âThe bulging eyes and the twisted mouthâ - Violence, Violent Imagery & Black Horror
TRIGGER WARNING: mentions of death, violence, blood, hate crimes, antiblackness, police violence, rape
Note! I am going to be speaking from a Black American point of view, as my identity informs my experience. That said, antiblackness itself is international. The idea of my Blackness as a threat, as a source of fear and violence to repress and to destroy, is something every Black person in the world that has ever dealt with white supremacy has experienced.
There are two things, I think, that are important to note as we start this conversation.
One: there is a long history of violence towards Black bodies that is due to our dehumanization. People do not care for the killing of a mouse in the way they care about a human. But if you think the people you are dealing with are not people, but animals- more particularly, pests, something distasteful- then you will be able to rationalize treating them as such.
Two: even though we live in a time period where that overt belief of Blackness as inhuman is less likely, we must recognize that there are centuries of belief behind this concept; centuries of arguments and actions that cement in our minds that a certain amount of violence towards Blackness is normal. That subconscious belief you may hold is steeped in centuries of effort to convince you of it without even questioning it. And because of this very real re-enforcement of desensitization, naturally another place this will manifest itself is in how we tell and comprehend stories.
There are also three points I'm about to make first- not the only three that can ever be made, but the ones that stand out the most to me when we talk about violence with Black characters:
One: Your Black readers may experience that scene you wrote differently than you meant anyone to, just because our history may change our perspective on whatâs happening.
Two: The idea that Black characters and people deserve the pain they are experiencing.
Three: The disbelief or dismissal of the pain of Black characters and people.
You Better Start Believing In Ghost Stories- Youâre In One
I donât need to tell Black viewers scary fairytales of sadists, body snatchers and noncoincidental disappearances, cannibals, monsters appearing in the night, and dystopian, unjust systems that bury people alive- real life suffices! We recognize the symbolism because weâve seen real demons.
Some real examples of familiar, terrifying stories that feel like drama, but are real experiences:
12 Years a Slave: âThis is no fiction, no exaggeration. If I have failed in anything, it has been in presenting to the reader too prominently the bright side of the picture. I doubt not hundreds have been as unfortunate as myself; that hundreds of free citizens have been kidnapped and sold into slavery, and are at this moment wearing out their lives on plantations in Texas and Louisiana.â â Solomon Northup
When They See Us: I canât get myself to watch When They See Us, because I learned about the actual trial of the Central Park Five- now the Exonerated Five- in my undergrad program. Five teen Black and brown boys, subjected to racist and cruel policing and vilification in the media- from Donald Trump calling for their deaths in the newspaper, to being imprisoned under what the Clintons deemed a generation of âsuperpredatorsâ during a âtough on crimeâ administration. And as audacious as it is to say, as Solomon Northup explained, they were fortunate. The average Black person funneled into the prison system doesnât get the opportunity to make it back out redeemed or exonerated, because the system is designed to capture and keep them there regardless of their innocence or guilt. Their lives are irreparably changed; they are forever trapped.
Jasper, Texas: Learning about the vicious, gruesome murder of James Byrd Jr, was horrific- and that was just the movie. No matter how âcommunity comes togetherâ everyone tells that story, the reality is that there are people who will beat you, drag you chained down a gravel road for three miles as your body shreds away until you are decapitated, and leave your mangled body in front of a Black church to send a message⊠Because youâre Black and they hate you. To date I am scared when Iâm walking and I see trucks passing me, and donât let them have the American or the Confederate flag on them. Even Ahmaud Arbery, all he was doing was jogging in his hometown, and white men from out of town decided he should be murdered for that.
Do you want to know what all of these men and boys, from 1841 to 2020, had in common? What they did to warrant what happened to them? Being outside while Black. Some might call it âwrong place wrong timeâ, but the reality is that there is no âright placeâ. Sonya Massey, Breonna Taylor- murdered inside their home. Where else can you be, if the danger has every right to barge inside? There is no âsafeâ.
