 2013. The Besieged Ego: Doppelgangers and Split Identity Onscreen. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schumacher, Joel, dir. 1987. The Lost Boys. Warner Bros. Sharrett, Christopher. 2014. The Horror Film as Social Allegory (and How It Comes Undone). In A Companion to the Horror Film, ed. Harry M. Benshoff, 56–72. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Spielberg, Steven, dir. 1976. Jaws. Universal Pictures. Sugrue, Thomas. 1999. Poor Families in an Era of Urban Transformation: The “Underclass” Family in Myth and Reality. In American Families: A Multicultural Reader, ed. Maya Parson, Gabrielle Raley, and Stephanie Coontz, 243–257. London: Routledge. Taylor, Keeanga Yamahtta. 2016. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Thompson, Kristin. 2022. How Did “Prestige Horror” Come About? Observations on Film Art, May 6. http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2022/05/06/ how-­did-­prestige-­horror-­come-­about/ Us. 2019. Rotten Tomatoes. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/us_2019 Us. IMDb. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6857112/ Wells, Wyatt. 2003. American Capitalism: 1945–2000. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Wiene, Robert, dir. 1920. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Decla Film. Wilentz, Sean. 2008. The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974–2008. New York: Harper. Wise, Robert, dir. 1963. The Haunting. MGM. Wolf, Jessica. 2017. Get Out-inspired UCLA Class Gets Students to Dig into Portrayals of Race and Fear. Newsroom UCLA, October 13. https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/get-­out-­inspired-­ucla-­class-­gets-­students-­to-­dig-­intofictional-­portrayals-­of-­race-­and-­fear

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Wood, Robin. 2003. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan… and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press. Yoshida, Emily. 2019. Jordan Peele’s Us Is a Messy, Chilling Descent into the American Nightmare. Vulture, March 9. https://www.vulture. com/2019/03/jordan-­p eele-­u s-­m ovie-­r eview.html#_ga=2.112470721. 474572933.1690554667-­1964762142.1690554667 Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

CHAPTER 10

Preying on the Other: Culture Wars Narratives in Horror Hunting Films Melenia Arouh and Daniel McCormac

Introduction Horror films are often considered “modern society’s equivalent of cultural myths” (Grant 2018, 8). As cultural myths they can encode fears and anxieties, collective nightmares, and our worst impulses and can thus be interpreted through a lens of social and political theory, as texts with cultural meaning and import. As Noël Carroll argues, the popularity of the horror genre is often linked to times of social stress or the rise of persistent anxieties—an expression of real fears society experiences. As he explains, “What presumably happens in certain historical circumstances is that the horror genre is capable of incorporating or assimilating general social anxieties into its iconography of fear and distress” (1990, 207). His point is not that horror films function as a release valve or mass catharsis, but that such films “are prone in such periods to command special interest, insofar as

M. Arouh (*) • D. McCormac Deree—The American College of Greece, Athens, Greece e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_10

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they project representations that match such anxieties and, therefore, address, if only by means of galvanizing imagery, pressing concerns” (210). Carroll’s thinking places the horror genre in a socio-political context, reflective of contemporary conflicts. It is within this context that we explore in this chapter horror hunting films that place human against human, in a display of conquest and misanthropy. We review the main premise of this type of narrative as it has transformed into a sub-genre of horror fiction and note its main traits. We then turn our attention to the horror hunting film The Hunt (Craig Zobel 2020), focusing on how the film narrativizes contemporary culture wars issues. We argue that the film offers a satiric perspective on the culture war, by tackling pertinent issues of morality and identity. Mixing humor and gore, the film should be understood as commentary on contemporary social reality.

The Hunt The Hunt tells the story of a group of wealthy friends caught in controversy when one of their chats is released online. In that chat Athena (Hilary Swank), commenting on the US politics, jokes that “At least the hunt is coming up. Nothing better than going to The Manor and slaughtering a dozen deplorables.” Her words are picked up online and a conspiracy that the Democrats are now hunting Republicans for sport is born. As a result of this leak, the eight friends are either fired, reassigned, or demoted. Under the leadership of Athena, and to avenge their downfall, the friends identify a dozen individuals who participated in the spread of the conspiracy, and sedate and fly them to a remote location in Croatia. When the prey wake up in a field ignorant of what is going on, they face numerous traps and deceptions, and most are quickly killed. The last survivor, Crystal (Betty Gilpin), a car rental employee and army veteran, and a case of mistaken identity, not only has the skills to stay alive, but also to hunt the hunters. Her final foe is Athena, who awaits her in her rented manor. They fight and Athena is killed. Crystal leaves Croatia to return to the US in Athena’s clothes and private jet. The script, written by Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse and produced by Blumhouse, the company behind horror hits The Purge (James DeMonaco 2013), Happy Death Day (Christopher Landon 2017), and Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017), was controversial from the start, with many studios avoiding bidding for the title. Universal bought it on a modest $18 million budget, although many remained skeptical about the viability of such

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a project (Siegel and Masters 2019). The film was scheduled for release in 2019, its marketing campaign emphasizing the film’s violence and gore. Following, however, the deadly mass shootings in August 2019 in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, Universal postponed the release for a later date. Donald Trump, then president, criticized the film prior to its release, although without mentioning the title; in a tweet, he wrote that, “the movie coming out is made in order … to inflame and cause chaos. They create their own violence, and then try to blame others. They are the true Racists, and are very bad for our Country!” (quoted in Truitt 2020). Director Craig Zobel insisted that the movie was never meant to be controversial, saying that, “Our ambition was to poke at both sides of the aisle equally… We seek to entertain and unify, not enrage and divide. It is up to the viewers to decide what their takeaway will be … I wanted to make a fun, action thriller that satirized this moment in our culture—where we jump to assume we know someone’s beliefs because of which ‘team’ we think they’re on” (quoted in Greenspan 2020). It seemed then that what the film was about had not been successfully communicated by the studio. As Rachel E. Greenspan notes, “Some, like Trump, assumed that the movie is anti-conservative, while others felt differently, pointing to its marketing as a satire. Many struggled to discern whether it is the presumed liberals or conservatives who serve as the story’s heroes or villains” (2020). As such, they were not sure whether to celebrate or denounce it. Without anyone having seen it, the film was anything people wanted it to be, a casualty of the very culture wars it lampoons. Months later, Universal announced the release of the film without changes but accompanied by a new marketing campaign that positioned the movie as satire and social commentary that takes aim at both sides of the culture war. The new poster teased: “The most talked about movie of the year is one that no one’s actually seen. Decide for yourself” (quoted in Barnes 2020). Perhaps unsurprisingly, the film came out to mixed reviews from both sides of the culture war barriers and did poorly at the box office, ending with an international gross of $16.2 million (“The Hunt” 2022).

The Manhunt Sub-genre The Hunt belongs to the manhunt sub-genre, which fuses the adventure, thriller, and horror films, and primarily “joins two elements: big-game sport hunting and hunting humans” (Schubart 2015, 76). This sub-genre

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seems to originate with Richard Connell’s popular short story “The Most Dangerous Game” (1924), which was first adapted into a film by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel in 1932 as The Most Dangerous Game. According to Juan Carlos Vargas and José Roberto Saravia Vargas, hunting humans had become a literary trend in the early twentieth century, inspired by the negative, fearful, and pessimistic perspective acquired from the experience of the First World War (2017). Connell’s story reflected this trend, setting man against man, in a context of obsession, violence, and conquest. The protagonist Rainsford, a hunter and author of hunting books, is stranded on an island and seeks refuge in a castle owned by the mysterious Cossack, Zaroff. The book presents Zaroff as an immoral aristocrat: “This man is an expert hunter who, having grown bored, decided to start hunting the most challenging species: humans” (Vargas and Vargas 2017, 34). Rainsford quickly realizes that from hunter he has become prey and uses his skills and knowledge to defeat Zaroff at this most dangerous game. Following the success of the 1932 movie and its claim to cult status, other adaptations were released, most prominently A Game of Death (Robert Wise 1945), Run for the Sun (Roy Boulting 1956), Bloodlust! (Ralph Brooke 1961), Surviving the Game (Ernest Dickerson 1994), The Pest (Paul Miller 1997), and the action series Most Dangerous Game, created by Scott Elder, Josh Harmon, and Nick Santora, (2020–2023). Additionally, several films were influenced by the main premise of the story: The Black Cat (Edgar G.  Ulmer 1934), Turkey Shoot (Brian Trenchard-Smith 1982), Elimination Game (Jon Hewitt 2014), The Running Man (Paul Michael Glaser 1987), Hard Target (John Woo 1993), and, to a certain extent, The Hunger Games (Gary Ross 2012). The main premise of the story has thus withstood the test of time and continues to inspire filmmakers. As Bryan Senn argues, “Connell’s concept touched a genetic nerve, or at least awakened some collective cultural memory” of our most basic, predatory, and misanthropic urges (2013, 1). It is this nerve that The Hunt touches as well. Rikke Schubart notes in his discussion of the key thematic and iconographic elements of this sub-genre that there is “a good and an evil big-­ game hunter; location is typically a remote island or some wild nature far from civilisation” (2015, 78). For, in all films of this sub-genre humans are pitted against humans, allowing the audience to observe and reflect on the violence and degeneration. For Schubart, “Animals hunt instinctively. Humans, however, do sport hunting by choice” (2015, 78). It is this

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choice that seems to fascinate audiences, especially when the prey is socially or politically targeted. When the short story was initially released in 1924, hunting would have been understood as a legitimate sporting activity, especially for the aristocracy, and most film adaptations as explorations of madness. That may explain why the hunting story has remained popular even though hunting has not; in most Western countries today, hunting is, if not illegal, stigmatized as barbaric. As such, hunting in more recent adaptations is replaced with other modalities, most evidently that of actual games—as, for instance, in Elimination Game (2014). The same principle applies to The Hunt, which, despite the title, does not place the prey in a traditional hunting environment. Additionally, the film places women in the lead positions, upending the norm in many of these adaptations of focusing on the male characters, and removing the romantic plot lines frequently reserved for the female character. In The Hunt the women dominate the story and are as vicious and determined as the men in earlier versions are. The prey in these stories is hunted by other humans, usually wealthy ones. Following Zaroff’s example, the predator is often an aristocrat and a member of the wealthy elite. Historically, this connects to the very nature of hunting. Vargas and Vargas note that, “hunting became a pastime reserved for a rich elite and, therefore, acquired the prestige associated with high-class activities. On a metaphorical level, hunting manifested the power of civilization over wildlife: it was a symbol of conquest” (2017, 33). Human hunts, however, seem to move in the opposite direction, with the films, including The Hunt, framing them as immoral actions by the elites, and asking the audience to recognize this activity for what it is: an act against civilization. In contemporary adaptations, this emphasis on wealth may allude to extravagant contemporary sporting activities taken up by the rich and idle (see, e.g., Wright 2016). Despite the reconfigurations, the main fascination in manhunting films remains the same: “What happens when individuals perversely abandon societal dictates and take it upon themselves to carry their competitive natures to the limit by hunting other humans for sport?” (Senn 2013, 3). From Zaroff to Athena, the same archetype seems to be recycled in this sub-genre. The predators are people who “have allowed their emotions— their obsessions—to cloud their reason to the point that they fly in the face of what they ultimately need: society” (Senn 2013, 4). Grégoire Chamayou links such hunting of humans to philosophical discussions, tracing its origins to the Ancient Greek philosophers, as “The ancient world was haunted

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by the menacing specter of the andrapodistes, the manhunter who seized citizens to capture them and sell them as slaves” (2012, 6). Hunting humans was understood by ancient philosophers as a form of conquest and domination, a savage act that separated masters from slaves. Such subjugation aimed “to maintain the dominated in correspondence with their concept, that is, with the concept that the dominant have imposed on them” (Chamayou 2012, 10). For ancient Greeks philosophers the hunting of other humans meant the rejection of their humanity, and their reduction to animal status. Within this savage context The Hunt explores aspects of contemporary culture wars.

Politicizing the Monster Given the nature of the topic, it is unsurprising that films of this sub-genre tackle social and political injustices, creatively determining who is predator and who is prey. Although Connell’s short story belonged more to the adventure genre, most film adaptations enter the domain of horror. This is evident even in the 1932 film adaptation, where Zaroff embodies the traditional horror monster, although without the supernatural element. As Vargas and Vargas observe, “the behavior of the Russian General echoes that of Count Dracula in vampire films: the viewer sees a man with impeccable manners, but that suggests an artificial attempt to conceal a dual nature” (2017, 36). Similarly, in The Hunt, Athena and the other hunters hold a dual nature, perceptive and aware of social injustices, fluent in political correctness, but also murderous of those they perceive as Other. These adaptations engage with social and political issues by placing the story squarely in the horror genre. After all, this is a genre that “has the ability to speak directly about politics,” whether as critique of violent and aggressive actions or responses to fear or war mongering (Eljaiek-­ Rodríguez 2021, 45). For instance, when it comes to US politics, Gabriel Eljaiek-Rodríguez understands the potential of the horror film to give expression to the ways in which far-right groups conceptualize diversity as a monstrosity that aims to destroy their way of life. Such “unifying dogmatisms” can be found on both the left and right, Eljaiek-Rodríguez suggests, and the genre offers an arena in which to explore them (45). The Hunt evinces this relation by utilizing the language and rhetoric of the culture wars. Indeed, in the manhunt sub-genre we find several articulations of such “dogmatisms.” Turkey Shoot (1982), for instance, presents a dystopic,

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authoritarian future, where dissidents are sent to labor camps where they are hunted by depraved aristocrats. In Run for the Sun (1956), Zaroff is replaced by a group of Nazis who have escaped to the jungles of Latin America, where they spend their days reading Nietzsche and hunting innocent Americans. In Elimination Game (2014) politics blend with the media to create a dystopic social reality of chaotic misinformation. In Most Dangerous Game (2020–2023) those entering the hunting game as prey are facing mounting medical debt and trying to save their families from ruin. Within this tradition, it makes sense for The Hunt to emphasize the pervasive culture wars evident in the US. Carroll argues that at the heart of the horror narrative stands the threatening character of the monster. The monster poses a threat that might be physical, moral, social, or political, and is recognized as such either by the individual protagonist or by the wider community or social order. What marks the horror monster off as different is the attitude with which the characters perceive it, “the affective responses of the positive human characters in the stories to the monsters that beleaguer them” (1990, 17). These affective responses guide the audience’s response to the monster. As Carroll argues, “The emotional reactions of characters, then, provide a set of instructions or, rather, examples about the way in which the audience is to respond to the monsters in the fiction—that is, about the way we are meant to react to its monstrous properties” (17–18). Such responses include fear, disgust, revulsion, and loathing. The monstrosity is manifested or marked, often physically; alternatively, as Barry Keith Grant explains, “they may be monstrous in their very physical ordinariness” (2018, 2). Thus, monsters become through narrative or visual representation a threat that we are meant to perceive in horror. Importantly, any subject can become the horror monster. Grant lists “women, the proletariat, other cultures, ethnic groups, alternative ideologies or political systems, children, and deviations from sexual norms” (18). In the case of The Hunt, the role is assigned to liberal elites. There is, thus, a connection between the conception of each horror monster and the socio-political reality in which a storyteller operates. Who embodies the hero and who embodies the monster is not the product of chance selection, but of the cultural pressures of an era. The horror monsters, Grant argues, “change over time, depending on evolving cultural contexts, and also that the same monsters are represented differently in different eras” (28).

