Searching for Brother Charles: Naming the "Black" in [Black] Horror

Abstract

Searching for Brother Charles:Naming the "Black" in [Black] Horror Mikal J. Gaines (bio) Taking a wide-angle view of the current horror media landscape, it would not be an exaggeration to assert that we are in the midst of a [Black] horror boom.1 From breakthrough films such as Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022) to Misha Green's Lovecraft Country (2020–), various episodes of Black Mirror (2011–), Richard Shepard's The Perfection (2018), Dallas Jackson's Thriller (2018), Tate Taylor's Ma (2019), David Rosenthal's Jacob's Ladder (2019), Deon Taylor's The Intruder (2019), Kurtis Harder's Spiral (2019) (which is not to be confused with Darren Lynn Bousman's Saw reboot, Spiral [2021]), Mark Tonderai's Spell (2020), Joe Marcantonio's Kindred (2020), Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour's Black Box (2020), Justin Simien's Bad Hair (2020), Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott's Tales from the Hood 2 & 3 (2018/2020), Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz's Antebellum (2020), Remi Weekes's His House (2020), Little Marvin's series Them (2021), Nia DaCosta's Candyman (2021) reboot, and Mariama Diallo's Master (2022), this explosion in new texts points toward what seems like a broad multimedia attempt to capitalize on an interest for horror that centers Blackness or at least prominently features Black casts and crews. Sheri-Marie Harrison has situated this upswing as part of an adjacent "New Black Gothic" aesthetic in literature, one less interested in recovery or representation than in exploring the cumulative [End Page 349] generational effects of racial violence over time.2 We might also consider how this latest cycle of [Black] horror fits into what Ibram X. Kendi has called the "Third Black Renaissance," a wellspring of dynamic new Black art across multiple mediums by creators intent upon developing nuanced portraits of Black life as it has not been depicted before.3 Yet, positioning these new [Black] horror films within either Harrison's or Kendi's frameworks becomes immediately complicated by the collaborative nature of the film medium itself and what are still deeply racialized networks of economic "greenlight" power on the industrial side. Consider, for example, that while all the horror texts I have previously named feature Black onscreen talent and in some cases Black writers, producers, and directors, others were made with predominantly white creators at the helm. I am inclined to argue, then, that while it would make sense to imagine some of this new wave of [Black] horror as aspiring to, in Kendi's terms, "escape the white gaze," to describe all these texts as likewise invested in a politics of "unapologetic blackness" would misrepresent the conditions on the ground.4 As Kendi points out, creators such as Peele, Ava Duvernay, Spike Lee, Issa Rae, and others have made opening doors to new Black talent central to their own artistic and commercial praxis, but we are still a long way off from anything approaching a level of Black agency and parity within media industries that matches the level of sustained investment Black audiences themselves have long given to film and television. Questions of authorship and creative control notwithstanding, this recent explosion in [Black] horror presents other more complex interpretive challenges, not the least of which includes whether the mere appearance of "diversity" truly alters anything for Black representation at all. In his seminal essay "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?," Stuart Hall explores how battles for cultural hegemony often elide the dialectical relationship between highbrow and lowbrow, a relationship that he argues is central to understanding anything we might recognize as a coherent Black diasporic aesthetic. Building on the work of Michele Wallace, Hall asks whether the postmodern obsession with difference is, as with modernism's obsession with primitivism, "once again achieved at the expense of the vast silencing about the West's fascination with the bodies of black men and women of other ethnicities." 5 Hall goes on to say that "we must ask about that continuing silence in postmodernism's shifting terrain, about whether the forms of licensing the gaze that this proliferation of difference invites and allows, at the same time as it disavows, is not...