Week 10: Blacks in Horror
Coleman examines the representation of Black people in American horror films in the 1980s in comparison to the cultural and social circumstances Black people faced in that time. The white flight, a migration of white population out of the urban areas into the suburbs, otherized the inner city areas and emboldened the spatial association with blackness, poverty, and crime. The lack of black culture represented on screen further otherizes urban communities and reaffirmed the whiteness as homogenous in the suburban areas. Coleman notes how the white flight reinstated racial segregation through housing policy exclusion backed by the local and federal government, perpetuating the racial stereotypes against the non-white population, especially the Black people. The 80s horror films clearly reflect the racial division in residential areas, in which that Black people are not allowed in the white suburbia. While the Native American people would haunt the white communities for taking their land, the Black culture could not exist in the white suburb with a plausible narrative even in the guise of the monster. The slasher films expose the duplicity of the white flight in which those homogenous white suburbs cannot recognize dangerous strangers and predators because the monster looks like one of them. Coleman analyzes that Black people are only allowed to enter white spaces when they actively protect and preserve whiteness in the horror genre. She calls this a new form of black exploitation, remarking how black characters' self-sacrificial deaths only serve the white interest and not their own.
She also points out black characters need a saintly narrative or magical or supernatural powers to be "the moral equivalent of a 'normal White one" (153). Coleman argues that the magic supposedly compensates for the lack in Black characters–class, education, culture, etc.–which the filmmakers deemed as an act to counter racial stereotypes when, in fact, emboldened the stereotypes. Along with the downfall of independent/drive-in theatres and the rise of multiplex cinema across the nation in the 1970s and 80s, the horror genre began to cater to the white audience and focus on mainstream themes rather than niche, non-mainstream oppositional themes. The white young adult became the main target for the horror genre, excluding non-white communities on and off the screen. Michael Jackson had inserted himself into the horror aesthetics in Thriller and Ghost with high-quality special effects and horror acceptable to the mainstream. While Michael Jackson somewhat popularized "Blacks in horror," the black characters in horror films continued to struggle against stereotypical tropes. Even within the demographic of black characters in horror, black women were silenced to add to their monstrosity. Coleman concludes that the 80s horror films coded the monsters as white, male, and suburban, leaving the racialized others, specifically the Black people, to become a scapegoat of reaffirming whiteness.