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The Hunt and the Culture Wars The historically “specific anxieties” that The Hunt taps into are those that haunt the two sides of the US culture wars: the liberals, who fear conservative “deplorables”; and conservatives, who fear liberal “elites.” Understanding the dynamic behind the evolution of these anxieties requires examining them in a broader historical context. What has distinguished the culture wars since the end of the Cold War has been their growing visceral nature and gradual move to the center of mainstream US politics, where, as James Davison Hunter explains, they have become an increasingly dominant frame through which all manner of issues are understood (2006). Rather than being a passing phenomenon, the culture wars constitute a powerful political frame in the post-Cold War period. Conservative pundit Pat Buchanan’s focus on what he called a “cultural war” at the 1992 Republican National Convention, as E. J. Dionne, Jr. and Michael Cromartie discuss, was one of the first prominent post-Cold War attempts to present the battle over cultural values at home as being of overarching significance to defining what it means to be an American (2006). While Buchanan referred to economic issues in his speech, the upcoming election, he told the delegates, “is about who we are. It is about what we believe and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America” (Buchanan 1992). Buchanan’s declaration of “war” expressed three objectives. First, waging that war would provide cohering meaning to social experience rooted in a set of shared conservative values and national sense of purpose to fill the void left behind by the end of the struggle against communism. With the foreign enemy vanquished, Buchanan turned his sights on the enemy within. Second, his reference to the “kind of nation we will one day be” was a nod to the importance of what conservatives would call a way of life—how individuals collectively, and through generations, give substance to their values and provide meaning to life through the way that they live—to maintaining that coherence. Third, the struggle to determine “the kind of nation we will be” would be the product of “war,” implying that it would not be a tolerant, pluralistic nation, but rather that the cultural Other would be defeated. Though Buchanan was a conservative Republican, his goal of creating a harmonious America through waging a successful “war” on those who are incorrigibly morally wrong is echoed by

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Athena, the liberal leader of the elites parodied in The Hunt, when she tells one of her fellow liberals after he protests her plunging her stiletto heel into one of the prey’s eyes: “No sentimentality comrade. War is war.” Her attitude parodies a real-world political climate in which people see those who uphold norms and values inconsistent with their own as enemies so dangerous that they must silence them. Buchanan’s rhetoric has become Athena’s reality. While Buchanan was issuing an initial call to arms in the emerging “cultural war,” scholars investigated what appeared to be the waning salience in the 1980s of the political “axis of tension” based on social class to which left- and right-wing parties had for so long given expression and leadership (Dionne and Cromartie 2006, 13). With the “collapse of state socialism abroad and the disarray of the labor movement, philosophical Marxism in the academy, and Keynesianism at home, the explanatory power of those categories had weakened,” including their ability to explain the passions that surrounded debate on many cultural issues (13). What Hunter calls “the culture war argument” attempted to explain political and social tensions across an array of apparently unrelated issues as the product of a “realignment” of American popular culture (2006, 13). “The antagonisms,” Hunter wrote, “were playing out not just on the surface of social life (i.e., in cultural politics) but at the deepest and most profound levels, and not just at the level of ideology but in its public symbols, its myths, its discourse, and through the institutional structures that generate and sustain public culture” (13). This pointed to “deeper crises over the very meaning and purpose of the core institutions of American civilization” (13). For Hunter, debates over abortion, school curricula, and gay rights express deep conflicts over values related to parenthood, people’s obligations to one another in society, the nature of the family, and the ideals Americans should pass on to succeeding generations. Alongside efforts to define the dynamic behind and the contours of the culture war, scholars have also questioned whether a culture war in fact exists. Andrew Hartman, for example, argued with reference to Barack Obama’s presidency in 2015 that the “logic of the culture war had been exhausted,” only to modify his view after the election of Donald Trump in a climate of acute polarization, arguing that “economic anxiety and class resentment have mapped onto cultural divisions to make the culture wars angrier, more tribal, and more fundamental than ever before” (2018). And, 30 years after Buchanan’s speech, Joe Biden renewed the voice of the culture wars at the center of American politics. Accepting his nomination

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as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate, he said the battle to win the White House from Donald Trump was a “battle for the soul of the nation” (“Transcript: Joe Biden’s DNC Speech” 2020). During a speech two years into his presidency, Biden warned that former President Donald Trump and his supporters “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” and “are a threat to our personal rights, to the pursuit of justice, to the rule of law, to the very soul of this country” (“Remarks by President Biden on the Continued Battle for The Soul of the Nation” 2022). Biden’s call to political arms against racism and extremism is echoed by characters in The Hunt. Waging the culture wars is not simply, however, only political struggle; it is also central to the characters’ project of establishing their identity.

The Culture Wars and the Hunt for an Identity The notion of identity as denoting sameness or fixedness existed in ancient times, but the idea of identity as self-definition became common only in the 1950s (Izenberg 2016). An identity that results from self-definition is, as Anthony Giddens notes, reflexive: in the process of constructing an identity the individual must constantly reflect not only on what they are doing but also on why they are doing it (1991). The individual quest in Western societies to create an identity has not only become increasingly common in the twenty-first century, but also increasingly visceral, as the impulse to define oneself is fanned by and entails battles with the weakening older cultural values and norms that constituted collective identities (Furedi 2021). As Gerald Izenberg concludes, today, we “no longer believe that questions of moral orientation can be answered in objective universal terms” (2016, 17). For Giddens (1991), this provisional nature of moral orientation leaves the individual in the position of having to continually assess and adjust the views and lifestyle that compose their personal identity. While the project of creating an identity for oneself may be a defining feature of what Giddens calls “late modernity,” the urge to construct one’s own identity in the absence of an inspiring one handed down by society was already evident in the seventeenth century, when, as Frank Furedi notes, “the modern world appeared to question many of the prevailing norms and conventions that gave meaning to human existence” (2021, 3). Furedi cites the example of Cervantes’ Alonso Quijano (1605), who, unfulfilled in the “unremarkable role of a country gentleman,” attempts to

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resolve his identity crisis by reinventing himself as the chivalrous and adventurous knight, Don Quixote (33). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, young readers of Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) would adopt the dress and mannerisms of the novel’s tragic hero. Furedi argues that in mimicking Werther, readers were “performing distinction” to create a self-defined identity (36). The need to perform distinction to maintain an identity in the context of political conflict is a key motivation of the liberals lampooned in The Hunt, and makes that conflict visceral. What might appear to be insignificant elements of the hunters’ lifestyle—their consumer habits, the way they talk, how they behave—are meticulously selected ingredients of their constructed and managed identity. The wealthy hunters blend savoir faire with knowing what is right and who is wrong so as to distinguish themselves morally from their prey. They are thus religiously aware of what they—and others—are eating, saying, and doing, as their words and deeds make their identity real. As Giddens notes, as tradition “loses its hold” over people, “the notion of lifestyle takes on a particular significance” (1991, 5). Sustaining a coherent identity in a world of myriad lifestyle choices thus “becomes a reflexive project” (32). Seen this way, lifestyle habits “give material form to a particular narrative of self-identity” (81). The hunters in the film are not just conscious of their own words and behavior as constituting their identities, but also of the targeted words and behavior of their prey, whom the hunters consider “deplorables.” Athena makes clear during an outpouring of rage that “deplorables” are “gun-­ clutching homophobes” and “academically challenged racists.” For a hunter’s identity to be complete, the prey must also perform their assigned identity, that which the hunter is not: the “deplorable.” The hunter and the prey form a binary pair. As Izenberg explains, “‘inhuman’ behavior is necessarily the behavior of those also described as human … the term would have no normative weight otherwise” (2016, 254). The performance of the encounter between the hunters and the prey thus validates the identity of the hunters, by pitting them against that which they do not want to be. After the hunt has begun, the film introduces us to two of the hunters, elderly couple Miranda (Amy Madigan) and Julius (Reed Birney), personable, committed to social justice, and still tenderly devoted to each other. In the performance of the hunt, they play the role of mild-­mannered, timid owners of a fake gas station; they are the unassuming country folk in what is supposed to be rural Arkansas, presumably a state where a

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“deplorable” would feel at home. Yet the couple are monsters in sheep’s clothing. They feign fear when three of the prey enter their store. But as their dialogue with Staten Island (Ike Barinholtz) unfolds, they become increasingly judgmental and sarcastic before finally pulling out their weapons and killing their prey. As the dialogue takes a bizarre turn, the viewer shares the disorientation of the prey, who are slowly realizing that they are face to face with the very evil they believe they have eluded. The hunters who hate their prey for swallowing and spreading unfounded conspiracy theories ironically confirm the mistrust their prey have of “elites” by plotting to lure them to their own destruction. The treatment of identity as a performance concocted from lifestyle habits substituting for the certainty of strong, shared values, and the similar construction of the Other as a compilation of stereotypical attributes, is one of the most intriguing elements of The Hunt. Yet, it is precisely this that some reviewers found fault with. Calling the script “lazy,” Sam Adams protested that “political positions aren’t just a matter of rhetoric, and pretending that they are—that they’re just a matter of cultural differences, of what kind of accents people speak with and what kind of podcasts they listen to—is worse than a lie” (2020). Phil Brown similarly found that the film sports “horribly two-dimensional characters and absolutely no subtlety or finesse on any level” (2022). However, the lack of revealed depth of the characters can be interpreted as purposeful. It could be argued that it reveals through the performance of the hunt that the culture wars are the result of people shoehorning into stereotypes both themselves and other people in their effort to find affirmation and meaning through the construction of a stable and durable identity in opposition to the Other. For that reason, during a planning discussion, Miranda tells her fellow hunters that they must stick with their plan of having a fake Arab refugee encounter the prey during the hunt, since it will prompt the prey to reveal their racist views: “We need to lean into the stereotype to let them just expose their biases,” she explains to her fellow hunters. In that inquisitional spirit, the didactic Miranda later interrogates the prey known as Staten Island before her husband kills him: Miranda “Why do you have seven guns?” Staten Island “Because it’s my constitutional right to protect myself if I should ever happen to be gettin fuckin’ shot at.” Miranda “So, those people that are shootin’ at you, they’re just exercising the very same right?”

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Staten Island “What the fuck are you talking about?” Miranda “Will there be sugar after the rebellion?” Miranda’s reference to sugar comes as a non sequitur that baffles her interlocutor. As Miranda moves from deceptive role-playing to punishing combatant, she passes judgment on her prey as someone obsessed with guns and sugary junk food, both of which she sees as immoral. However, there is also a deeper level of complexity to her reflexive enterprise, for, like the “deplorable,” the hunters also use guns. In asking Staten Island if the people shooting at him are just exercising the same right to defend themselves that he does, she is also figuring out for herself how the hunters’ use of guns is morally acceptable. Later in the gas station scene, after she and her husband have killed three of the deplorables, Miranda shouts, “Honey! That’s poison!” at her husband, who has just taken a sip from a soft drink he got from a gas station refrigerator. “You rigged the soda?” he asks in alarm after spitting the beverage out. “No. There are 43 grams of sugar in that bottle!” Miranda explains with religious conviction. “Good God Miranda. You really scared me,” complains her husband. “I am not going to apologize for caring,” she says, and they lovingly embrace. Miranda and Julius further demonstrate how their war against the “deplorables” intertwines with their own struggle to sustain their identity. Miranda, for example, has a twinge of regret after seeing the ring on the prey’s finger. “He’s married,” she says. Her husband props up her sense of moral righteousness by reminding her that deplorables are hopelessly stained by their racism. “He probably uses the N-word,” he says. “Those people suffered 400 years of bondage at the hands of that piece of shit’s ancestors.” Their dialogue continues: Miranda Julius Miranda Julius Miranda Julius Miranda Julius

“Those people?” “Sorry. Black people.” “African Americans. It’s privilege.” “It’s perfectly fine to call them Black people again.” “According to who?” “NPR” [National Public Radio]. “Which consists almost exclusively of” “White people. We’re the fucking worst.”1

1  The dialogue here raises an interesting point as to whether their thinking can be read as a type of insight, or it further reinforces the point that their opinions are not a product of their ability to reflect, but things they receive from others.

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The hunter’s lack of certainty about their own moral rectitude renders them uncharitable not just to the deplorable Other, but also to themselves. As a result, they often quibble about what speech and actions are appropriate: “Sorry. I gendered it” Peter (Vince Pisani) self-corrects after saying “guys” to address their group. At another point, Oliver (Macon Blair) tries to shut down Richard’s (Glenn Howerton) disagreement with him over how many people they should abduct for the hunt by telling him that his wearing a kimono amounts to “appropriation.” Critics who misunderstand the purpose of the shallowness of the characters also miss a certain depth embedded in the behavioral differences between the hunters—differences which suggest different motivations for engaging in the culture wars. Miranda, for example, seems primarily motivated by genuine moral fervor. Interestingly, while she seems the most austere of the hunters in matters of lifestyle, she also has a moment of self-­ doubt when she sees the wedding ring on the finger of the prey she has murdered, as she realizes that he was a human being. Richard, in contrast, seems primarily motivated by simple snobbery—making a point to set himself off from the working-class attendant by regaling her with chatter about caviar and champagne, and wearing a kimono with moral impunity. Athena, the leader, seems motivated mostly by a need to dominate her prey. What unites the hunters despite the differences in their characters and temperament is their almost immutable loathing of the prey they stereotype. Indeed, showing that the culture wars induce people to use binaries in constructing their own identity on the basis of superficial lifestyle habits and a few core attitudes—that is, on the basis of making themselves stereotypes—seems to be one of the film’s main points. By reducing its characters to their presumed culture wars attributes, the film demonstrates through fiction what some observers call “affective polarization”—a “primordial sense of partisan identity that is acquired early in life”—a polarizing force more powerful than ideology in American politics (Iyengar et al. 2012, 427). According to this view, Americans hold “biased beliefs about opposing elites—that they are duplicitous, self-interested, stupid, etc.” (405). The primordial view that their opponents are beyond moral redemption provides the hunters with a steady moral compass that justifies their violence. The hunters’ own lack of moral certainty or sense of security that comes with an identity rooted in the venerable traditions of a society predisposes them to rely on “biased beliefs” in constituting their Other.

