When Jordan Peele released his directorial feature debut Get Out in 2017, he reinvigorated interest in the Black horror genre. Horror, fantasy, and science fiction have always been ideal genres to work through America’s original racial sins, and the tautly written film demonstrated exactly why. Through the fraught dynamics of an interracial romantic relationship, Peele found a way to tell an entertaining story that laid bare the literal and figurative harms whiteness has historically inflicted upon Black people and their bodies. Most importantly, it illustrated how those harms are perpetuated in the present.
To put it more directly, it did a single thing extremely well. But as the genre has picked up steam in the years since Get Out’s release, it has also gotten exponentially more ambitious. In both film and television, Get Out successors such as Antebellum, Lovecraft Country, Bad Hair, Watchmen, and Peele’s own sophomore effort Us have demonstrated that the triumphs of Get Out are much more hard-won than was immediately apparent.
The problem, naturally, is that a meaningful radical politics tends to take a back seat when entertainment and commerce meet. Many of the aforementioned projects, though entertaining, ultimately fail because they do not do the hard ideological work necessary to give them the cultural and political meaning to which they aspire. They fall into the gaping hole where art and capitalism generally intersect.
It’s almost ironic that Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen is the story that best balances the concerns of fantasy storytelling with real-world considerations of racial dynamics.
Case in point is this year’s Antebellum—a horror film written and directed by Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, both making their feature directorial debuts. The film stars Janelle Monáe as Veronica Henley, a writer and public intellectual who is kidnapped from her life and deposited into what seems to be a modern-day plantation. Beaten, branded, and given the new name Eden, Veronica must find a way to escape and return to her family.
It is clear that Antebellum truly believes it has something deeply resonant to say about race in America. Unfortunately, it never gets around to telling us what that something is. The impressive potential of the story is undermined almost immediately by its reliance on pat dialogue best suited for a viral Twitter thread. By the film’s end, we learn that Veronica and her fellow abductees have been forcibly installed as living participants in a deranged senator’s Civil War re-enactment fantasy. Veronica has been selected and targeted specifically because she is publicly but vaguely vocal about general issues like “patriarchy,” “revolution,” and “intersectionality.”
The film begins and ends on the plantation, cleaving in two at its midpoint to show us Veronica’s life before she is metaphorically pulled back in time. According to a Q&A with Interview magazine, the directors included this detour in order to “show Veronica in her full power in a completely different world.” Supposedly, we are meant to make the connection between her thriving life and career before this experience and the forgotten lives of enslaved Africans before they were stolen and brought to new lands.
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Noble as that intention may have been, it is not reflected in the film’s actual story. It is never made clear what Veronica’s politics actually are other than presumably leftist. “Within our authenticity lies our real power and that’s even in those environments which by design demand our complete and total assimilation,” she says to an eager crowd at a conference. For some reason, this milquetoast combination of buzzwords and airy rhetoric elicits cheers from her audience.
But Antebellum’s biggest sin is that it mistakes cinematography for a narrative point of view and uses brutality to gesture at seriousness and depth. The film begins with the capture and murder of a fleeing Black woman, and only escalates from there. Bush and Renz never meaningfully explore either their protagonist or their villains, constructing both as empty shells positioned as adversaries in an ill-articulated battle. They show us the terror of life on this plantation for Veronica, but they do not bother to explain what motivated its existence in the first place. Antebellum has all the aesthetic signifiers of a Very Important Film™, but it never bothers to acknowledge the contours of whiteness or dig into the ramifications of what it would mean for something like this to actually happen in our current climate. Black audiences are no stranger to white violence, but here Bush and Renz have defanged it by stripping it of all meaning or motivation.
In this universe, monster and man represent the same level of danger if you’re Black.
Misha Green’s recently concluded first season of her HBO series Lovecraft Country suffered from the opposite problem. Rather than providing a scarcity of information, Green packed her story with so much detail it was hard to discern who or what its actual focus was. A clever subversion of H.P. Lovecraft’s racism, Lovecraft Country took its namesake’s mythical monsters and aligned them squarely with whiteness. In the story, Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors) finds himself caught up in the malevolent forces of magic that he has inherited from his bloodline. In this universe, monster and man represent the same level of danger if you’re Black.
In ‘Get Out,’ Jordan Peele laid bare the harms whiteness has historically inflicted upon Black people.
But the series’s impressive and terrifying pilot gives way to “monster of the week” shenanigans that only loosely connect to one another, leaving the audience confused and disoriented. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could summarize the season’s plot, because it never fully cohered. Green’s characters were brave and bold and determined to stand up to the new, supernatural threats they had stumbled upon, but the show was never able to successfully delineate who or what those threats were.
On the small scale—usually on a scene-to-scene basis—the show was excellent at making clear that the racial dynamics of 1950s America permeated every aspect of its characters’ lives. Intimate relationships were speckled with the loss and yearning of potential thwarted by racial terror. But in the aggregate, Lovecraft Country failed to make its point. The show was jam-packed with backstory and lore about everything from a secret cabal of wizards to a murderous doctor experimenting on Black people. But with its first season concluded, the politics the show gestured at were not threaded through the narrative in a way that held up to scrutiny.
