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Blog Post #6

My blog post for this week is meant to round out my final thoughts on the class for this quarter. To start, I would like to give a quick introduction for my Final Project. I wrote a short story titled “A Tight Leash” that explored black horror themes such as white supremacy, retribution, and morality tales. It’s an Afrofuturistic story that follows a narrator’s recounting of an alternate history following the abolition of slavery in the US. It was inspired by works we have gone over in class such as The Birth of a Nation, Love Wanga, and Us. I had fun writing it and getting a chance to write freely in an academic space for a change. The works I was inspired by were just a few from a long list that we went over throughout the quarter. Some other films and stories that I really enjoyed from this class were Wake, “Wet Pain”, and Eve’s Bayou due to the southern gothic themes that they invoked. I think there’s something about growing up black in America that has attracted me to the southern gothic genre, having generations of family from the South (while not personally being from there) makes some of these stories a bit less fiction in my eyes. There are very real and very horrific things that have happened to black people in the South and when I see writers connecting horror and the South in their stories, no matter how far-fetched, it always seems grounded with a slight chance of realism to it. When I first started putting ideas together for my short story I wanted to capture the feeling and tonality that was displayed in the works that I called some of my favorites earlier. I found myself departing from this original idea as I continued to write my story and found new inspiration within my own thoughts. I didn’t quite hit the mark that I had originally set out for, but I’m equally as proud of what I produced instead. All in all, I would like to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this class. The content, lectures, and workload was all engaging and I would strongly recommend this class to others. Learning about the hidden black history in the horror genre was so enlightening to me and caused me to look at a lot of things within the genre in a different light. It was an overall inspiring experience and I hope I can find a similar class that gives me the same feeling.

[for-dues-class]

Blog Post #5

For this week’s blog post I want to talk about the 1972 film Blacula and the 1998 film Beloved. These two films share the commonality of telling stories for black people, just being done in very different ways. Blacula came in a time where black stories were not being told on a big stage. The only way you would really see a story you could relate to as a black person was in blaxploitation films. Blaxploitation films were cheaply-made movies in the 70’s that were meant to pander towards a black audience. Producers were looking to make a cheap profit off of these “hyper-black” films that black audiences would flock to in order for a chance to see a film that you could relate to. I use the term “hyper-black” because these films included many stereotypically black tropes and themes such as soul music, prostitution, afros, drugs, and many more. Including stereotypes such as these in black films only further perpetuate these preconceived notions to the white audience that comes into see these films. Even with these hurtful factors, many blaxploitation films are looked back at fondly by the audience due to it having such an ingrained place in the culture. Other blaxploitation films such as Shaft, Foxy Brown, and Super Fly are all very popular and important films to the black community. As audiences continued to become accustomed to seeing black stories, it became a more normalized component of the film industry. You could now see black stories take a step further into fiction while still staying with its roots. This is the case with the other film I’ll be talking about, Beloved. Beloved is a horror film that mixes black heritage - pertaining to our history of slavery in the US - and horror tropes such as poltergeists. Black stories don’t have to be told as is or in an exaggerated fashion, now we can have more advanced plots. There is a higher budget meaning more people are willing to back this horse and there is genuine interest in it, rather than a fake interest for exploitation. Something I enjoyed about Beloved is the combination of gothic themes and the staticy feeling I often feel in shows and movies from the late 90’s to early 2000’s. There is something about the media from this time period that has a certain realness to it. I likely attribute it to being close enough to my time period while also not having the illusion-breaking access to actors and sets that we have today.. These factors gave me a similar nostalgic feeling that I had while watching Eve’s Bayou.