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The Location of Identity The film attaches significance to geography as a signifier of the combatants’ identities and lifestyles. The hunters see themselves as living beyond geographical attachments, literally viewing the world from far above it. Athena’s terrain is her large office high up in a skyscraper. The elites’ space is the private jet we find them in as they wing their way to the hunt, which is in Croatia, but could be anywhere. The nemesis of the “globalist elite” is the location-bound “deplorable.” The gas station is located in “Arkansas,” and the prey are branded with conservative-voting locations such as “Wyoming” and “Staten Island” instead of names. David Goodhart describes the significance of perceptions of political geography as a component of post-Cold War identity. He sees the emergence in twenty-first century Western politics of “voices preoccupied with national borders,” which appeal “to people who feel displaced by a more open, ethnically fluid, graduate-favoring economy and society, designed by and for the new elites” (2017). Opposed to them are “liberal-minded people” who, for example, “regard hostility to the openness required by European integration and a more global economy as simply irrational, if not xenophobic” (2017). According to Goodhart: Anywheres dominate our culture and society. They tend to do well at school … Such people have portable “achieved” identities, based on educational and career success which makes them generally comfortable and confident with new places and people. Somewheres are more rooted and usually have “ascribed” identities— Scottish farmer, working-class Geordie, Cornish housewife—based on group belonging and particular places. (2017)

Goodhart’s “Somewheres” and “Anywheres” encounter each other near the start of the film aboard the private jet. While the elites eat caviar and drink champagne, the flight attendant (Hannah Alline) feels awkward when Richard asks her pointedly if she has ever eaten caviar (she has not) or to rate the quality of the champagne available on the flight. Free of geography, the hunters are also free of history. When Richard asks the flight attendant about the champagne available, he tells her that a German submarine had sunk a Russian ship on its “way to Tsar Nicholas II” in World War I, and that recently robots had recovered from the wreck a case of champagne, three bottles of which Athena had bought for

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$250,000.00 each. Richard’s interest in an obscure past event should be interpreted not as love of history, but of history’s relevance to his exclusive consumer habits, which always reside in the present. While the “Anywheres” live with a smug sense of being in control of the world from their perches—in the scene in her office Athena boasts, even as she is being fired, that she knows everything that goes on at her company—their ignorance leads them into fatal error when conducting the hunt. When the unsuspecting Crystal enters the fake gas station, she asks Miranda for a pack of cigarettes. When Crystal sees her change from a 20 is only around nine dollars, she knows she is not in a gas station in Arkansas. “Cigarettes in Arkansas only cost six bucks. You fucked up, bitch,” Crystal says before shooting Miranda. All the time and logistical care the elites have put into making the gas station seem real is wasted because they are unaware of what to them, but not to their prey, would be an insignificant detail. In another scene, when the elites are meeting to plan the hunt, Oliver complains to the rest about the hardship of having been assigned to Croatia. Julius objects, “It’s a blessing. We’re gonna build that gas station for pennies.” Like Crystal, the elites are concerned with being thrifty, but only when it comes to sums magnitudes greater than what the “deplorables” are concerned with. The scene, like the staging of the hunt in Croatia, reveals in parody form globalist preference for unhindered global trade over the constraints of national borders.

Identity and the Need for the Deplorable Other The wealthy hunters’ need to continually perform an identity that is intractably provisional colors their choices, trivial or significant: whether it is wearing a kimono or hunting prey. They achieve moral redemption by distinguishing themselves from their deplorable counterparts, even—or perhaps especially—in the minutiae of daily consumer life. When Crystal has killed all the hunters except Athena, she goes to her villa to kill her, too. She finds her in her luxurious kitchen, making, of all things, a grilled cheese sandwich. No doubt aware of the irony of her elevating this simple sandwich to the level of haute cuisine, Athena opines in a faux tone of advice about the shared experience of making a sandwich: “You know, most people think that you should use cheddar in a grilled cheese, but I use Gruyere. Nothing else has that kind of melt.” Here, Athena is attempting to assert her authority over and set herself apart from her prey, which she also does when opining about another common food during the same

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scene: “It’s amazing to me. People go their entire lives without realizing the most simple, obvious truth. The only way to properly slice tomatoes is with a bread knife.” The pomposity with which she delivers these trivial insights contrasts with the existential desperation in her voice later, when she asks emotively of her erstwhile prey, “Who am I?” To which Crystal replies, “Lady, I don’t know who you are. I just know you’re crazy,” linking Athena to all the Zaroffs before her. This conversation in the kitchen, like that between Miranda and Julius discussed earlier, reveals perhaps how the hunters’ attempt to dominate their prey blends with their attempt to sustain an identity through the achievement of moral clarity. Though the hunted in the film are at risk of death, they are, ironically, also prone to magnify the nature of the risk the hunters pose to them. In an inversion of cause and effect, Athena explains to Crystal that the hunted are responsible for “Manorgate”—which started as an unfounded conspiracy theory that wealthy liberals were hunting Republicans—becoming reality, because it cost the hunters their careers. The conspiracy theorists, Athena explains, had thus forced the hunters to become the villains of their prey’s conspiracy theory. The “Manorgate” conspiracy—like the similarly preposterous real-life “Pizzagate” conspiracy alluded to in the film— could only take root among people—the prey—predisposed to feel at risk from wealthy liberal elites—their inscrutable Other—who presumably constitute a menace to humanity. The participants in the spiraling cycle of conjecture, suspicion, contempt, and violence are driven by the inability or unwillingness of either side to accept that they have any agency in shaping the world. Instead, both sides cast themselves as victims of the Other, an insuperable force of evil, which drives them to desperate conclusions. In both cases, the key motivating factor seems to be a primal sense of defenselessness. While the “deplorables” have conspiracy theories, the “elites” make their own stereotypical assumptions about their prey. One is that deplorables are trigger-­happy gun nuts. They thus provide their prey with an extensive supply of rifles. In the event, however, most of the deplorables appear to have little to no firearm proficiency. On the contrary, the hunters are adept at using weapons and have even hired a military consultant (Steve Mokate) to train them in combat and weapons use. The lopsided result is that the hunt is over almost before it begins, with almost all the prey killed off before they even get a chance to fire a serious shot at one of their hunters.

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The hunter stereotyping of what their prey are obviously like—dangerous gun lovers—is exposed as being an exaggeration that reflects their own moral ambivalence.

Conclusion Stephen Prince argues that “any given horror film will convey synchronic associations, ideological and social messages that are part of a certain period or historical moment” (2004, 2). In following this tradition, The Hunt captures the political present by embodying tensions and divisions of the culture wars in its narrative and iconography. It asks the audience to contemplate these issues, reveling in the horror and pausing for the commentary. For Dennis White, “horror films tend to dismiss the possibility of making simple moral judgments on their content or characterizations” (1971, 8), and The Hunt achieves this through the character of Crystal. As it becomes obvious in the film, the wrong Crystal has been kidnapped and brought to Croatia, a (not very simple) case of mistaken identity. In fact, Crystal seems to be the one character in the story who is not fighting in these culture wars, perhaps because she has already fought in Afghanistan. While the other characters are blinded by their biases, stereotyping each other based on words chosen or clothes worn, each signaling their moral superiority, Crystal’s focus remains on survival and only that. In a way, Crystal suspects all of them, treating each and every one she meets as potential enemy, ignoring their performed identities and focusing on her escape. Her lack of trust in assumptions and preformed binaries becomes the key that separates her from the rest, both hunters and prey. The Hunt seems to suggest that her lack of dogmatism and refusal to participate in the culture wars mark her as the sole character  with agency, capable of surviving and triumphing. By placing a seemingly neutral character at the center of the narrative, it could be argued that the film, as any satiric text, is asking the audience to reflect on their own biases, fears, and anxieties and consider an alternate point of view.

References Adams, Sam. 2020. The Hunt is Too Dumb to Justify Trump’s Outrage. Slate Magazine, March 11. https://slate.com/culture/2020/03/the-­hunt-­movie-­ review-­trump-­outrage-­elites-­deplorables.html.

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Barnes, Brooks. 2020. The Hunt, a Satire with Elites Killing “Deplorables,” Is Revived. The New York Times, February 11. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/ 02/11/business/media/the-hunt-release-date.html. Boulting, Roy, dir. 1956. Run for the Sun. United Artists. Brooke, Ralph, dir. 1961. Bloodlust! Crown International Pictures. Brown, Phil. 2022. The Hunt (2020). Film Blitz, February 21. https://filmblitz. org/hunt-­2020/. Buchanan, Patrick Joseph. 1992. Culture War Speech: Address to the Republican National Convention. Voices of Democracy, August 17. https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/buchanan-­culture-­war-­speech-­speech-­text. Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror; Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge. Chamayou, Grégoire. 2012. Manhunts: A Philosophical History. Translated by Steven Rendall. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Connell, Richard. [1924] 2008. The Most Dangerous Game. Rockville, Maryland: TARK Classic Fiction. De Monaco, James, dir. 2013. The Purge. Universal Pictures. Dickerson, Ernest, dir. 1994. Surviving the Game. New Line Cinema. Dionne, E.J., Jr., and Michael Cromartie. 2006. Introduction: Modernist, Orthodox, or Flexidox? Why the Culture War Debate Endures. In Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life, ed. James Davidson Hunter and Alan Wolfe, 1–9. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Elder, Scott, Josh Harmon, and Nick Santora, creators. 2020–2023. Most Dangerous Game. BlackJack Films. Eljaiek-Rodríguez, Gabriel. 2021. Baroque Aesthetics in Contemporary American Horror. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Furedi, Frank. 2021. 100 Years of Identity Crisis: Culture War over Socialisation. Berlin: De Gruyter. Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Glaser, Paul Michael, dir. 1987. The Running Man. TriStar Pictures. Goodhart, David. 2017. On the Road to Somewhere, the Divide between Elites and Populists. National Review, August 21. https://www.nationalreview. com/2017/08/road-­t o-­s omewhere-­p opulist-­r evolt-­d avid-­g oodhart-­ somewhere-­people-­anywhere-­people-­brexit-­trump-­election/amp/?gclid=Cj0 KCQjwwfiaBhC7ARIsAGvcPe7O2N802IDQrLNV_MuweAY5Iw3VptOi BGUPTCdu_yCNFw0jJp8xMZgaAsy_EALw_wcB. Grant, Barry Keith. 2018. Monster Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Greenspan, Rachel E. 2020. What to Know about the Controversy around the Movie The Hunt. Time, February 12. https://time.com/5650047/ the-­hunt-­movie/. Hartman, Andrew. 2018. The Culture Wars Are Dead. The Baffler, April 30. https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/culture-­wars-­are-­dead-­hartman. Hewitt, Jon, dir. 2014. Elimination Game. Altitude Film Distribution. Hunter, James Davidson. 2006. The Enduring Culture War. In Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life, ed. James Davidson Hunter and Alan Wolfe, 10–40. Washington, D. C.: Brookings Institution Press. Iyengar, Shanto, Gaurav Sood, and Yphtach Lelkes. 2012. Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization. The Public Opinion Quarterly 76 (3): 405–431. Izenberg, Gerald. 2016. Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Landon, Christopher, dir. 2017. Happy Death Day. Universal Pictures. Miller, Paul, dir.1997. The Pest. Sony Pictures Releasing. Peele, Jordan, dir. 2017. Get Out. Universal Pictures. Prince, Stephen. 2004. The Horror Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Remarks by President Biden on the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation. 2022. The White House, September 2. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-­ room/speeches-­remarks/2022/09/01/remarks-­by-­president-­bidenon-­the-­continuedbattle-­for-­the-­soul-­of-­the-­nation/. Ross, Gary, dir. 2012. The Hunger Games. Lionsgate. Schoedsack, Ernest B. and Irving Pichel, dirs. 1932 The Most Dangerous Game. RKO Radio Pictures. Schubart, Rikke. 2015. The Thrill of the Nordic Kill: The Manhunt Movie in the Nordic Thriller. In Nordic Genre Film: Small Nation Film Cultures in the Global Marketplace, ed. Tommy Gustafsson and Pietari Kääpä, 76–90. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Senn, Bryan. 2013. The Most Dangerous Cinema: People Hunting People on Film. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland. Siegel, Tatiana, and Kim Masters. 2019. Ads Pulled for Gory Universal Thriller The Hunt in Wake of Mass Shootings (Exclusive). The Hollywood Reporter, August 6. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/ads-pulled-huntwake-mass-shootings-1229829/. The Hunt. n.d. Box Office Mojo. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/ tt8244784/. Transcript: Joe Biden’s DNC Speech. 2020. CNN, August 21. https://edition. cnn.com/2020/08/20/politics/biden-­dnc-­speech-­transcript/index.html. Trenchard-Smith, Brian, dir. 1982. Turkey Shoot. Roadshow Film Distributors.

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Truitt, Brian. 2020. The Hunt Controversy, Explained: What You Need to Know about the Movie Slammed by Trump. USA Today, March 10. https://eu.usatoday.com/stor y/enter tainment/movies/2020/03/10/the-­h unt-­ controversy-­explained-­why-­trump-­hates-­this-­movie/5003993002/. Ulmer, Edgar G., dir. 1934. The Black Cat. Universal Pictures. Vargas, Juan Carlos Saravia, and José Roberto Saravia Vargas. 2017. Human Degradation: A Text-to-Film Comparison of the Human Hunts in Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game and Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Revista de Lenguas Modernas 27: 31–40. White, Dennis L. 1971. The Poetics of Horror: More than Meets the Eye. Cinema Journal 10 (2): 1–18. Wise, Robert, dir. 1945. A Game of Death. RKO Radio Pictures. Woo, John, dir. 1993. Hard Target. Universal Pictures. Wright, Daniel William Mackenzie. 2016. Hunting Humans: A Future for Tourism in 2200. Futures 78–79: 34–46. Zobel, Craig, dir. 2020. The Hunt. Universal Pictures.