Even internally, the show’s issues with colorism and gender undercut its presumed assertions about race, history, and trauma. The story’s most violent and repressed Black male character was also its darkest-skinned. Its dark-skinned female characters were brutalized and killed. The unceremonious death of an Indigenous two-spirit character prompted an online apology from Green. Even to itself, the show could not justify its scattered politics.
Justin Simien’s Bad Hair is yet another example of a Black horror film grasping for political resonance where none exists. The film is nominally about an ambitious young Black woman whose life is derailed when she has a new weave installed that turns out to be possessed. Bloodthirsty and murderous, the weave—and the story—makes a mockery of Black women’s real-life struggles with hair by simplifying them past the point of realistic recognition.
Simien has called the film a “satirical horror love letter” to the strength of Black women. While his intentions were surely pure, what he produced instead was a reductive story that did not engage with the complexities of Black beauty politics, or how the thorny politics of presentation have impacted Black women’s ability to move through, be accepted by, or ascend within white institutions. In her review of the film for Vulture, culture critic Angelica Jade Bastién argued that
Simien, from my vantage point, reflects Black men’s own strange, thorny relationship to the beauty rituals of Black women and the intimate spaces in which they take place. Both the script and direction pathologize Black women’s relationship with their hair, falling on tired tropes that frame wanting to get a relaxer or weave as a reflection of Black women striving for white acceptance and power (although the villains shown throughout the film are primarily Black women, which in itself is telling).
Rather than being a new way to explore the realities of an age-old problem, Bad Hair contributes to it, chiefly by laying the blame for the endlessly perpetuated Eurocentric beauty standard at Black women’s feet. In this universe, true, proud Black women do not fall prey to the allure of silky weaves or “creamy crack.” Though why the film then chooses to also kill off these “naturalista” characters (those who don’t alter their natural hair) is never explained.
The through line of the many failed stories is their reckless deployment of spectacle over substance.
The film’s ending (truncated from its Sundance run time) positions weaves and other protective styles as something from which Black women need to be saved. In Simien’s mind, a weave can only be a source of torment or shame. Weaves and hair extensions are depicted as the bogeyman at the heart of Black women’s internal conflict, without ever meaningfully addressing the white and capitalist order that is at the root of the need for them to assimilate in order to survive.
It’s almost ironic that Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen is the story that best balances the concerns of fantasy storytelling with real-world considerations of racial dynamics. Lindelof—who is white—adapted the limited series from the comic books of the same name. Watchmen took creative liberties that expanded and contextualized the story’s narrative. It built a world that commented on our current climate around policing while retaining the spirit of the comic’s original story.
What makes Watchmen both a successful adaptation and example of how fantasy can inform Black politics is that it gets the very first step right: It explicitly names whiteness as the ever-present villain in the lives of everyday Black men and women. White people are individually presented as antagonists, sure. But the series makes the point over and over again that whiteness and adherence to the tenets of white supremacy are the animating factors in the chaos and violence that stalk its characters.
Black police officer and masked vigilante Angela Abar (Regina King) is sprung into action when her white mentor and boss is found lynched from a tree, apparently by an enfeebled old man. As she investigates how this seemingly impossible sequence of events could have occurred, she is drawn into a decades-old conspiracy involving her own family, the institutions she trusts, and the very foundation of her identity.
Watchmen cleverly flips its world’s racial landscape, making it the opposite of our own. In this world, the police are the good guys, and the explicit enemies of the resurgent neo-Nazi group the Seventh Kavalry. But as the show’s narrative progresses, it slowly reveals that the mythic “White Night”—in which the Kavalry murdered nearly the entire police force in a coordinated set of home invasions—was actually orchestrated by cooperating forces. Abar’s beloved police chief and an ambitious senator collaborated on the deadly evening as a way to hasten the blurring of lines between police and vigilante groups.
With this revelation, the show dramatizes a fact that many already understand to be true—the real hindrance to American progress is the latency of good old-fashioned anti-Black racism. No matter how you shift institutions around, whiteness and white supremacy persist because they are hardy ideologies that must be directly confronted and challenged, not wished away. Even in a world in which the police are the heroes, they are still the villains. There is no way to cleave these institutions from the inherent wrongs that were embedded in them from their inception.
But Watchmen and Get Out are, sadly, the exceptions in the new Black horror genre. The through line of the many failed stories is their reckless deployment of spectacle over substance. In many ways, by contrast, Get Out is a very quiet film. Its protagonist, Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya), spends most of his time merely observing the white people around him. It is effective because it uses the discrepancies and oddities that he takes notice of as a way to frame a larger story about white resentment and dissonance. Stefon Bristol’s See You Yesterday also pares down a fantastical premise—the invention of time travel—to a deceptively simple premise: Not even the scientific brilliance of two young Black minds can save them from the everyday horrors of police violence. It is this simplicity that makes these stories sing, because they take real-world pain and trauma, and respect the truth that they are inescapable. No amount of fantastical rendering can obscure the fact that for many Black people, every day is a horror.