It is already Frightening to live while Black- not because being Black is inherently frightening, but because our society has made it horrific to do so. But that leads into my next point:
âThey Shouldnât Have Resistedâ
Think of all the videos of assaulted and murdered Black people from police violence. If you can stomach going into the comments- which I donât, anymore- youâll see this classic comment of hate in the thousands, twisting your stomach into knots:
âif they obeyed the officer, if they didnât resist, this wouldnât have happenedâ
Another way our punitive society normalizes itself is via the idea of respectability politics; the idea that âif you are Good, if you do what you are Supposed to do, you will not be hurt- I will not have to hurt youâ. Therefore, if my people are always suffering violence, it must be because we are Bad. And in a society that is already less gracious to Black people, that is more likely to think we are less human, that we are innately bad and must earn the right to be exceptional⊠the use of excessive violence towards me must be the natural outcome. âIf your people werenât more likely to be criminals, there wouldnât be the need to be suspicious of youâ- that is the way our society has taught us to frame these interactions, placing the blame for our own victimization on us.
Sidebar: I would highly suggest reading The New Jim Crow, written in 2010 by Michelle Alexander, to see how this mentality helps tie into large scale criminalization and mass incarceration, and how the cycle is purposely perpetuated.
You have to constantly be aware of how you look, walk and talk- and even then, that wonât be enough to save you if the time comes. The turning point for me, personally, was the murder of Sandra Bland. If she could be educated, beautiful, a beacon of her community, be everything a âGoodâ Black person is supposed to be⊠and still be murdered via police violence, they can kill any of us. And thatâs a very terrifying thought- that anything at any point can be the reason for your death, and it will be validated because someone thinks you shouldnât have âbeen that wayâ. And that way has far less to do with what you did, than it does who you are. Being âthat wayâ is Black.
My point is, if this belief is so normalized in real life about violence on Black bodies- that somehow, we must have done something to deserve this- what makes you think that this belief does not affect how you comprehend Black people suffering in stories?
Human experimentation? Vivisection? Organ stealing? Begging for medicine? Dramatically bleeding out? Not trusting just anyone to see that you are hurt, because they might take advantage? All very real fears. The idea that pain is normal for Black people is especially rampant in the healthcare field, where ideas like our melanin making our skin thick enough to feel less pain (no), an overblown fear of âdrug misuseâ, and believing we are overexaggerating our pain makes many Black people being unwilling to trust the healthcare system. And it comes down to this thought:
If you think that I feel less pain, you will allow me to suffer long before you believe that I am in pain.
I was psychologically spiraling I was in so much pain after my wisdom teeth removal, and my surgeon was more concerned about âaddiction to the medicationâ. Only because Hot Chocolateâs mom is a nurse, did I get an effective medicine schedule. My mother ended up with jaw rot because her surgeon outright claimed that she didnât believe that she was in more than the âhealingâ pain after her wisdom teeth were removed. She also has a gigantic, macabre (and awesome fr) scar on her stomach from a c-section she received after four days of labor attempting to have me⊠all because she was too poor and too Black to afford better doctors who wouldnât have dismissed her struggles to push.
As a major example of dismissed Black pain: letâs discuss the mortality rate of Black women during childbirth, as well as the likelihood of our children to die. When we say âthey will let you bleed to deathâ, we mean it.
âBlack women have the highest maternal mortality rate in the United States â 69.9 per 100,000 live births for 2021, almost three times the rate for white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black babies are more likely to die, and also far more likely to be born prematurely, setting the stage for health issues that could follow them through their lives.â
Even gynecology roots in dismissal (and taking brutal advantage of) Black women's pain:
âThe history of this particular medical branch ⊠it begins on a slave farm in Alabama,â Owens said. âThe advancement of obstetrics and gynecology had such an intimate relationship with slavery, and was literally built on the wounds of Black women.â Reproductive surgeries that were experimental at the time, like cesarean sections, were commonly performed on enslaved Black women. Physicians like the once-heralded J. Marion Sims, an Alabama doctor many call the âfather of gynecology,â performed torturous surgical experiments on enslaved Black women in the 1840s without anesthesia. And well after the abolition of slavery, hospitals performed unnecessary hysterectomies on Black women, and eugenics programs sterilized them.â
If you think Black characters are not in pain, or that theyâre overexaggerating, youâre more likely to be okay with them suffering more in comparison to those whose pain you take more seriously- to those you believe.