CHAPTER 11

Humans Hunting Humans: Allegories of Cultural and Economic Divides across National Boundaries Pablo Gómez-Muñoz

This chapter addresses the recent popularity of films about humans who hunt other humans and the socioeconomic discourses that they develop.1 My analysis focuses on the transnational dimension of the horrific situations that films like Bacurau (Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles 2019), The Hunt (Craig Zobel 2020), and The Forever Purɡe (Everardo Gout 2021) imagine. As Jason Bailey (2020) notes in a recent piece in the New York Times, the idea of humans literally hunting or  This publication is part of the research project PID2021-123836NB-I00, funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and “ERDF A way of making Europe.” Research toward this chapter has also been carried out with the help of research project H23_23R, funded by the Government of Aragón. 1

P. Gómez-Muñoz (*) University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_11

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preying on other humans has been a recurrent and highly adaptable motif in horror cinema, which can be traced back to the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game (Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel), if not earlier. In recent years, franchises like The Hunger Games (2012–2015) and The Purge (2013–2021), among other films, have imagined national contexts in which citizens are stripped away of their most precious right: the right to life. In this context, The Hunt, Bacurau, and The Forever Purge stand out in their decisions to incorporate transnational elements into their narratives. The Hunt and Bacurau present a group of people who are mostly from the US and travel abroad to hunt other humans for sport. The Forever Purge, in contrast, imagines an uprising in the US that makes the annual killing purge a phenomenon of daily life, leading a group of US citizens to migrate to Mexico. In this chapter, I focus on The Hunt, offering a reading of the film that looks beyond its apparent investment in debates on culture wars and shifting the focus toward the transnational premise of the film, which, among other narrative elements, invites viewers to pay attention to the economic and geopolitical power of elites. In recent years, several films have used transnational elements in their narratives to add an often-unexpected dimension to their narratives. Films from previous decades such as Turkey Shoot (Brian Trenchard-Smith 1982) or Hard Target (John Woo 1993) feature political, military, or economic elites preying on non-compliant and poor citizens respectively. Yet, while recent films also draw attention to ideological and economic divides, they often add transnational twists to their initial premises, which generally underline the unbridled power of privileged or entitled groups of people. After spending the first third of its runtime exclusively following Brazilian characters who live in a village in Brazil, Bacurau introduces the hunters, who happen to be US citizens and have chosen the Brazilian village that gives name to the film as their hunting grounds. Similarly, The Hunt initially makes viewers believe that the action is developing in the US while in fact it is taking place in Croatia. From a slightly different angle, the protagonists of The Forever Purge unexpectedly look for refuge in Mexico. In this way, the film draws attention to the extreme-right, violent movements that have developed in the US in recent years. In The Forever Purge (2021), the US is no longer a desirable place to live in. Not all films about humans preying on other humans obscure their transnational elements at the beginning. Hostel (Eli Roth 2005) actually foregrounds the transnational dimension of its narrative by alluding to the fact that the protagonists are far from home. In Hostel, wealthy people (who happen to be

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German and US American) pay between $5,000 and $25,000 for torturing and killing other people in an abandoned factory in Slovakia. The price varies depending on the nationality of the person being tortured, the cheapest being Russian citizens and the most expensive US Americans, with Europeans occupying the middle ground. Although these prices reflect hierarchies in terms of nationality, they also correlate to the distance between the place where people are tortured and their homes, particularly in the case of US American victims. By emphasizing the distance between these locations, the film adds a further layer to the sense of threat and anxiety that characters suffer when they find themselves in such a place. Whether these films use their transnational dimension as a surprise factor or not, by taking abroad such dehumanizing activities as the ones mentioned above, they imply that characters aim to fulfill monstrous fantasies and whims that their presumably civil nations cannot accommodate. In this way, the location of such activities abroad channels sociocultural clashes to places beyond the reach of the laws by which most people usually abide. For example, in The Purge: Election Year (James De Monaco 2016), some people travel to the US to participate in an activity that is not allowed in their countries. Films about humans who hunt or torture other humans often focus on isolated environments. The clearest example of this is the islands where The Most Dangerous Game and Squid Game (Hwang Dong-hyuk 2021) locate their events. After all, films and series such as these tend to emphasize that remote locations and legal asymmetries across borders allow powerful, privileged people to indulge in exclusive, otherwise inaccessible activities. The deadly competitions featured in the global streaming hit Squid Game take place on an island near Seoul where a group of anonymous but presumably US American characters gather for the pleasure of witnessing a group of impoverished people kill each other in a series of games. Other films about morally repulsive activities also draw attention to the ability of powerful actors to disregard people’s rights and circumvent laws. For example, Fresh (Mimi Cave 2022) briefly features elites from around the world who eagerly consume human meat from kidnapped people, which is delivered to their doorsteps from the US. These films point to growing concerns and fears about the scale and impact of the activities of the more powerful members of society. In this chapter, I will focus on The Hunt, as it is a film that brings together many of the issues and motifs present in the films I have mentioned. Through close analysis of The Hunt, I argue that the social geographies depicted in this film illustrate emerging concerns about the ability of global elites to

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bend local legislation, engage in corrupt practices across borders, and mold foreign spaces. Such concerns can also be found in Bacurau and the more action-driven film Hard Target 2 (Roel Reiné 2016). As I aim to show in the following pages, the strategy of these films to locate human hunts beyond the limits of the nation and the logistics required for such hunts increase the sense of threat that such activities elicit. In Horror Film and Affect, Xavier Aldana Reyes argues that, “physical threat lies at the heart of the Horror experience” (2016, 104). He explains that horror films tend to draw attention to such threats in order to generate fear and that they do so mostly by creating “awareness of corporeal vulnerability and of human mortality” (104). For Aldana Reyes, this often relies on fearful disgust (abjection) (56), but I argue that in the context of transnational human-hunting movies, the ability to reorganize and modify entire areas or regions and their populations for the twisted, bloodthirsty leisure of a few also generates social fear and feelings of threat. Indeed, Aldana Reyes also seems to be aware of this as he opens his book with the following observation on the movie Hostel (Roth 2005): “I was horrified by the thought of the plausibility of its premise … and the possibility that people, somewhere in the world, would be mad enough to pay money to kill or torture someone they did not know for the mere pleasure of seeing someone suffer and die” (1). As Aldana Reyes notes, considering the possibility of people engaging in such atrocious activities as killing and torturing for pleasure can also constitute a major source of threat and fear. Indeed, fictional worlds such as Hostel’s are particularly frightening because the threats they imagine are not limited to the activities of individual psychopaths or monsters. They take on a large scale, requiring systematic organization and the collaboration of multiple social actors. This does not mean that individual killers represent a less significant source of fear. Rather, what I mean is that films like Hostel address moral corruption in pervasive terms. The films analyzed in this chapter are not just about the actual horror of killing humans. As Cynthia Freeland points out, horror films rely on “gut-level reactions such as fear, revulsion, anxiety, or disgust, but they also stimulate more complex emotional and intellectual responses” (2000, 273–74 quoted in Cherry 2009, 94–95). Although The Hunt and other films mentioned in the following pages do include abject images that may trigger gut-level reactions, they also make viewers reflect on the social networks that make the activity of hunting humans possible. In this sense, I argue that films about humans hunting humans engage with social anxieties about the growing socioeconomic power of wealthy elites and

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the sociopolitical polarization that goes hand in hand with it. This chapter then revolves around the following two questions: How do these films foreground the madness and the perverted character of hunting humans and of doing so across borders? How do they draw attention to the radical alteration of social norms that such activities entail? The notion of “operations” can help to make sense of the concerns that films like The Hunt and other hunting narratives channel. More specifically, this concept allows me to turn the spotlight on points of convergence within and between these narratives and on elements that contribute to generating a sense of threat and horror. Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson use the notion of “operations of capital” in their book The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capital (2019). In this chapter, I seek to use a broader notion of the term operations, focusing on operations at a more general level and not just on those connected to capital. More specifically, within the context of the films analyzed here, I focus on operations that make it possible for some humans to hunt other humans. While Mezzadra and Neilson only refer to operations in general briefly, their elaboration of the concept is quite illuminating. They warn that operations are not just based on “a straightforward relation of cause and effect” (2019, 66–7). They are not just “what they accomplish” (67). Rather, they propose to focus on the process of the operation, its dynamics, and the connection between different operations. In order to do so, they “[invoke] the … point of view of the interval that separates the operation’s trigger from its outcome” (67). In other words, they argue that looking at operations invites us to focus on what is required to accomplish something. Thinking about operations also allows us to interrogate what certain narrative moves imply instead of taking them for granted. In the context of this chapter about humans hunting humans, the concept of ‘operation’ is in no manner a euphemistic term that just aims to refer to the practice of killing, but rather to the processes that precede and enable it. This focus on operations will allow me to examine aspects of these films’ horror narratives that contribute to building a sense of threat that may not appear to contribute to feelings of fear or horror at first sight. Within the context of films about humans hunting humans, two different kinds of operations can be identified: (a) ideological operations, and (b) logistical operations. By ideological operations, I refer to the development and evolution of a set of beliefs that lead some humans to hunt other humans. In this sense, political polarization, culture wars, imperialism, neo-colonialism, and racial supremacy (to name a few) are all elements

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that contribute to generating and developing such a set of beliefs. As far as logistical operations are concerned, I am borrowing Mezzadra and Neilson’s approach to this term. Drawing on the work of Deborah Cowen, Mezzadra and Neilson explain that logistical operations do not just refer to “physical distribution” but rather to the “whole process of business,” that is, the whole process of making something possible (Cowen 2014, 32 quoted in Mezzadra and Neilson 2019, 67–68). This understanding of logistical operations contributes to shedding light on aspects within a narrative that may seem inconsequential in isolation. Yet, considering them as potential operations that contribute to making an action possible, our understanding of the narrative may change. A seemingly straightforward action such as killing may not appear so simple anymore and may unveil the relevance of other elements or factors in the working of the system. This does not only apply to speculative genres. This approach can also be beneficial for the analysis of more realistic genres: yet, in the context of speculative genres like horror, this focus is particularly enlightening, as it invites us to pay attention to aspects that the suspension of disbelief that the genre often encourages may sometimes lead us to overlook. Applying this notion to film also has its limitations: films do not necessarily cover all the operations involved in making something happen. Yet, the focus on operations underscores narrative strategies and dynamics which we may otherwise take for granted. In addition, the prominence or proliferation of certain kinds of operations in films can also help in identifying operations that are essential or decisive.

The Hunt (2020): Subverting Ideological and Spatial Expectations The Hunt imagines a group of kidnapped US citizens being hunted by other people in a remote outdoors area which first appears to be located in the US and is later revealed to be in Croatia. The identity of the hunters is not disclosed until minute 50, although the film does provide earlier cues about the kind of people who are behind the murders. Some of these people call one of the hunted “redneck” and refer to others as “deplorables,” a term that Hillary Clinton used to refer to some of Donald Trump’s supporters during the 2016 presidential election campaign (CBS News 2016). In the same vein, a couple of hunters who pretend to be the owners of a store at a fake gas station express their contempt toward one of the

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hunted by saying that “he probably uses the N-word” and by highlighting that “climate change is real.” The old couple also reveal that one of the hunted called them “godless elite.” One of the first scenes also invites us to see the hunters as part of an elite, as some of the travelers in the first class cabin kill a man who wakes up disoriented in the middle of the flight. Indeed, this is the man whom someone calls “redneck.” By means of these references to political stereotypes, social clashes, and the political agenda, The Hunt invites readings through the lens of the current culture wars. More specifically, The Hunt seems to pit wealthy, woke liberals against working and middle-class conservatives. Indeed, a group of wealthy friends decides to hunt low- or average-income conspiracy theorists because they lose their managerial positions when several jokes from a group chat are leaked and many people read them literally on social media. Despite the controversial character of the 2016 speech in which Hillary Clinton used the word “deplorables” (CBS News), it nicely captures the two key conflicts that The Hunt articulates: culture wars and economic divisions. In her speech, Clinton divided Donald Trump’s voters into two groups or baskets. She said, “You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic. You name it.” By alluding to this “basket” through the use of the word “deplorables” and other less direct references like the ones mentioned in the previous paragraph, The Hunt clearly taps into the concerns that such extreme political views have generated in US politics lately. Yet, when thinking about The Hunt, the other half of the basket that Clinton mentions is just as relevant as “the basket of deplorables.” Clinton explains: “That ‘other’ basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down. Nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” In this way, Clinton suggests that political polarization is not just a consequence of culture wars, but also of economic inequality. Similar discursive dynamics are at work in The Hunt. The focus on operations that I apply in this chapter sheds light on the centrality of economic divides to the film’s narrative and the horrific activities it imagines. Indeed, the range of operations that the film depicts invites viewers to see conflict in economic/class terms rather than in purely cultural or ideological terms. David Bordwell notes that the plot of a film may “facilitate” or “impede” viewers’ ability to construct the space of the story (1985, 51). The Hunt purposefully muddles the construction of spaces and plays with viewers’

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potential expectations about some locations, especially at the beginning of the film. By playing with viewers’ spatial expectations, the film aligns them with the experience of the hunted and draws attention (at later points in the film) to the unbridled power of the hunting elites. Following the aforementioned scene on the plane, the third scene in the film is set in a field in an undetermined location surrounded by forest, where a group of kidnapped people wearing mouth gags seems to have just woken up. In the middle of the field there is a large box the size of a car that some of the people believe to be a trap. A man dares to open it and pulls out a large set of weapons. At this point, the open field and the weapons in the middle may remind viewers of the starting point of the games in The Hunger Games (Gary Ross 2012), in which competitors have to try and get a weapon and survival kit while avoiding being killed by other participants in the game. The similarity between both situations may lead viewers to wonder whether this group of characters is also supposed to kill each other. Yet, things seem to run a little different in this case, as everyone in the group quietly gets hold of a weapon while they help each other remove the mouth gags. Peace is over soon enough after everyone has a weapon. Shots start being fired from an uncertain location. The head of a woman is blown, and an extreme long shot reveals that the gunshots come from an underground shelter. The people in the field do not seem to be attacking each other. Within a matter of seconds, the body count soars as characters keep getting shot at, fall into deadly traps excavated on the ground, get their bodies blown up by stepping on landmines, or get hit with arrows. We witness a massacre in the first few minutes, but we do not know who is shooting, who has prepared the traps, or if these killings serve any specific purpose. What we do know is that the people who wake up in the field are vulnerable victims in a rigged game. Through the lens of operations, the fact that the identity and the motives of the hunters remain hidden at the beginning of the film is significant, as they constitute an invisible, mysterious threat for a substantial part of the film. The Hunt also tricks viewers’ perception of the location where the main events of the film take place. Viewers are invited to believe that the action develops in the US, while in fact most of the story occurs in Croatia. By playing with viewers’ expectations, the film draws attention to the scope of action of the human hunters and seems to respond to contemporary fears of the unchecked power of neoliberal elites. The first few scenes are set in vague locations: an individual office, a plane, a field. Yet, all characters speak English with an American accent. After some characters escape the

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field and surrounding woods where they are being shot, they arrive at a gas station that is distinctly US American. Outside the store (which is called Ma & Pop’s Main Street Market), there is a pick-up truck and a marquee sign. When two different characters open the door to the store in two different scenes, a US flag sticker can be appreciated on the door. Inside the store, several shots feature a poster advertising Pabst Blue Ribbon, a well-known US beer brand historically associated with blue collar workers and often regarded as indicative of social status. In the two scenes at the gas station, the kidnapped characters ask about the state in which they are, to which one of the two workers replies that they are in Arkansas. However, Crystal (Betty Gilpin) realizes that something is off when she gets charged an unusual price for a pack of cigarettes. After killing the supposed store owners, she checks the plate of the pick-up truck outside and unveils a Croatian plate below the Arkansas plate. The Croatian location of the hunting grounds is confirmed some minutes later when Crystal has a conversation with two police officers. The fact that the film initially obscures the location of the hunt and then foregrounds it invites viewers to think about the transnational dimension of the horrific activities that the film depicts. This is significant from the point of view of operations. By moving the action to a country that is different from the country of origin of both the hunters and the hunted, the film highlights the scale of the operations involved. The logistics of such a hunt are, in theory, much more complicated and scarier than a hunt that could have been potentially organized in the US. For the hunted, being hunted is in itself a scary enough experience, but being hunted in a completely unfamiliar space, abroad, and at least 5000 miles away from the US, multiplies the horror of the experience that they go through. This is highlighted by Crystal’s crackly voice as she mentions Bosnia, Serbia, and Croatia when she asks about the place where she is after she arrives at a refugee camp near the hunting grounds. In addition, the hunted are kidnapped in different parts of the US, including Wyoming, Orlando, and Staten Island, among others. This, together with the Croatian location of the hunting grounds, highlights the scope of power of the hunters. Apart from the capacity to operate across borders, the ability of the hunters to mold spaces is even more shocking—especially when seen through the lens of operations. For the hunt to take place, the hunters have to secure a space that they can use at their own discretion. Doing so is, in theory, particularly challenging. Yet, as the film shows, bribe money can turn those theoretical difficulties into advantages, allowing the