[for-dues-class]

Blog Post #4

For this week’s discussion post we are talking about our lectures taking place in the week of October 31st, Halloween. I wish I was able to spend more time in class this week but I got stuck at work, eventually though I was able to catch up with the lectures and the media we went over. The first piece I’ll be discussing is Eve’s Bayou. I enjoyed this film mainly because of the starpower that was in it. With Samuel L. Jackson, Jurnee Smollett, and Meagan Good all starring, I am truly surprised I’ve never heard of it before. Another aspect that I enjoyed about it was the fact that the director was able to make so many characters appear as unreliable, something that reminded me of the 2021 film The Last Duel. Even though the scene in question is uncomfortable and it may be a bit unethical to be speculating, you still have to wonder what happened between the characters of Louis and Cecily. In the end I do think Louis is lying about the ordeal because he was seen to be untruthful many more times throughout the film. Louis was unfaithful towards his wife and has lied about it many times, the truth of his heritage has to be called into question. I sometimes find myself asking, why would he feel the need to write a letter about the situation if he didn’t feel guilty? Though it is also important to keep in your mind the virtue of innocence until proven guilty, it’s wrong of me to speculate. Moving on, I also really enjoyed The Night of the Living Dead. This is one of the films that we have gone over that I knew the importance of in black culture. There was a black lead in a 1960s film where the color of his skin didn’t have anything to do with his character. It also wasn’t just any 1960s film, it is one of the most celebrated horror films and one of the earliest depictions of an undead, flesh-eating zombie. Duane Jones’s part was not written for a black man, but he was deemed to have the best audition and no changes were made to the script after his casting. He was allowed to play the role of strong, male lead among an almost entirely-white cast. It’s an exciting thing to talk about as a black man today and I’m sure it was an electric feeling for Jones during his time. It definitely made my Halloween a little bit better.

[for-dues-class]

Blog Post #3

For this week’s blog post I would mainly like to talk about Wet Pain by Terence Taylor because I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I don’t know if I would say it’s my favorite story we have gone over in this class, but it is definitely up there. Truthfully, in the beginning I had not even planned on reading it and was just going to go watch the lecture that Professor Due had done on it, but in the end I decided it was going to be a quick enough read to just do it. I think the thing that really ended up sticking with me was the pit that I felt in my stomach for most of the read. I felt more uneasy reading this story than I had felt for any other material we have gone over this quarter so I have to applaud Taylor for that. After a bit of thought, there were three things that I think mainly contributed to that uneasiness. The first of which comes from our main character and narrator Greg. Greg is explicitly described in the reading as being both black and queer, this opens up the character to being extremely vulnerable to the outside world. Racism and homophobia runs rampant around the world and for someone to have to deal with both of them at the same time is a very tough task. What makes it worse is some are never able to find that safe space. Homophobia is a big issue in the black community and subtle racism can always find its way into the queer community, Greg even having to deal with this from a man he met at the club. Greg being vulnerable to all of these aggressions raises the stakes on what can happen. Another contributing factor is Dean’s descent into madness. In the beginning Dean is pretty much described as “one of the good ones”, in that he is completely blind to his differences with Greg which contributes to their friendship. In an early scene he calls himself colorblind which is a statement that I have always hated because I think it is important to value our differences (this sentiment is shared by another character in the story which I was excited to see). When Dean started his descent into his “illness”, the racism seemed pretty deep from the very first time it appeared. This caused me to question just how far the racism was going to go as we progressed over time. The scariest part about Dean’s descent though was the fact that we never actually saw his setting/point of view for the whole story. The entire story was told from Greg’s perspective so anything that was happening to Dean and the things that he was doing when he wasn’t talking to Greg was a complete mystery. Our imaginations are left to imagine the horrors that are going on. The last factor that made the story what it was, was the setting. A subplot of the reading was that Hurricane Katrina was slowly making its way towards New Orleans which is where Dean’s house was located. The readers know that Katrina devastated New Orleans when it happened which keeps us concerned for Dean’s family for the whole story. Terence Taylor uses Katrina as a metaphor for the darkness clouding in Dean’s mind. As the stormfront makes its way to New Orleans, Dean’s racism and alcoholism is progressively getting worse and worse. It is a boiling point that the reader knows Dean will reach at some point and all we can do is sit and wait. I think this was a very intelligently written story and I am very thankful I took the time to sit down and read it.

