When Black Horror Consumes Us

by Jason Parkham, Wired.com

The films of Jordan Peele are just the latest in the current renaissance of black horror. Claudette Barius/Universal Pictures

Black horror is having a moment. All of a sudden the genre feels alive, feral, infinite. How delicious it tastes, too. Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man biting into that ambrosial yam, savoring something like self-release, the genre has gone sweet and hot, enriched as anything we’ve witnessed, a divinely wicked nectar, a sustenance of arrant want. But even with all this chatter about black horror’s Hollywood renaissance, and how Hitchcock heir apparent Jordan Peele has masterminded a movement toward the macabre—with Get Out, Us, The Twilight Zone, and upcoming projects that include a Candyman remake—one point gets lost: Donald Glover got here first.

When I consider What Black Horror Means Today, with the thick of the present around me and its propensity to so swiftly crush the soul into ash, I think of Atlanta, Glover’s twisted theater of kinship and chaos and black pathos. For two seasons, the FX drama has plunged into the bizarre, an experiment so agile and esoteric in purpose, so sharply Ellisonian, it was, at times, hard to understand it as anything other than straight-up horror. Like the best of the genre, Atlanta is a wounded animal. Because hasn’t black life always been an open wound? From the moment slave blood soaked the shores of Jamestown, it was a gash that wouldn’t close shut, that refused to heal. (The decision, it should be said, was never ours to make. The radical act of healing—to be whole and free—is, for black people, near impossible in a land built on the rejection of racial equilibrium.)

That is how black life exists: in the open, unprotected, wedged in a loop of creeping peril. Round and round and round. In 1903, black pan-Africanist historian W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness. It concerns the twinned state of being for black people living in a white world and how our social mutability remains tied to our survival. But rarely discussed is the terror of being psychologically trapped between those warring states of self- and social-authorship. That is the space Glover mines with such brilliance, fury, and curiosity…

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