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hunters to do as they please. Bribery is an element that is also present in other films about humans hunting humans, such as Hard Target 2 and Bacurau. But how are spaces actually shaped and modified in The Hunt? Several of the killings, apart from contributing to heightening the goriness of the hunt, evince the capacity of the hunters to shape spaces. One woman has her body punctured by iron bars when she falls into a trap that had to be purposefully excavated on the ground and meticulously camouflaged beforehand. Similarly, the land mines that make a character’s body explode require installation. The gore in these scenes, which include images of splatter and organs, also helps to draw attention to the preparation and modification of large open spaces for the purposes of this sadistic hunt. Apart from this, the film includes a range of infrastructures that are specifically designed for the hunt, such as the underground shooting shelter in the field or the gas station and all the US American products and objects in and around it. These elements of the mise-en-scène point to the capacity of the hunters to radically shape the space where the hunt takes place. Indeed, in the scene in which the group of wealthy professionals is selecting the people to be hunted, one of the friends explicitly draws attention to this when he says: “we’re gonna build that gas station for pennies.” The Hunt also shows that hunters manage to control spaces beyond the hunting grounds. Crystal and Gary get on a freight train in an attempt to leave the hunting area. However, a group of military personnel stops the train, and Gary and Crystal are taken to a refugee camp along with the rest of the refugees on the train. There, they are mocked by officers and eventually allowed to leave the camp once a supposed member of the US Embassy shows up at the camp with an official car, which looks purposefully fake. In the following scene, Crystal notices that he may be an impostor and, after killing him, finds a “bribe money” box in the car trunk. The film then indicates that the collaboration of local authorities has been necessary in order to make the hunt possible. In short, the film plays with viewers’ expectations, highlights the transnational dimension of the hunt, and features murders that point to the purposefulness and specificity of the operations necessary to prepare the ground for the killings. Through these elements, The Hunt captures anxieties about the increasing power of elites. Writing about the franchise of The Purge (2013–2021), Stacey Abbot notes that the first film was, in essence, a home invasion movie that revolved around the struggle of a family to survive a dreary night during which murder and other sorts of crime are made legal (2022, 130–131). Abbott argues that subsequent

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films in the franchise transplant domestic horror to the city streets and, in doing so, turn concerns related to “class, race, and the economy … from subtext to text” (135). Taking this context into account, The Hunt takes a step forward by adding a transnational level to the narrative. In addition, by focusing on open natural spaces that are purposefully designed and highly controlled, The Hunt alerts us to the inescapable influence of affluent elites. That is, the power of the elites in The Hunt (and similar films like Bacurau and Hard Target 2) seems much more pervasive as they manage to control much larger areas than in similar films. This is particularly evident when comparing these transnational narratives with the earlier film Hostel (2005), in which the elites also take advantage of places where people are in economic need to create places where the affluent can murder other people for leisure. The main difference between Hostel and more recent films is that in the former, the torturing and murders of kidnapped people take place in an abandoned building, while in more recent films, the killings happen in open spaces which are more difficult to manage. This indicates that the operations required for contemporary hunts in contemporary cinema are more complex, as the killings are perpetrated in places where it is more difficult to conceal them. At the same time, in theory, transnational hunts require more logistics than local or regional hunts or murder sprees that originate in rebellious acts. Hard Target (1993) and The Purge franchise are good examples of films that imagine hunts mostly in national terms. Location choices in films about humans who hunt humans across borders then seem to point to the scope of power of contemporary ultra-rich elites (as in The Hunt, Hard Target 2, and Hostel) or xenophobic groups who share neocolonial ideologies (as in Bacurau).

The Hunt (2020): Culture Wars or Economic Wars? For a film that enables a reading that sheds light on the ability of the hunters to shape spaces and do as they please, the elites are purposefully and perhaps even surprisingly absent from a substantial part of the film. The film seems to highlight this strategy when the identity of one of the hunters, Athena (Hilary Swank), is revealed 63 minutes into the film—which is 85 minutes long. While she is having a conversation with two colleagues about some friends who have lost their jobs and reputations, Athena is filmed from the back for two minutes. Once her two colleagues break it to her that she is expected to resign as well because of the text thread scandal,

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the camera starts to slowly rotate around her head, stopping to finally reveal her face. As I mentioned earlier, the beginning of the film only provides some brief cues as to who the hunters may be, mainly in political terms (they are people who seem to despise “rednecks,” are concerned about the climate crisis, and show some awareness of racial inequality). Several characters speculate that the (liberal) elites could be the ones hunting them, but the repetition of this idea and the highly stereotypical depiction of the hunted as pro-guns, paranoid, and conservative suggests that they may be wrong. Little more is known about these elites until minute 50, when they are shown having a conversation at the shooting shelter. At this point, the film reveals that the hunted were actually not so mistaken. For example, one of the hunters mentions that he attended a Time 100 Dinner, thereby showing his high socioeconomic status. Yet, the strategy of the film of obscuring who is behind such murders invites viewers to adopt a negative view of them and to empathize with the characters who are under physical threat even if they are, as Athena calls them, “bigots,” “racists,” and “homophobes.” As Aldana Reyes points out, viewers tend to identify with victims even if those characters are not likable (2016, 104). Indeed, many viewers are likely to find the cultural and political views of the victims repulsive. Yet, in cases such as this, identification is possible thanks to viewers’ “awareness of corporeal vulnerability and of human mortality” (Aldana Reyes 2016, 104). By the time the film reveals the identities of the hunters (their jobs, social position, etc.) and confirms their progressive political beliefs, viewers are well aware of the vulnerability of the hunted and are likely to have already sided with them. Despite the pervasive operations that enable the hunt and viewers’ likely identification with the hunted, the hunters in The Hunt are not characterized as particularly threatening individuals. Writing about the first three films in The Purge franchise (2013–2016), A. Bowdoin Van Riper notes that the villains in it are “not the monstrous Others of traditional horror films” (2020, 121). The same could be said about the hunters in The Hunt. There is apparently nothing monstrous about them. Indeed, from a political perspective, it is surprising that the elites are depicted as progressive. This contrasts with the portrait of privileged individuals in similar films about humans preying on other humans or being made to do so. Indeed, in Bacurau, the hunters are characterized as extremely racist people who are offended if English is not spoken around them. Bacurau includes several conversations that draw attention to the racial hierarchies that structure characters’ minds, and two characters even have an argument about who is more “American” after a man calls another man of

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German descent “a Nazi.” On top of this, one of the characters notes that he is participating in the hunt because he had thoughts of killing his wife and massacring people at a mall, but eventually decided that it was better to give vent to his frustrations abroad. In short, Bacurau paints a much more negative image of the hunters than The Hunt does, even though both groups of hunters engage in equally despicable activities. When seen from the point of view of ideological operations, the reasons for participating in the hunts that these two films imagine also differ substantially. In Bacurau, the hunters show an interest in weapons, get excited about “the body count,” and approach the hunt as a leisure activity from a position of neocolonial superiority. Approaches to hunting such as this can be termed, as Daniel W. Mackenzie Wright suggests, as a kind of “dark tourism” in which hunting humans becomes an attraction (2016, 35–36). In contrast, what moves the elites in The Hunt to kill is not a need to try new experiences or to meet obscure fantasies, nor a deep hatred toward a specific demographic. What drives the elites in The Hunt to murder other people is revenge. They feel the need to punish those who have caused them to lose their jobs and their privileged socioeconomic status. So, even if The Hunt seems to be about an ideological war, from the perspective of ideological operations that trigger the murders, what is at the center of the film is actually a revengeful battle for power and status. The battle that is waged in The Hunt is not won either by the liberal elites or by conservative conspiracy theorists. None of them survives in the end. Instead, the film’s discursive battle is fought on the front of socioeconomic divisions. While most “deplorables” die one after another, the film favors viewers’ identification with Crystal (Betty Gilpin), a veteran of the Afghanistan war who now works at a car rental company. The Hunt invites viewers to identify with Crystal as she starts to repeatedly feature in almost every single scene at the hunting grounds after the first 25 minutes of runtime. Indeed, the film prevents identification with the largely invisible elites, but also with the rest of the hunted—who are, as a rule, quickly killed. In addition, Crystal manages to slowly turn the tables on the revenge-thirsty elites, scene after scene. This generates sympathy in viewers as she is constantly under physical threat (making viewers aware of her corporeal vulnerability) and, at the same time, combats the multiple threatening agents that she comes across. As Film Comment critic Michael Sragow notes, “we’re with her 100% as she analyzes each risk and conquers it with ingenious, cool ferocity” (2020). Yet, what makes Crystal remarkable is not just that she turns the tables but also that she is a politically neutral character. A conversation between Athena and Crystal during

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their fight scene at the end of the movie reveals that Crystal ends up in the hunt because she was mistaken for another person with a similar name who posted about Athena on social media. More importantly, unlike most characters in the film, Crystal does not make any statements with political implications. Viewers are provided with literally no information about her cultural and political views. Crystal’s characterization allows the film to explicitly shift the focus from culture wars to class divisions in the final scene. My analysis of the operations that enable the hunt and the implications of their spatial dimension has already drawn attention to the relevance of income inequalities and abuses of power related to them. References to the character Snowball from Animal Farm (George Orwell 1945) and to a modified version of Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare also invite viewers to read the film in terms of class struggles. Yet, The Hunt brings its concerns about class inequality to the surface in the final scene in which Crystal, after killing Athena, leaps aboard the private jet that had previously taken both the hunters and the hunted to Croatia and asks the pilot to take her home. The previous scene shows Crystal eating Athena’s food, putting on one of Athena’s dresses, a pair of high-heel shoes, and grabbing a bottle of champagne from 1907. This bottle of champagne is mentioned earlier in the film, in the second scene (which takes place on the same plane), when one of the hunters says that the bottle is worth $250,000. Upon entering the plane, the flight attendant asks Crystal if she would like her to pour the bottle and if she would like caviar as well. When the stewardess brings the bottle and the caviar, Crystal tells her to “dig in.” Earlier in the film, the flight attendant mentioned that she does not think she is allowed to have caviar. By inviting the worker to sit down, enjoy the food, and drink with her, Crystal reshapes a space that was highly divided in terms of class and economic power. Indeed, Crystal’s kindness contrasts with the demanding, entitled attitude of the man who asks for food and champagne at the beginning of the film. In addition, by using this space as a way of framing the film (appearing in the second and last scene) and by reworking its class dynamics, The Hunt highlights the relevance of socioeconomic divides in the story and celebrates the fact that Crystal challenges them. In this way, the last scene invites viewers to leave aside their potential (and legitimate) concerns about the culture wars and directs their attention toward class divisions instead.

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Conclusion: Fear of the Widening Income Gap The focus on ideological and logistical operations of this chapter has allowed me to highlight the relevance of class divisions within the narrative that The Hunt builds. Even if the film seems primarily a film about culture wars, its tendency to revise assumptions encourages viewers to consider other dimensions to the film beyond ideological divides. The Hunt subverts both spatial and political expectations in order to draw attention to the scope of the power of the privileged and the extent to which they are willing to cling to it. In addition, the invisibility of the elites for most of the film underlines their capacity to operate from the shadows. By portraying the hunters and their operations in this way, the film taps into contemporary social fears and anxieties about the widening gulf between the 1% and the rest. Even if the elites are surprisingly progressive, from the point of view of operations The Hunt offers a particularly negative image of them, as they directly engage in the act of killing. This is also the case in other films in which humans hunt humans at a transnational level such as Bacurau and Hard Target 2. Yet, other films that also draw attention to the ability of socioeconomic elites to shape contexts and spaces depict elites that do not get directly involved in the suffering that they create. Examples of this include the cannibalistic desires of the wealthy who eat human meat in Fresh and the far-right political brains that come up with the idea of the annual purge in the franchise of the same name. In addition, the first season of The Squid Game features a small group of privileged individuals who bankroll a series of twisted games just to enjoy the spectacle of seeing poor people compete against and even kill other economically deprived humans in order to win a large sum of money. As cruel, corrupt, and unscrupulous as the elites in these films and series are, they do not get directly involved in torturing and killing other people. Films about humans hunting humans at a transnational level depict elites that seem to have greater control over their horrific pastimes or revenge plots, as they do not usually need to hide behind masks—as they do, for example, in The Squid Game. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Damon Lindelof, one of the scriptwriters of The Hunt, observes, “I think that we use horror and scary stories as a way to speak to whatever the interior anxiety we’re feeling, both personally and societally” (quoted in Collis 2020). The Hunt clearly points at social anxieties over the largely unconstrained power of elites to shape spaces and use people to their advantage. The fact that the

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hunters end up being hunted not only in The Hunt, but also in Bacurau and Hard Target 2, suggests that people may desire to see elites stripped away of their power to mold situations. The recent popularity of the “Eat the rich” popsicles seems to confirm this idea. In 2022, the brand MSCHF created a limited edition of ice-cream popsicles with the faces of controversial millionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. The initiative connected with people’s fantasies of turning the tables and having control over the super-rich by literally eating them. The business idea relied on slogans such as “Bite Bezos” or “Munch Musk” (Erb 2022). While this initiative and The Hunt point to similar social anxieties, The Hunt does not just seem to be about metaphorically eating the rich. Writing about social horror and the Nightmare on Elm Street movie series (1984–2010), Gary Heba differentiates between incoherent and coherent horror films. Heba notes that coherent horror movies reassure viewers through endings in which monsters and the threats they embody disappear: the master narrative is restored, bringing back harmony and safety (1995; 108, 112–113). In turn, in incoherent horror movies, characters have no “control over [their] future” (112–3). In this kind of film, the conflict has not been solved and the source of the threat may return or strike again (108). As the hunting elites are killed by the end of the film, The Hunt seems a coherent horror movie in which things go back to normal. Crystal is no longer at risk: she can return home and continue with her previous life. Yet, by restaging power dynamics within the private plane, the film does not just reinstate normalcy, but symbolically rewrites power relations. In this way, the film’s ending suggests that cultural and ideological battles act as smokescreens that prevent people from paying attention to other equally divisive issues: income and privilege. The film’s ending indicates that even after Crystal defeats the ultra-rich elites, there is still important work to do. Crystal’s attitude toward the flight attendant points at the need to create more equitable societies that reduce the gap between the 1% and the rest. To draw attention to the importance of operations one last time: would the hunt have been possible without the vast economic resources of the hunters?

