Submission Date

7-18-2025

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

African American and Africana Studies

Faculty Mentor

Patricia Lott

Second Faculty Mentor

Edward Onaci

Project Description

In the early 1900s, Black filmmakers, actors, and writers began asserting themselves in the horror genre in greater numbers and employing horror films and literature as influential platforms to confront and subvert antiblack depictions. This subversion is apparent in films such as Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Sinners (2025). The black characters in these films are beacons of survival and resilience in the face of racial slavery, sexual exploitation, and zombie invasion, among other horrors. In this paper, I employ Robin R. Means Coleman’s concepts “Blacks in Horror” and “Black Horror,” introduced in Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s-present (2023), to investigate how Black creatives use the genre to disrupt harmful antiblack stereotypes and to offer cutting-edge ways of portraying the horrifying. Specifically, I focus on how filmic horror either reinforces or subverts the monstrosities of what Media and Communication Studies scholar Moya Bailey calls “Misogynoir”—“anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women [and Black girls] experience, particularly in US visual and digital culture” (Misogynoir Transformed, 1). I am especially interested in understanding how mothers and daughters in Jordan Peele’s Us appear as both victims and avengers of macabre misogynoir. This paper evaluates how protagonist Adelaide and her double Red in Us portray the horrors that ensue when Black mothers shoulder the burden of familial survival, how such burdens can transform Black mothers into monsters or force them to defeat monstrosities, and how female parents sometimes bequeath macabre inheritances to Black children.

Comments

Presented during the 27th Annual Summer Fellows Symposium, July 18, 2025 at Ursinus College.

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