My point is that whatever terrifying scene you think youâre writing, whatever violent whump scenario you think youâre about to put your Black characters through, thereâs a chance it has probably happened and was treated as nonimportant (damn shame, right?) And when those terrifying scenes are both written and read, the way their suffering will be felt depends on how much you as a reader care, how much you believe they are suffering.
Thereâs a joke amongst readers of color that many dystopian tales are tales of âwhat happened if white people experienced things that the rest of us have already been put through?â Think concepts like alien invasion and mass eradication of the existing population- you may think of that as an action flick, meanwhile peoples globally have suffered colonization for centuries. The Handmaidâs Tale- forced birthing and raising of âsomeone elseâsâ children, always subject to sexual harassment by the Master while subject to hate from the Mistress- thatâs just being a Mammy.
Thereâs nothing wrong with having Black characters be violent or deal with violence, especially in a story where every character is going through shit. That is not the problem! What I am trying to tell you, though, is to be aware that certain violent imagery is going to evoke familiarity in Black viewers. And if I as a Black viewer see my very real traumas treated as entertainment fodder- or worse, dismissed- by the narrative and other viewers, I will probably not want to consume that piece of media anymore. I will also question the intentions and the beliefs of the people who treat said traumas so callously. Now, if thatâs not something you care about, thatâs on you! But for people who do care, it is something we need to make sure we are catching before we do it.
âSo I just canât write anything?!â
Stop that. There are plenty of examples of stories containing horror and violence with Black characters. Thereâs an entire genre of us telling our own stories, using the same violence as symbolism. Iâm not telling you ânoâ (least not always). Iâm telling you to take some consideration when you write the things that you do. Thereâs nothing wrong about writing your Black characters being violent or experiencing violence. But there is a difference between making it narratively relevant, and thoughtlessly using them as a âspookâ, a stereotypical scary Black person, or a punching bag, especially in a way that may invoke certain trauma.
The joke is that we never survive these horror movies because we either wouldnât be there to begin with, or because we would make better decisions and the narrative canât have that. But the reality is just that a lot of writers find Black characters- Black people- expendable in comparison to their white counterparts, and it shows. More of a âhere, damnâ sort of character, not worth investment and easy to shrug off. The book itself I havenât read, just because itâs pretty new, but Iâm looking forward to doing so. But from the summaries, it goes into horror media history and how Black characters have fared in these stories, as well as how that connects to the society those characters were written in. I.e., a thorough version of this lesson.
Instead, I wrote an entire list of questions you could possibly ask yourself involving violence or villainy involving a Black character. Feel free to print it and put it on your wall where you write if you have to! I cannot stress enough that asking yourself questions like these are good both for your creation and just⊠being less antiblack in general when you consume media.
Black Horror/Black Thriller
We, too, have turned our violent experiences into stories. I continue to highly suggest watching our films and reading our stories to see how we convey our fear, our terror, our violence and our pain. There are plenty of stories that work- Get Out, The Angry Black Girl and her Monster, Candyman, Lovecraft Country (the show) and Nanny are some examples. Thereâs even a blog by the co-writer of The Black Guy Dies First who runs BlackHorrorMovies where he reviews horror movies from throughout the decades.
Desiree Evans has a great essay, We Need Black Horror More Than Ever, that gets into why this genre is so creative and effective, that I think says what I have to say better than I could.