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References Abbott, Stacey. 2022. When the Subtext Becomes Text: The Purge Takes on the American Nightmare. In Horror Franchise Cinema, ed. Mark McKenna and William Proctor, 128–142. London and New York: Routledge. Aldana Reyes, Xavier. 2016. Horror Film and Affect. London and New  York: Routledge. Bailey, Jason. 2020. When Humans Are the Prey: A Plot Made for Every Era. The New York Times, March 13. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/ movies/the-hunt-most-dangerous-game.html Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. CBS News. 2016. Hillary Clinton Says Half of Trump’s Supporters Are in a “Basket of Deplorables.” YouTube, September 10. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PCHJVE9trSM Cherry, Brigid. 2009. Horror: Routledge Film Guidebooks. London and New York: Routledge. Collis, Clark. 2020. The Hunt Co-writer Damon Lindelof Says Trump’s Tweets Made the Film “Radioactive.” Entertainment Weekly, March 10. https:// ew.com/movies/the-hunt-damon-lindelof-donald-trump/ Cowen, Deborah. 2014. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Monaco, James, dir. 2016. The Purge: Election Year. Universal Pictures. Dong-hyuk, Hwang, dir. 2021. Squid Game. Siren Pictures Inc. Erb, Jordan Parker. 2022. A Pop-up Ice Cream Truck Is Selling “Eat the Rich” Popsicles Shaped like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg—and People Can’t Get Enough of Them. Business Insider, July 12. https://www.businessinsider.com/ eat-the-rich-icecream-popsicle-mschf-gates-zuckerberg-musk-2022-7 Freeland, Cynthia. 2000. The Naked and the Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror. Boulder: Westview Press. Gout, Everardo, dir. 2021. The Forever Purge. Universal Pictures. Heba, Gary. 1995. Everyday Nightmares: The Rhetoric of Social Horror in the Nightmare on Elm Street Series. Journal of Popular Film and Television 23 (3): 106–115. Mendonça Filo, Kleber, and Juliano Dornelles, dirs. 2019. Bacurau. Vitrine Filmes. Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. 2019. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Ross, Gary, dir. 2012. The Hunger Games. Lionsgate. Schoedsack, Ernest B., and Irving Pichel, dirs. 1932 The Most Dangerous Game. RKO Radio Pictures.

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Sragow, Michael. 2020. Deep Focus: The Hunt. Film Comment, March 12. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/deep-focus-the-hunt/ Van Riper, A. Bowdoin. 2020. All against All: Dystopia, Dark Forces, and Hobbesian Anarchy in the Purge Films. In Dark Forces at Work: Essays on Social Dynamics and Cinematic Horrors, ed. Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, 115–130. Lanham, Boulder, New York, and London: Lexington Books. Wright, Daniel William Mackenzie. 2016. Hunting Humans: A Future for Tourism in 2200. Futures 78–79: 34–46. Zobel, Craig, dir. 2020. The Hunt. Universal Pictures.

CHAPTER 12

“Obliteration of the Unfit”: Disposable Other Bodies and Economic Privilege in the The Purge Film Series Gamze Katı Gümüş

Madison Grant once said that the life of human beings is of value only when it benefits the community. The renowned eugenicist’s idea dwelled on the infamous aspiration to obliterate the unfit, the weakling, and hence the undesirable elements of the society that constitute a burden on the public. Almost a hundred years later, The Purge film series (2013–2021) comments on the elimination of undesirable elements in American society in a very similar vein. As the series tackles a different story in each film, the spectators are left with a critique of consumerism, xenophobia, racism, and the disposability of the lives of those that are deemed to be unfit. The series consists of five films and highlights how Americans take pride in the low unemployment, poverty, and crime rates. This American Dream is a result of the political tactics of the NFFA, the New Founding Fathers of America, who urge their citizens to commit any crime once a year for

G. Katı Gümüş (*) Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0_12

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twelve hours. The night of March 21 in the series offers a cathartic discharge for Americans who join the Purge. The film series portrays how the government, the privileged, and white supremacists use these twelve hours to dispose of the poor and undesirable elements of society, which are identified as the homeless, the colored, and the immigrant. In The Purge: Anarchy (James DeMonaco 2014), the Revolutionary leader of the anti-Purgers, Carmelo Johns, mentions that the victims are the poor who cannot afford to protect themselves. This low-income group fails to do their job as consuming citizens, and thus they are excluded from the safety provided by guns, nice neighborhoods, and security systems. Conquered by the consumerist world, the victims of the Purge are objectified, for the upper class hunts them to cleanse the United States from masses that are perceived as burdensome to the American economy. The eugenic notion that someone who becomes a burden to the state should be eliminated for the common good can be found in the series’ tragic scenes, where such people are portrayed as a burden to, hence enemies of the state. As Achille Mbembe discusses in “Necropolitics” (2003), the killing of the enemy of the state becomes a justified act. And yet, this act is problematic in the series, for the spectators are forced to answer the question of who has the right to kill and who is forced to sacrifice their life for the common good. At this point, neoliberalism and the limited access to protection, only available for those who can afford it, further disclose the answer. This chapter aims to answer the questions of what bodies are inclined to be labeled as disposable; the limitations of neoliberalism for the colored, immigrant, the homeless, and the Other; the eugenicist concept of eliminating those whose very existence is dangerous for the governing class; and consumerism as a protective asset for the privileged few in the The Purge film series. In “Necropolitics,” Mbembe states that sovereignty declares its power in the rather dystopian expression of who “may live and who must die” (2003, 11). As Mbembe continues to question the limits of the sovereign’s power, he asks, “Under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?” (12). The limits of the sovereign’s power over other bodies echo in The Purge. The first film of the series points at the New Founding Fathers of America (NFFA) and their sovereign power as a supposedly rejuvenating, but ultimately annihilating power. It becomes clearer in the sequels that the erasure of the poor from the visible face of society was the only practical solution for the NFFA when they took office. But why is it that the homeless, the immigrant

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Other, and the poor must lose their right to live with the decree of the sovereign? The problematic phrase “All men are created equal” resonates as the new sovereign decides that the unwanted should be obliterated for the common good. Moreover, the “common good” turns out to be a term used for the well-being of the upper class, a term that fails to include all components of society. This exclusive common good makes it obligatory for the Other to sacrifice themselves, disregarding their willingness as victims. The Other becomes the inanimate: void of choice, with no power to exercise its will even on its very own life. The sacrifice is an obligation ordered by the sovereign, and the Other must hail to it only because they are part of a community that needs ritual cleansing to sustain economic prosperity. From the very beginning, the American discourse on national identity and citizenship acquisition dwelled on property ownership and whiteness. The economic privilege was accompanied by the prerequisites of having white skin and upholding American values. These values varied over time, however, being of use to the community and the country stayed as a pivotal element of the American fabric. The fact that the undesired do not have any or much input in the shared prosperity of the United States makes their murder a necessity, and their death a sacrifice. This martyrdom becomes a title that grants the unfit prosperity, one they cannot obtain in the neoliberal system when they are alive. In the first half of this chapter, I will talk about eugenics and the disposability of the Other upon their failure to contribute to the common good of the nation. I will then apply this notion to the The Purge series and state how the undesired characters are shunned from the community and are exposed to dismemberment from the body politic. The second part of the discussion focuses on the representation of the neoliberal world in the series. In this part, I argue that the disposability of the Other stems from their lack of a consumer identity, which prevents them from partaking in the security the neoliberal assets provide to the privileged. Moreover, in this part, I will analyze how possessing white skin acts as another protective means in the Purge’s neoliberal world.

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The Disposal of the Unfit: Eugenics and the Elimination of the Underprivileged in The Purge In the first installment of the The Purge film series, The Purge (James DeMonaco 2013), the protagonists belong to the Sandin household. The Sandins are portrayed as a wealthy family that supports the values of their neoliberal government. The year is 2022, and the unemployment rate is at 1%. When James Sandin turns on the radio on his way home, the radio broadcasts how “the poor can’t afford to protect themselves.” This statement demonstrates how the poor are transformed into the receivers of the targeted violence, for they cannot purchase protective equipment such as the security systems sold by James. The series repeatedly questions whether the Purge is really just a chance for citizens to release anger by restricting violence to one night, or rather an opportunity for the government to get rid of the unwanted masses that become burdensome to society. Is the catharsis achieved by the Purge a result of the released violence, or is it the relief felt by a fellow citizen over the solved problem of ending the life of a burden that really needs not to be alive in the American neoliberal system? If the citizen does not spend enough to support the economy of their country, and instead needs support to relieve their financial troubles, is the person really a citizen? The famous question “What is an American?” is repeated when the NFFA starts a social revolution by introducing the Purge to the American community. The purging of the underprivileged stresses the imperative sacrifice of the unfit citizens in order to establish order. The obligation to eliminate the lower classes of the society is anticipated to make the country more livable for those who can afford to become members of the spending mass. However, if the purging of unfit citizens is sanctioned by state policy, how does this situate the citizenship of the less privileged? In the The Purge series, the targeted victims, apart from the Sandins and some accompanying white victims who have difficulty protecting themselves are either people of color or immigrants. The concept of the United States as a haven for the immigrant, the refugee, and the Other falls out of sight as the series questions who is a deserving citizen. Yet, the US ceased to be an all-welcoming asylum to the incoming masses in the early 1920s, when the incoming wave of immigration reached threatening levels. Threatened by the idea of losing their values in the face of these new

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immigrants, the politicians decided to pass immigration laws that were supported by eugenicist scientists and won the support of the public. Although the term eugenics was first coined by Sir Francis Galton in the 1880s, it is no surprise that eugenics became a well-supported “science” at the beginning of the twentieth century. According to the eugenicist ideal, the human race, hence the society, could be improved by increasing the number of people deemed to carry ideal qualities. This view also assumes that another way to improve humanity is to discourage the reproductive ability of people with undesirable qualities. The key point to this solution, however, was that this discouragement could be voluntary or, more often, by force. The American government implemented forced sterilizations on individuals in prisons or asylums, sometimes without the victims’ knowledge. Individuals were thus victimized by the forced government policies performed on their bodies. In the end, their bodies were sterile for bodily reproduction because they were deemed to be sterile of political power, since many of these individuals were criminals or people with physical or mental disabilities. The perfection desired by the American government required eliminating these people, who crowded American correctional facilities and were considered to burden both the government and the taxpayers. The crowd considered burdensome mostly came from poor, colored, and immigrant communities. In 1914, eugenicist Harry Laughlin published a model eugenical sterilization law which suggested the sterilization of the “socially inadequate”—those who failed to prove themselves a valuable member of the state. Eugenicists such as Laughlin believed in the generational curse of the weaklings, which urged them to support the idea of the obliteration of the unfit. Another eugenicist, Madison Grant, pointed to the futility of this unwanted population; for Grant, being of value to the community was the utmost goal of a person. He stated that, “the laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race” (1916, 45). Grant suggested that it could be considered only merciful to get rid of the next generations of people who were inapt to control their urges or failed to prove their value to the community they lived in. According to Grant, “the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community” was a compassionate act (45). The reason to justify this idea lay in the burden this population put on the shoulders of the taxpaying community, which was “a minute minority” worn out because of their responsibility to provide for “an ever-increasing number of moral perverts,

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mental defectives, and hereditary cripples” (45). The keywords Grant focused on in his writings indicate the obliteration of “worthless race types”: A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words, social failures—would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums … This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types. (46–47)

For Grant, these social discards and weaklings were unprofitable to the United States on economic terms, which led them to be regarded as disposable bodies. The value of the citizen’s body is thus determined by its ability to contribute to the nation’s good. The lifeless body of these social failures “inscribes them in the register of undifferentiated generality: simple relics of an unburied pain, empty, meaningless corporealities, strange deposits plunged into cruel stupor” (Mbembe 2003, 35). The bodies deprived of life by the sovereign are inanimate on the social and economic stage as they are steadily forced to disappear from the nation. Giorgio Agamben argues that bodies that are condemned as defective, void of rights, and stripped of their humanity are unfreed by the sovereign power. The sovereign’s victim is then transformed into the homo sacer, a body reduced to a bare life void of rights and national belonging. The condition of the homo sacer, “lacking almost all the rights and expectations that we customarily attribute to human existence,” except for being alive, limits him to “bare life” (Agamben 1998, 159). The sovereign denationalizes the unfit, for the unfit cannot meet the criteria for ideal citizenship. In eugenic terms, this lifeless, rightless, denationalized body becomes the expatriate that is deemed disposable for their failure in serving the common good. In the The Purge series, there is a similar list of people that burden society and state institutions, a list that is unwritten but also known by every member of the purging community. For instance, in The Purge (2013), a fine educated white gentleman calls out to the Sandins, stating that the Black man they shelter (who, unbeknownst to the spectators, is Dante

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Bishop, a character that will reappear in the following two installments of the series) “is nothing but a dirty, homeless pig.” The leader of the purgers that invade the Sandin house adds that the man is “a grotesque menace to our society.” Toward the end of the film, when the leader of the purgers fatally wounds James Sandin, he asks, “Was his life really worth yours? Your family’s?” The worth of human life, as well as death and hence the lifeless body, transform into a debatable value. This value comes from the entitlement of wealthy young college students who consider it their right to own a person’s life as long as that person is deemed a burden to society. Mbembe argues that, “sovereignty means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (2003, 27). These purgers represent the stereotypical white upper class in the movie, as they become reflections of the sovereign power. The narrative of the white sovereignty marks the body of Dante Bishop as disposable, for he, as a homeless man, is the opposite of a contributing and consuming citizen. At the time the purgers come to the door of the Sandin household to demand the homeless Black man, they mention how “no one will miss him when he is gone.” A man with no home and no known ties to the community is a justifiable victim, for according to these purgers, his disappearance from the scene will only provide relief to the community. And yet, in the process of asking for their victim, these privileged youngsters dehumanize the Black man, deprive him of humanity, and highlight his animality with constant references to him as a pig. Moreover, they expect him to embrace the act of being purged, hence, to become the receiver of the punishment without putting up a fight. In this case, in their imagination, the Black man becomes the homo sacer, a bare life that is only alive as long as these people desire him to be. The privileges of whiteness attainable by these white people only work as long as there is an Other that they can differentiate themselves from. As Cheryl Harris argues, whiteness allocates certain rights to the members of the socially powerful and dominant white class “that reproduces Black subordination” (1993, 1731). In this scenario, the purgers situate the Black man firmly as an animal, whereas they appear higher on the social ladder as members of an elite white community. Douglas C.  Baynton argues that the alignment of the Other as close to an animalist form, as opposed to the prosperity of the dominant norm, becomes a motive for racial subordination (2001, 41). In The Purge (2013), white characters’ sympathy for the unfit is presented as a quality that devaluates their whiteness. For the privileged white college students, the worth of the lives of the Sandins is in question, for they are willing to

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step out of the protection offered to them by white privilege. The purgers believe that the Sandins should prioritize their privileges as a white family rather than dismissing the protection offered to them by their race only to safeguard the black homeless man hiding in their house. This idea of the white college students’ highlights the racial tension between the purgers and the purged, since it overvalues whiteness as an entitlement ensuring safety, whereas blackness becomes devaluated as a means of obliteration. In the second installment of the series, The Purge: Anarchy (2014), anti-Purge leader Carmelo Johns and his supporters—Dante Bishop among them—declare their intention to fight against the government’s designed cleansing of the poor. In this movie, Eva Sanchez and her daughter Cali are trying to make it through the night when a group of mercenaries attacks their apartment. At the beginning, Cali watches videos of Carmelo, as she thinks that the government is “keeping the population down by getting rid of people like us to save money.” Later, it is Eva who mentions how the buildings that are being attacked by mercenaries are “all around the projects.” As people of color with limited financial means, lead mother-daughter pair is presented as undesirable elements of society who need to be eliminated. Indeed, when mercenaries with military-level equipment bust into their apartment, one of the men informs their leader, Big Daddy, that they have found two people for his “personal purge.” Big Daddy is portrayed as a patriotic white man who fulfills his duty as a citizen to cleanse the unwanted elements of society. At the end of the movie, he talks to Leo, the protagonist, and reminds him that Purge Night is all about taking lives and not saving them to keep society balanced: “We make things manageable for us.” Like the white purgers in the first installment, Big Daddy becomes one of the ardent supporters of purging, which for him is a citizen’s duty. He becomes a medium to help create balance in the community, and the balance that is desired requires the obliteration of the people who dwell in housing projects, the people who are part of lower-income groups, and the people of color who cannot afford necessary medication, like Eva. The neoliberal structure is perceived through the disparity created by the high-tech truck that is equipped with heavy artillery in contrast to the desperate cry of Eva at the beginning of the movie when she says that she cannot afford her father’s medicine any longer. The politics that Big Daddy adheres to become “the errant attempt at creating a space where ‘error’ would be reduced, truth enhanced, and the enemy disposed of” (Mbembe 2003, 19). The Purge: Anarchy indicates that this error is unemployment, crime, and poverty. If the individual