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Blog Post #2

This was a really exciting week for Professor Due’s Racism, Survival, and Black Horror Aesthetic class. We had a guest speaker in Dewayne Perkins who both wrote and starred in the 2022 horror/comedy film The Blackening. This was really exciting and he gave us a look into the process of getting his sketch turned into a theatrically released film. This was a decently popular movie when it came out so it was exciting to see him and just to listen to our questions for a few minutes. My fellow students asked a variety of questions which I thought were interesting. He was asked about the plot device of the board game and how it was used to move the story along. A question was brought up about the character Ranger White and how his stereotype of the “white savior” was used for comedic bits. Someone asked about the character of Allison, who’s identity as a mixed-race woman brought forth the topic of feeling secure in your blackness. Having to play up your blackness was a big part of the movie and the main characters playing the board game as a way to defend their blackness ended up being what got many of them killed. I thought that was a very interesting metaphor for the black community as a whole as we have seen this play out many times. The Blackening was not the only media we discussed this week, we also delved into Professor Due’s story, The Keeper, and the 1936 film The Love Wanga. I think the most interesting part about The Keeper was how it connected personally with Professor Due. In the story, the grandmother’s passing was inspired by Professor Due’s own fears regarding her grandmother’s death. I felt a connection to that as I remember the anxiety I felt when my grandparents were on hospice during the COVID lockdown. Everytime I had an opportunity to stop by the house, I felt a severe sense of dread because I never knew when it would be the last time I saw them. It also reminded me of a book I read in elementary school titled The City of Ember. A similar situation happened in that story regarding a grandmother and I have a distinct memory of how sad I was during that scene. Still, with all of that sadness being cast to the side, I really did enjoy The Keeper. The last story we went over this week was The Love Wanja and what really stuck with me here was how it was one of the earliest depictions of zombies in film. These were not brain-eating, flesh-loving zombies, they were mind-controlled, voodoo-powered zombies. It was not only one of the earliest depictions of zombies, but it was also one of the earliest depictions of interracial love. Though it was done in a bit of a problematic manner, it still explored love between an interracial couple which is something that is still judged in today’s media. As we continue to go over media, we see more and more how intertwined black culture is with the horror genre and I can’t wait to learn more.

[for-dues-class]

Blog Post #1

Three weeks into Professor Tananarive Due’s 112A class and I can say that I have been enjoying the lectures so far. I have enjoyed the lectures themselves, but even more I have been enjoying the content. As a casual fan of horror, I have been excited to see how people who look like me have been a part of the genre throughout history. It is hard to find black faces in the mainstream horror scene other than one of the more exciting names in modern directing, Jordan Peele. Peele’s movies are a personal favorite of mine, with Us being my favorite, and I wanted to find more works with or by black people in the genre that I could learn about and relate to. These works provide a perspective that is not widely covered and there is much to discuss about it. Bree Newsome’s “Wake” gives an interesting take on generational trauma in black households. The main character, Charmaine, makes a conscious decision not to assist her father as he is dying, most likely out of spite. At her father’s funeral, she takes a jar of dirt from the grave and later uses that dirt to conjure the perfect husband. Once Charmaine eventually sees the evil in this husband she kills him, but not before she ends up pregnant and unsure of her future. Charmaine’s life has been negatively affected by three generations of black men all directly impacting the next. Her father kept her hidden away and prevented her from finding a loving husband. Her self-esteem was hurt and she probably felt she was too old due to gossip by other ladies. Driven to find a husband, she refused to help her father and used dark magic to create one. This husband eventually revealed himself to be abusive towards her and drove Charmaine to kill him as well. This husband impregnated her and left her a single mother without much money. This future kid will be very expensive and there is no telling how he will turn out. Though using voodoo to make the story “mystical” and “spooky”, generational trauma is a very serious issue in the black community. Having had families torn apart from slavery, family values are a still-fresh concept that we are continuing to develop today. Fatherless and motherless households are missing vital components and information, greatly impacting our community. That being said, it is important that we do our best to step up in the face of this adversity because excuses can become crutches very easily.