âEven before Peele, Black horror had a rich literary lineage going back to the folklore of Africa and its Diaspora. Stories of haints, witches, curses, and magic of all kinds can be found in the folktales collected by author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and in the folktales retold by acclaimed childrenâs book author Virginia Hamilton. One of my earliest childhood literary memories is being entranced by Hamiltonâs The House of Dies Drear and Patricia McKissackâs childrenâs book classic The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural, both examples of the ways Black authors have tapped into Black history along with our rich ghostlore.â
âBlack horror can be clever and subversive, allowing Black writers to move against racist tropes, to reconfigure who stands at the center of a story, and to shift the focus from the dominant narrative to that which is hidden, submerged. To ask: what happens when the group that was Othered, gets to tell their side of the story?â
For on the nose simplicity, Iâm going to use hood classic Tales From The Hood (1994) as an example of how violence can be integrated into Black horror tales. Tales From The Hood is like⊠The Twilight Zone by Black people. Messages discussing issues in our community, done through a mystical twist. Free on Tubi! If you want to stop here before some spoilers, itâs an hour and a half. A great time!
In the first story, a Black political activist is murdered by the cops. The scene is reflective of the real-world efforts to discredit and even murder activists speaking out against police violence, as well as the types of things done to criminalize Black citizens for capture. The song Strange Fruit plays in the background, to drive the point home that this is a lynching.
The second story deals with a Black little boy experiencing abuse in the home, drawing a green monster to show his teacher why heâs covered in wounds and is lashing out at school.
The fourth story is about a gangbanger who undergoes âbehavioral modificationâ to be released from prison early. Think of the classic scene from A Clockwork Orange. He must watch as imagery of the Klan and of happy whites lynching Black bodies (real-life pictures and video, mind you!) play into his mind alongside gang violence.
Isnât Violence Stereotypical or antiblack?
That last story from Tales From The Hood leads into a good point. It can be! But it does not have to be! Violence is a human experience. By suggesting we donât experience it or commit it, you would be denying everything Iâve just spoken about. We donât have to be racist to write our Black characters in violent situations. We also donât have to comprehend those situations through a racist lens.
Even experiences that seem âstereotypicalâ do not have to be comprehended that way. I get a LOT of questions about if something is stereotypical, and my response is always that it depends on the writing!!! You could give me a harmless prompt and it becomes the most racist story ever once you leave my inbox. But you could give me a âstereotypicalâ prompt and it be genuine writing.
Letâs take the movie Juice for example. Juice in my honest to God opinion becomes a thriller about halfway in. On its surface, Juice looks like bad Black boys shooting and cursing and doing things they arenât supposed to be doing! Incredibly stereotypical- violent young thugs. You might think, âyou shouldnât write something like this- youâre telling everyone this is what your community is likeâ. First- thereâs that respectability politics again! Just because something is not a ârespectableâ story does not mean it doesnât need to be told!
But if weâre actually paying attention, what weâre looking at is four young boys dealing with their environment in different ways. All four of them originally stick together to feel power amongst their brotherhood as they all act tough and discover their own identities. They are not perfect, but they are still kids. In this environment, to be tough, to be strong, you do the things that they are doing. You run from cops, you steal from stores, you mess with all the girls and talk shit and wave weapons. Thatâs what makes you âbigâ. Thatâs what gives you the âjuiceâ- and the âjuiceâ can make you untouchable.
I want to focus particularly on Bishop, yes, played by Tupac. Bishop, the antagonist of Juice, is particularly powerless, angry, and scared of the world around him. He puts on a big front of bravado, yelling, cursing, and talking big because heâs tired of being afraid, and he doesnât know how to deal with it otherwise. So when he gets access to a gun- to power- he quickly spirals out of control. His response to his fear is to wave around a tool that makes him feel stronger, that stops the things that scare him from scaring him.