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cannot enhance their economic prosperity, they cannot expect the support of the NFFA government. The NFFA views helping the economically disadvantaged members of the community as a burden, transforming the poor into the enemies of the state that need to be obliterated in alignment with the weaklings Laughlin and Grant mentioned. The members of American society that are labeled as weaklings also appear in the third installment of the The Purge series. In The Purge: Election Year (James DeMonaco 2016), Dante Bishop makes another appearance where he explains the motivation of the NFFA government on the news. Bishop describes how the NFFA has been using the Purge for 20 years “to decrease the poor population, which in turn keeps the government’s spending down.” He mentions how this policy helps the government to balance the economics of governmental support by disposing of the poor as it means “less welfare, less healthcare, less housing.” In the meantime, one of the anti-Purge protestors in the background carries a sign that reads, “My hands up. Don’t shoot #MikeBrown.” The movie thus connects to the contemporary obliteration of Black people and police violence that surfaces in the white/Black binary. The sovereign’s power disguised as police brutality in the case of Michael Brown’s shooting reminds the spectator that the Purge as a dystopia is not that far from contemporary American society, for the sovereign always finds different ways to forcefully project its power on the subjugated Black bodies. In The First Purge, the fourth installment of the series (Gerard McMurray 2018), the spectators are informed of the causes behind the NFFA’s coming to power and the institution of the first Purge. The initial targets of the first Purge are portrayed as low-income citizens on Staten Island. The mastermind behind the Purge, Dr. May Updale, notices how the NFFA interferes in the Purge when mercenaries target the low-income parts of Staten Island such as the housing projects of Park Hill, Mariner’s Harbor, and Stapleton. When she confronts the Chief of Staff of the NFFA, Arlo Sabian, about the situation, his answer points to the role of the NFFA in the betterment of the country: “This country is overpopulated, Dr. There is too much crime, too much unemployment.” And when Dr. Updale points out how the NFFA is “trying to depopulate the lower classes,” Sabian states that “some group [has to] suffer.” This installment stresses how the originating story behind the idea of purging is presented only as a façade to hide the real aim of the NFFA. The constant references by the characters to the killing of Black and Brown people show that they are aware of their racially-marked disposable situation. As the movie

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focuses on the racial demographics of the targeted victims as the dwellers of housing projects, it becomes inevitable to separate the discussion on race from economics. Two of the main characters, Isaiah and his older sister Nya, live in one of the targeted low-income housing projects. The condition of their apartment forces Isaiah first to try his hand at dealing drugs, and then to join the Purge experiment. Even his name is suggestive of the Purge itself with its Biblical connotations: “I will thoroughly purge away your dross and remove all your impurities” (Isa. 1:25 NIV). Although dross is related to the sins of the people, in the context of the purging American community, the dross is the worthless citizen: the citizen that does not do their job in contributing to the consuming side of the economy but needs support from the government. This idea contradicts one of the core values of the Puritan work ethic that Americans still adhere to, which ultimately justifies the obliteration of the unfit. In the fifth and last installment of the series, The Forever Purge (Everardo Gout 2021), the spectators encounter an illegal immigrant couple: Juan and Adela. Race becomes one of the leading forces of the movie, alongside the problem of illegal immigration from Mexico. Juan and Adela, who are very hardworking, virtuous, and value their family, prove how immigrants can adapt to their new life if given the chance. However, their adaptation to American values is not considered to be enough by a group supporting the Forever Purge, who view immigrants as invaders: “Our duty is to uphold American beliefs and values while keeping America free from refugees and terrorists … Only full-blooded Americans are welcome here. All invaders will be purged.” Considering the history of the setting (El Paso, Texas), and the historical change in the national belonging of the region, the statement of the purgers becomes even more problematic. As seen, the quotation situates native-born Americans as superior to immigrants within this white supremacist discourse. The alignment of refugees with terrorists reflects the perception of the Other in a xenophobic light. Moreover, the war the purgers fight now is similar to the Mexican-American War of 1848, which further complicates the national belonging of the land. To whom does the land belong? If to US Americans, because it is “lawfully” theirs as a result of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, why would there be a need to reclaim it from the immigrants? The movie’s clever move, showing the irony in the illegal immigrant status of Juan and Adela, deepens the discussion on land ownership and national identity. This perspective allows the spectators to notice the irony in the settler colonialism of the US and

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the illegal citizenship status of Juan and Adela, who are dismissed simply as trespassers on the land that had belonged to their ancestors. Dante, Eva, Cali, Isaiah, Nya, Juan, and Adela, and the unnamed masses of the poor and homeless in the The Purge series, are elements of the society that are not in harmony with the rest of the body politic. The hegemonic NFFA policy leads people to dismember the unwanted part of said body politic. The American citizenry is so overwhelmed by the presence of these ostracized groups that the physical obliteration of the subject becomes inevitable. In the process of purging, the dismembered subject is objectified, disregarding their will as an individual, and this leads the objectified subject to be exposed to dismemberment, to a separation that takes place in the body of the people, for they are not considered to be one and equal anymore. One of the main reasons behind the dismemberment of the unfit is their failure to undertake the responsibilities of a consuming citizen: the neoliberal world of the The Purge series is not much concerned with production in a Marxist sense; the focus is rather on how dismemberment is inexorable once the individual fails to fulfill one of the imperative demands of the neoliberal world, that is, to consume.

Lacking Protective Assets in the Neoliberal US: The Underprivileged Citizen in The Purge Eric Hobsbawm argues that “mass migration and mobility” leads to a system where “the ‘right’ kind of racial classification goes with the ‘right’ kind of social position” ([1990] 2013, 65). In this context, race is integral to both the social and economic spheres. In the series, the extermination policy of the NFFA acts as a force that constructs a neoliberal world in which survival is conditional on the security afforded by white skin. Whiteness and the financial security it provides are exalted in the discourse of the NFFA and the 28th Amendment, which legalizes murder in America during the Purge. Whiteness becomes a social and civic privilege in the neoliberal world of the The Purge series. David Harvey argues that neoliberalism is a theory that “proposes that human well-being can be best advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” ([2005] 2011, 2). Moreover, Stuart Hall states that, “neo-liberalism is grounded in the idea of the ‘free, possessive individual’” (2011, 706). Similarly to

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Harvey, Hall asserts that the state would never “regulate a free market economy” (2011, 706). Harvey and Hall discuss how these neoliberal ideas evolve to turn the state’s power into a hegemonic authority. Subsequently, neoliberalism turns out to be “a political project to re-­ establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites” (Harvey [2005] 2011, 19). This authority, then, endows the state with the ability to further victimize the poor. It can be seen that throughout the process of neoliberal evolution, the state in fact becomes the force behind the free market, and the regulations are authorized to be profitable for the elites regardless of the situation of the proletariat. Neoliberalism is advantageous for the upper class, since the upper class becomes richer in contrast to the impoverished proletariat. In neoliberalism, privatization and the neoliberal sanctions of the International Monetary Fund enforce poverty, yet the state holds the individual responsible for their poverty. The The Purge film series examines the divide between different classes and the privilege this difference offers to the holders of financial power. It is no coincidence that the people who represent the upper classes are usually portrayed as white people in the series. White privilege offers them the necessary protection on Purge Night, transforming their racial status into social and economic status and becoming a protective asset on its own. This protection, however, is not granted to the racialized Other, and this condition strengthens the racial lines in the neoliberal economics in the films. Access to capital and its protective assets is one of the recurring subjects throughout the series. Most of the characters are aware that the NFFA initiated Purge Night to unburden the American economy, and consumerism and the consuming citizen are idealized as the model individual, whereas the limitations of neoliberalism force the underprivileged into a stateless status. These people are shunned from the protection of their country on the night of the Purge, and their victimization as stateless subjects is hence justified. In The Purge (2013), when James Sandin gets the news of how successful he has become in selling home security systems, the news on the radio mentions that the victims of Purge Night are the poor, who “cannot afford to protect themselves.” As David Harvey argues, “for those left or cast outside the market system—a vast reservoir of apparently disposable people bereft of social protections and supportive social structures—there is little to be expected from neoliberalization except poverty, hunger, disease and despair” ([2005] 2011, 185). The disparity between those bereft of

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protection and those who create the market is highlighted after the commencement of the Purge, as Mr. Sandin assures his family that they will be safe because they can “afford protection.” The contrast between the lower class and the self-made wealthy men like James Sandin is emphasized when criminologist Tommy Aagaard makes an appearance on TV, further questioning the decisive power of the government to support the elimination of the Other: Now, is the Purge really about releasing aggression and containing violence, or is it something else? Purge detractors often postulate this evening is actually about the elimination of the poor, the needy, the sick. Those unable to defend themselves. The eradication of the so-called “non-contributing members” of society, ultimately burdening the economy. Is the Purge really about money?

The series does not make any attempt to distort the real intentions of the NFFA government in obliterating the poor from the community. When a Black man covered in blood appears in their secure rich neighborhood and screams that he just needs “to get somewhere safe … I don’t deserve this,” the question of who must sacrifice their life for the common good resonates again. Being homeless and lacking the security of a home becomes the sole reason for his obliteration from society. The purgers who invade the Sandin house keep repeating the word “homeless” when they refer to the unnamed Black man. The Black man becomes the intruder, an invader of the safe space the neoliberal system allows the Sandins to have. When James Sandin tries to persuade the Black man to turn himself in to the purgers, he insists that he and his family do not “deserve this,” to which the Black man answers, “I don’t deserve this either.” The notion of “deserving” to be killed, to be cleansed from society, hence un-blemishing it by erasing the undesired individual’s existence, echoes in these answers. James Sandin believes that he belongs to the group of people who are secure from this obliteration, for they are fit to be Americans as consuming citizens that contribute to the system. However, the system fails to protect them when the Black intruder breaks into their safe space. In The Purge: Anarchy (2014), the basic need for housing is substituted for the basic need for healthcare. Eva complains about not being able to afford her father’s medication. As she completes her shift and walks home for the night, unable to ask for a raise, she represents the working classes that cannot participate in the consuming masses due to low income. In the

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meantime, her daughter Cali listens to one of the videos of the anti-Purge leader Carmelo, who claims that the essence of Purge Night is capital: “Who dies tonight? The poor. We can’t afford to protect ourselves.” Financial means as protective assets from the destruction of the Purge works both ways. First, the capital allows the citizens to protect themselves by buying armament, home security systems, and the services of a bodyguard, the means for protection. Secondly, the capital provides these people with access to safer neighborhoods in less crowded areas or vehicles that offer mobility and protection. But the working-class members in this installment have access to neither. Their apartment is in a crowded building, and the only security system they have is a makeshift barricade behind the door; they have one gun which fails to protect them, and no cars to offer them safety during their escape. This, Carmelo says, demonstrates the inequality in wealth distribution, and he asks what happened to “give me your needy, your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free? The redistribution of wealth upward through killing has to stop.” His online speech manifests the capital-based nature of the Purge; for the night grants the right to expunge the unfit body of the Other and thus eradicate the burden it causes on the social system. Once the existence of the unfit is discontinued, they become martyrs whose death is celebrated. Their sacrifice means that the wealthy will become even more wealthy, and yet their sacrifice does not translate into automatic improvements to the financial condition of the working classes. The government also benefits from the discontinued existence of the purged unfit body since its existence would require continued financial support from government resources. As Leo, Eva, Cali, Liz, and Shane move along purgers, they hear a woman with a megaphone declaring that she is doing “God’s work” by keeping the population under control in order to allow “the masses [to] flourish and nourish.” Those unable to protect themselves become the targets of this woman who refers to herself as the “Holy Trinity. And my MP9 silver-tipped Auto Magnum, the right arm of the free world and the left hand of God!” In this dystopic setting, any purging citizen with access to capital obtains hegemonic power, a power that is similar to that of the government and God. The connection between religion, government, and murder reveals the operation of biopower at the expense of the unfit Other. According to the NFFA, it is acceptable to kill the ones who cannot protect themselves, for they failed at being successful enough in economic terms to protect themselves.

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Nevertheless, Purge Night gives the power to kill those who failed the economic system as well. When the characters pass through the Business District, they encounter a man strung up to the entrance of a bank, with a cardboard hanging on his dead body, saying, “Here hangs stockbroker David Neustadter. He stole our pensions. Now he’s gone.” Those who value profit are punished for their role in impoverishing the working classes. In neoliberal economics, profit becomes a keyword that ends up defining democracy. But for Carmelo, “profit-making is not the essence of democracy,” which, as an idea, contradicts the political views of the NFFA.  Moreover, the Purge creates its own temporary habitus in the United States of the The Purge series. The democratic country is transformed into a temporarily undemocratic state in which human beings are hunted down and even sold at auctions for use in the personal purges of the wealthy. When Leo and the rest of the group are caught and sold to the NFFA Purge, a woman announces their arrival as the arrival of the “next batch.” Not only their agency but also their humanity is stripped off their bodies when they are referred to as the next batch. They are now what Agamben calls the bare life, the homo sacer, the outcast. As the auction starts for the last Purge of the night, the wealthy purgers start the bidding at $200,000. The monetary value of the group is determined by the bare life they offer to the purgers: it is the prospect of the hunt between the powerful and the powerless, the wealthy and the poor, the hunter and the hunted. The third installment of the series, The Purge: Election Year (2016), investigates the neoliberal order of NFFA politics. The movie opens with a riot scene in Washington, D.C., showing people protesting the NFFA for “using the Purge to help their economic agenda.” People’s awareness of the Purge’s real nature is at a peak as the presidential election draws closer. But according to Caleb, the president of the NFFA government, the citizens that protest are “idealistic pigs,” for “they want the impossible. Everyone to have. Some cannot have. Not enough to go around.” The money available in the market belongs to the NFFA and its supporters, and they want to make sure that it stays that way. Anti-Purge supporter Charlie Roan summarizes this capital-based relationship between the people, the state, and the financial supporters of the state as follows: “More low-income people are killed during the Purge than anyone else. The money generated from the Purge lines the pockets of the NRA and the insurance companies.” The Purge generates and empowers certain markets, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) is the lead in those

