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By Priscilla Wiredu
Two years ago, I wrote an article about the portrayals of Black people in horror movies. The article discusses the types of roles Black people play in such films wherein they pretty much end up dying painfully and unjustly. The main point of this article was to showcase how Black people aren’t wanted in horror cinema unless they are suffering. They do not want to be seen as heroes, survivors, or protagonists. It would have been a solid theory that Black people simply wouldn’t survive in horror films.
Now, a new theory arises: maybe Black people are too smart to get into horror movie plots.
A survival technique
Famed director Jordan Peele has made several films with Black actors with the underlying theme of these films being racism. Peele’s debut feature,Get Out (2017), follows the story of a Black man as he finds out the hypnotic and terrifying secrets of his white girlfriend’s family. As the title suggests, the protagonist has to get out before he becomes their next victim.
On the Internet, many skits and videos comically show how Black people would react in horror movies, and why these films would then end faster than anticipated. It’s not because Black people are buzzkills and ruin the fun. Black Americans, specifically, have been socially engineered to avoid danger and conflict whenever it’s presented. They’ve inherited a generational survival instinct that has transcended even today.
Experiences of the oppressed vs the oppressors
Southern physician Samuel Cartwright (1793-1863) was famous for coining the term drapetomania, a racist fluke disguised as a mental illness that explained the psychology of enslaved Black people who escaped. Cartwright theorized that the enslaved who wanted to escape slavery were mentally unhinged since slavery made their lives better. He also believed Black people were put on this earth to be enslaved for White people. It was deemed unfathomable to break free from that.
Of course, drapetomania has long since been debunked, with more verifiable studies on Black mental illness and well-being coming to light, and advancements in Black mental health help. However, the reason why it is mentioned here is paramount to explain why there is such a difference in approaching danger when it comes to Black and White people.
As history tells us, White people came from Europe, participated in the most recent slave trade, brought Africans to Americas and colonized every group of color into their own little box. For decades, Black people have fought against slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, hate crimes, and other racist systemic disadvantages to get where they are today. White people, on the other hand, have regressed when it comesto reigning superiority – no longer owning slaves, integrating with people of color,andracist laws being abandoned.However,White people, of course not all the time, now face consequences for their racist behaviors.
Real-life horrors
After putting up with racist practices, discrimination, gaslighting, and too many other forms of mistreatment to name, Black people in Western society have developed a sixth-sense sort of “power” that helps them understand they are not wanted in a certain area and therefore must leave if they want to live.
Sundown towns, public lynchings, police brutality as examined in the murder of Emmett Till, and the horrors enslaved Black people faced on plantations explains why how Black people have developed this instinct.
Ancestral Instincts
Stories from the enslaved that are told from families to families, and news stories about police brutality and unjust killings of Black people, are enough to make Black people worry about their lives and safety that to just frolic into a haunted place as opposed to White people. White people have a superiority complex due to centuries of indoctrinating their beliefs and colonizing parts of the world. For example, White supremacists fear that they’re being replaced and facing karma for the damage they inflicted upon the world (which is far from the truth).
Back to the drapetomania theory. Perhaps, Black people were mentally ill to want to escape slavery because if slavery was bad, what made them think the outside world would be any more welcoming to them?
This theory in real life
Black people are aware of the staggering difference between how they act and how White people act in dangerous situations. They are also aware of racism in horror films. The 2019 documentary, Horror Noire,details the history of racist cinema and how only recently have Black people mastered the horror genre. Of course, Black people try to make the best of it, making social commentary films, such as Peele’s Nope, Get Out, and the 2022 horror comedy The Blackening,a movie about Black friends who go to a cabin and try to survive a serial killer with their knowledge of horror films and Black peoples portrayals.
Black Americans have used this instinct as a means of surviving in an racist anti-Black society for centuries. It has informed their arts, songs, poems,and struggles giving other members of society the chance to sympathetically view Black experiences from Black perspectives.
Priscilla Wiredu is a writer for this year’s Black Voice project. An alumni of York University, she graduated with Honors where she studied Social Sciences. She then went on to get an Ontario Graduate certificate in Creative Writing from the Humber School for Writers, and a college certificate in Legal Office Administration at Seneca College. She is currently studying for the LSAT in hopes of going to law school. Her main goal as a Black Voices writer is to ensure Black issues and Black Pride are enunciated through her works.