Now, that is not a unique tale! That is a tale that any race could write about, particularly young white men with gun violence! If you ever cared for Fairuza Balkâs character in The Craft, it is a similar fall from grace. But because it is on a young, Black man in the hood, audiences are less likely to empathize with Bishop. And granted, Bishop is unhinged! But many a white character has been, and is not shoved into a stereotype that white people cannot escape from!
Now would I be comfortable if a nonblack person attempted to write a narrative like Juice? Yes, because Iâd worry about the tendency to lose the messaging and just fall into stereotype outright. But it can be done! The story can be told!
âBut if Black violence bad, why rap?â
âIn order for me to write poetry that isnât political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.â
Marwhan Makhoul, Palestinian Poet
First, rap is not âonly violence and misogynyâ. Step your understanding of the genre up; there are plenty of options outside of the mainstream that donât discuss those things. Second, every genre of music has mainstream popular songs about vice and sin. The idea that Black rappers have to be held to a higher standard is yet another example of how we are seen as inherently bad and must prove ourselves good. We could speak about nothing but drugs and alcohol and 1) there would still be white artists who do the very same and 2) we would still deserve to be treated like humans.
That said, many- not all- rappers rap about violence for the same reason Billy Joel wrote We Didnât Start the Fire, the same reason Homer first spoke The Iliad- because they have something to say about it! They stand in a long tradition of people using poetry and rhythm to tell stories. Rap is an art of storytelling!
Rap is often used as an expression of frustration and righteous anger against a system built to keep us trapped within it. Iâm not allowed to be angry? Why wouldnât I be angry? Anger is a protective emotion, often when one feels helpless. Young Black people also began to reclaim and glorify the violence they lived in within their music, to take pride in their survival and in their success in a world that otherwise wanted them to fail. If I think the world fights against me no matter what I do, Iâd rather live in pride than in shame with a bent head. Is it right? Maybe, maybe not. But if you donât want them to rap about violence, why not alleviate the things leading to the violence in their environment?
Whether you choose to listen to their words, because the delivery scares you- and trust, angry Black men scared the music industry and society- doesnât make the story any less valid!
I am going to drop a classic by Slick Rick called Childrenâs Story. I think listening to it- and I mean genuinely listening- summarizes what Iâve said here about how Black creators can tell stories, even violent ones, and how even the delivery through Blackness can change how you perceive them. Please take the time to listen before continuing.
Iâve been alive for 28 years and have known this song my whole life, and it just hit me tonight: not once is the kid in this story identified as Black! My perception of this story was completely altered by my own experiences, who told the story, and how it was told.
Thatâs what Iâm trying to tell you. You can tell stories of violence that involve Black characters. I love and adore a good hurt/comfort myself! But you need to be cognizant of your audience and how theyâll perceive the story youâre telling, and that includes the types of imagery you include. Itâs not effective catharsis via hurt/comfort for the audience if your Black readers are being completely left out of the comfort. âI wrote this for myselfâ thatâs cool, but⊠if you wrote racism for yourself, and youâre willing to admit that to yourself, thatâs on you. Iâd like to think thatâs not your intention! You can write these stories of woe and pain without mistreating your Black characters- but that requires knowing and acknowledging when and how youâre doing that!
@afropiscesism makes a solid point in this post: our horror stories are not just fairytales full of amorphous boogiemen meant to teach lessons. Racial violence is very real, very alive, and we cannot act like the things we write can be dismissed outright as âoh well itâs not realâ. Sure, those characters arenât real. But the way you feel about Black bodies and violence is, and often it can slip into your writing as a pattern without you even realizing it. Be willing to get uncomfortable and check yourself on this as you write, as well as noticing it in other works!
If youâre constantly thinking âI would never do thisâ, youâll never stop yourself when you inevitably do! If you know what violent imagery can be evoked, you can utilize it or avoid it altogether- but only if youâre willing to get honest about it. You might not intend to do any of this, but it doesnât matter if you donât change the pattern, because as always, itâs the thought that counts, but the action that delivers!
jbbartram-illu
pixelskylines
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