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markets, according to Roan. The uneasiness among the people compels the NFFA Secretary Tommy Roseland to mention the process’s fairness and end the worries of the citizens, who believe that “the Purge benefits the rich and the powerful.” In this installment, Marcos becomes one of the heroic figures. A silent and respectful young man, he works for Joe in his deli shop. He is depicted as a man who immigrated from Juárez, New Mexico, and became an American citizen. His endeavors in the new country are not unnoticed by his Black employer Joe, who says he will make Carlos a partner in the deli because the “American Dream is still alive.” The old dream of the immigrant he mentions is far from the exclusive neoliberal dream of the system, a dream that has reached a point where it decides who is expendable and who is not. And in the end, when Joe dies and Marcos inherits and rebuilds the store, now-President Charlie Roan is also busy rebuilding the US. She declares that, “her first order of business will be to take an executive action to put an end to the Purge.” The camera turns to show an American flag waving outside the window of Marcos’ deli. The American Dream recovers its literal and figurative connotations once America is restored from the purgers. The Dream gains importance once again in The First Purge (2018). As is the case with all installments, the movie starts with the news that informs the spectators about the current situation. Before the Purge is initiated by the NFFA, the economy of the country is depicted on the verge of collapsing; unemployment is on the rise, the nation is uneasy, and the market is going down. The NFFA President Bracken states that “the American Dream is dead” and adds, “We will do whatever it takes to let you dream again.” The dream of prosperity through hard work is rewritten as a process in which sacrifice becomes a necessary step for the community’s upward social mobility. As The First Purge demonstrates the condition of the country, the NFFA sets on to start a trial Purge on Staten Island. The stress on impoverished neighborhoods and housing projects attains a deeper meaning with the prospect of being paid to participate in the Purge. Black people volunteer in large numbers for the $5000 payment, for “they got no money. They got no food.” People are confined to the island, almost forced to be purged, but it is actually only the poor that must stay on the island since the wealthy parts of the region have been evacuated. This, according to Nya, “is another way to keep the Black and Brown people down.” Furthermore, it is interesting that the first man to purge, and to mention the verb “purge,” is a Black man. His first victim is

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a man who attacks an ATM, asking for his money back. After the Black man, referred to as the Skeletor, purges, he calls out to the Founding Fathers, “Pay me. Save me,” for he knows that “they are watching.” The Orwellian dystopic politics in the form of the seizure of the habitus highlight the all-seeing image of the NFFA superstructure against the reward-­ expecting hand of the slayer. The contrast in this installment is how it expects the needy to do the extermination of the poor, as well as the sacrifice. In this version, both parties belong to the same class, and the incentive is the money that they all lack. The fifth installment, The Forever Purge (2021), reflects the horrors of the Purge focusing on Mexican immigrants and Native Americans. At the beginning of the movie, the attention is drawn to Mexican immigration, with the scene focusing on the wall lining the border. The news informs the spectators that it is 2048. The NFFA has been voted back into power, and unemployment and white supremacy, as well as illegal immigration, are on the rise. The Purge is reinstated by the NFFA as soon as they take office. And it is no surprise that “the rich get richer, and the poor are left behind.” As the movie demonstrates Juan and Adela adapting to their life in America, a new character, Kirk, is introduced to the plot. A white ranch worker coming from poverty, he becomes the voice of the poor white working-class people who had not been much represented in the series before. When the ranch owner, Mr. Tucker, pays his workers to stay safe on the Purge night, Kirk comments that the money is “a way for these people to keep us alive so they can continue using our slave labor.” Kirk aligns his present-day poverty to the chattel status of the enslaved Blacks and expands the racist discourse of the white purgers. Historically, the first naturalization law of the US excluded unfree white bond laborers as well as Blacks from voting. But, as fears of white slavery became strong, and the connotations of whites working together with Blacks became offensive to the white population, new regulations were formed. The white European, even if he did not own property, “could be naturalized and vote as white” (Painter 2011, 201). This was one of the reasons why whiteness was so valuable to the poor, for it was their only property: as Harris says, “whiteness—that which whites alone possess—is valuable and is property” (1993, 1721). Consequently, the legalization of whiteness as a positive trait was secured under juridical forces. Almost two centuries after the advancement of white laborers, Kirk ç perceives his situation as a ranch worker to be a failure due to his lack of financial means. When the Forever Purge starts, and Kirk and his fellow purgers take Mr. Tucker and

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his family hostage, Kirk’s desperation becomes clear: he resents the loss of the power he thinks he deserves as a white man in the neoliberal system, since the capital grants power only to the ranch owner. His despair surfaces when he mentions how people like him have been stuck in a vicious cycle of powerlessness since they were born. As he threatens Mr. Tucker, he adds, “You … will find out what it’s like to be penniless and powerless.” Mr. Tucker, however, decides to show Kirk that the problem is bigger than himself. Rather than one man, it is the whole system: You are talking about life in America, the way the rich get rich off the backs of the poor, the way it has been ever since we robbed this land from the Native Americans. You know who created the Purge, don’t ya? A bunch of fat, rich businessmen in Washington, D.C.  So, what would that make you, Kirk?

Unwilling to identify with those businessmen, Kirk shoots Mr. Tucker in the head, putting an end to his life and to his liberal ideas. Kirk resolves to identify with the hegemonic power holders in the hope that he will break the cycle of poverty. According to Lisa Lowe, “It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American’” ([1996] 1998, 3). It is whiteness that presents Kirk and the Nazi cross-carrying mercenaries with the ability to evolve the Purge into an ever-continuing genocide of the Other. The social category of whiteness for them carries “considerable power and provide[s] resources” (Guglielmo 2004, 169). The white American identity allows these men to act as members of the nation, and also turns them into power holders in the neoliberal hierarchy. Even though Kirk exchanges his values in return for the capital and hence power, he loses both in the end when he is killed by Juan and his friend T. T. When white supremacy gained impetus amidst the rising immigration flows in the nineteenth century, white skin not only allowed the poor white laborer life and liberty, but also the chance of upward mobility. However, the movie denies that upward mobility to poor white workers like Kirk, and moreover, rids him of life, reducing the poverty-stricken members of the white race to bare life. Harris argues that, “whiteness produced—and was reproduced by—the social advantage that accompanied it” (1993, 1742). Indeed, it was a set of advantages and privileges that was shaped around white supremacy. Membership to the white race was a desired characteristic among the new-­ coming immigrants of the nineteenth century, suggesting a shared trait

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with the native-borns along with the promise of upward mobility. In this regard, Harris mentions Andrew Hacker’s discussion on how immigrants arriving in the United States in the nineteenth century formed their whiteness in alignment with the “Anglo-American norms,” which gave these new members of the white race “an active entity” that “is used to fulfill the will and to exercise power” (Harris 1993, 1734). In the series, eliminating the Other is another way of governing the Other’s body through the assertion of whiteness. The The Purge series highlights the forced sacrifice and the associated title of martyrdom of those who fail to successfully contribute to the country otherwise. In The Purge: Anarchy (2014), Eva’s father sacrifices his life to save his family from the burden of buying him the necessary medicine. In the letter he leaves behind, he writes how he “will be a martyr for a wealthy family” for a payment of $100,000. He will offer his life as a service to the members of the mentioned family, who want to purge as ideal American citizens but do not want to leave the safety of their mansion. It is not only the purged, but also the purgers who view this sacrifice as martyrdom. In The Purge: Election Year (2016), the NFFA presidential candidate, Minister Edwige Owens, conducts the NFFA’s Midnight Purge Mass in the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows. During the ceremony, he refers to the victims of the night as martyrs, stating how these “modern-day martyrs will die” for the sins of Americans. This martyrdom becomes the utmost sacrifice of the American, bestowing on him an ideal patriotism that he fails to fulfill otherwise. As Owens also mentions earlier in the movie, “America is built upon sacrifice.” The problematic part, however, resides in choosing who will be the sacrificed Americans. In the 2014 and 2016 installments, the ones who are forced to be purged are the sick, the homeless, the colored, and the poor. The wealthy Americans as well as government officials in the series perceive a large majority of these people as disposable, deeming them as economic and social failures. In this sense, the hegemonic power of the government is allowed to eradicate the will of the individual. The last installment of the series suggests a dystopic future for the white supremacist neoliberal US, because the obliteration of the unfit is now transformed into an obligation. Hence, the idea of sacrifice fades into the idea of a social cleanse that allows the “patriots” to reclaim their country and unburden it from the undesirables.

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Baynton, Douglas C. 2001. Disability and the Justification of Inequality in American History. In The New Disability History: American Perspectives, ed. Paul K.  Longmore and Lauri Umansky, 33–57. New  York and London: New York University Press. DeMonaco, James, dir. 2013. The Purge. Universal Pictures. ———, dir. 2014. The Purge: Anarchy. Universal Pictures. ———, dir. 2016. The Purge: Election Year. Universal Pictures. Gout, Everardo, dir. 2021. The Forever Purge. Universal Pictures. Grant, Madison. 1916. The Passing of the Great Race or The Racial Basis of European History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Guglielmo, Thomas. 2004. White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890–1945. New York: Oxford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 2011. The Neo-Liberal Revolution. Cultural Studies 25 (6): 705–728. Harris, Cheryl. 1993. Whiteness as Property. Harvard Law Review 106 (8): 1707–1791. Harvey, David. [2005] 2011. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Reprint. New York: Oxford University Press. Hobsbawm, Eric J. [1990] 2013. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowe, Lisa. [1996] 1998. On Asian American Cultural Politics: Immigrant Acts. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. McMurray, Gerard, dir. 2018. The First Purge. Universal Pictures. Painter, Nell Irvin. 2011. The History of White People. New  York and Dunham: W. W. Norton & Company.

Index1

NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 2, 3, 5 A Abject, 6, 74, 88–96, 98–101, 110, 111, 119, 152, 194 African Americans, 48, 57, 58, 99, 111, 112, 119, 122, 150n3, 181 Alienation, 140 American Dream, 93, 140, 209, 224 American exceptionalism, 2 American politics, 2, 4, 177, 182 American society, 2 B Black horror, 6, 94, 106, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 122

Black Lives Matter movement, 2, 3, 88–90, 97–102, 111 Blackness, 5 C Candyman, 6, 14n4, 75, 87, 88, 90–101, 105–111, 116–123, 144, 151n5 Capitalism, 7, 33, 70, 72, 139, 153, 154, 157, 158, 160–163 Civilization, 2, 14n2, 70, 136, 173, 177 Class, 7 Conservatives, 2, 7, 11, 58, 59, 171, 176, 197 Consumerism, 7 Critical race, 5 Cultural anxieties, 6 Cultural battles, 2 Culture wars, 2–7, 11, 44, 48, 57–60, 88, 90, 99, 170, 171, 174–182, 186, 192, 195, 197, 204, 205

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 N. Gregorio-Fernández, C. M. Méndez-García (eds.), Culture Wars and Horror Movies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53836-0

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INDEX

D Dehumanization, 15, 65 Don’t Breathe, 6, 47–60, 48n2 Dystopia, 31, 37, 217

The Invitation, 6, 28, 34, 36–38, 40, 42, 43 It Comes at Night, 6, 28, 34, 36, 37, 41–43

E Economic exploitation, 5 Ethnicity, ix, 2, 140n8

L Left-wing, 3 Liberals, 7

F Fake news, 28, 31, 32

M Manhunting films, 7 Middle-class, 7, 39, 93, 106, 136, 143, 150, 197 Midsommar, 6, 63, 68, 71, 73–75, 77–81

G Gentrification, 6, 87, 90–94, 99, 101, 116, 118, 123 Get Out, 1, 4, 5, 11–13, 12n1, 14n3, 15, 16, 18–23, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74–78, 81, 112–114, 150, 150n2, 150n3, 170 The Gift, 6, 28, 34, 36, 39, 41, 43 H Hands Across America, 155–157 Home invasion, 130, 151, 152, 163, 200 Horror genre, 3, 4, 8, 13, 14n2, 14n3, 19, 22, 44, 63, 70, 87, 88, 90, 93, 106, 107, 136, 151, 152, 163, 169, 170, 174 The Hunt, 7, 170–180, 186, 191–205 I Identity politics, 2 Immigrants, 7 Immigration, 2, 3, 29, 124, 212, 218, 225, 226

N National identity, 58, 151, 211, 218 Neighbor, 6, 130, 132–136, 133n5, 138, 140, 141 Neoliberal/neoliberalism, 5, 7, 90, 114, 151, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159–163, 198, 211, 212, 216, 219–221, 223, 224, 226, 227 O Obama, Barack, 11 Obama era, 7 Oppression, 3, 6, 14, 20, 33, 69, 113, 123, 137, 143, 144, 158 Otherness, 4, 14, 22, 30, 33, 97, 130, 154 P Peele, Jordan, 1, 4–7, 11, 12, 63, 108, 112, 117, 121, 129, 150, 153n6, 163, 170

 INDEX 

Polarization, 5, 7, 8, 177, 182, 195, 197 Polarized politics, 4 Politics, x, xi, 7, 31, 32, 44, 73, 74, 94, 99, 106, 111, 130–133, 133n5, 139n7, 140n8, 144, 151, 151n5, 153, 155, 170, 174–177, 183, 197, 216, 223, 225 Populism, x, 31, 32, 141, 156n8 Post truth, 28 Post-2010 horror film, 7 Poverty, 72, 92, 108, 109, 123, 155, 163, 209, 216, 220, 225, 226 Power dynamics, 12 The Purge, 7, 170, 192, 193, 200, 202, 209–227 R Race, 2, 4, 11, 12, 12n1, 19, 21–23, 63, 64, 68, 69, 71, 73–78, 80, 81, 94, 97–99, 109, 121, 124, 140n8, 201, 213, 214, 216, 218, 219, 226 Racial context, 12 Racial discrimination, 6 Racial politics, 5, 13, 19, 22, 74, 75 Reagan Era, 155, 156, 156n8 Reagan, Ronald, 155 Repression, 33, 70–72, 77, 129, 136, 142, 144 Right and left populism, 31 Right-wing, 7 S Slavery, 64, 65, 70, 81, 111, 123, 137, 225 Social capital, 78, 162 Social discontent, 3, 5 Social horror, 1, 7, 206 Social justice, 5 Sociocultural, 2, 5, 96, 193 Sociopolitical, 3 Sociopolitical ideologies, 1

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Stereotypes, 31, 102, 107, 110, 131, 180, 182, 197 Subjective violence, 153, 158, 163 T Terrorism, 17, 28, 30, 152 Terrorist attacks of 9/11, 30 Transnational, ix, 3, 7, 191–194, 199, 200, 205 Trump, Donald, 5, 28–30, 71, 72, 142, 171, 177, 196, 197 U Us, 6, 7, 129–132, 129n1, 133n5, 139n7, 142–144, 150–156, 150n2, 155n7, 161, 163 US presidential election, 2 V Veteran, 6, 47–50, 52, 56–59, 170, 203 Vulnerability, 12 W White liberalism, 6 White masculinity, 2, 3, 48 White monster, 64, 65, 68–78, 80, 81 Whiteness, 5, 16–18, 59, 68, 77–81, 211, 215, 225, 226 White social space, 23 White supremacy, 6, 7, 14, 16, 19–21, 67, 71, 73, 78, 79n2, 80, 81, 114, 225, 226 Wood, Robin, 13, 14n2, 28, 33, 35, 43, 69, 70, 106, 136, 143, 151n5 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 133, 133n5, 139n7, 153, 158