Horror is booming.
And within the genre, Black storytelling seems to be coming into its own. Critics and bloggers (myself included) have been quick to declare a new renaissance in Black horror, the most important since the 1970s. Writer/producer Tananarive Due pumps the brakes on the hype a little bit, but even she has to admit this current trend feels different. I might characterize her mood as “cautiously optimistic.”
I don’t need to spend much time belaboring this well-covered point but the new resurgence can’t be discussed without mentioning the commercial and critical success of Jordan Peele’s searing 2017 debut Get Out, along with his subsequent Oscar win for Best Screenplay (an historic first for a Black writer).
Of course a renaissance is by definition a collective movement, and I’m sure Peele would be the first to admit that he is standing on the capable shoulders of creators like Rusty Cundieff and the great Ernest Dickerson, among others.
It’s been four years since Get Out, and it doesn’t seem out of pocket to suggest that Little Marvin’s new Amazon-produced horror series Them is riding the wave created by Peele’s box office hit (and his ambitious-if-flawed Us). And right at this moment I am choosing to go glass-half-full and say that this new series is providing a valuable lesson: representation is not the same thing as progress, and even a golden age has bad days once in a while.
Them is created and written by Little Marvin, showrun by David Matthews and executive produced by Lena Waithe. It stars Ashley Thomas and the magnetic Deborah Ayorinde, moving west with their daughters (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Melody Hurd) during the Great Migration of American Blacks in the middle of the 20th century.
They land in an alabaster suburb of Los Angeles, and to say that they receive a chilly reception from their uniformly white neighbors would be to dramatically understate the situation. Alison Pill plays the Queen Bitch Betty Wendell with acerbic gusto, and she galvanizes the unequivocally racist community to drive out the well-meaning Emory family by any means necessary. As if the White bigots aren’t enough, something supernatural (and no less fanatical) lurks inside their home.
Them became the #1 series on Amazon upon its release, and it has enjoyed moderate critical praise for its slick production design and gutsy acting performances. But any of the buzz you may have heard might just be the disgruntled vibration of controversy, and you don’t need to look far on social media to find a collective exhaustion with the particular kind of pain that defines the show, which reaches its apex in the agonizing fifth episode, “COVENANT I.” (directed by Janicza Bravo, the only Black director on the crew).
The problem is one of Black pain, a phrase and concept that has made its way into mainstream discussions of media as Black representation in Hollywood has painstakingly improved, one hard-earned project at a time.
While I can define the concept of Black trauma (and why it may be problematic) I cannot describe how it feels. I am a White man living in a system that automatically rewards both my race and my gender, and the relevant and necessary discussion surrounding the recycled commercialization of Black suffering is not one that needs my voice. If anything, it is the repeated opinions and actions of White men that got us into this mess in the first place.
So don’t take it from me.
Jason Parham of WIRED astutely parses the detrimental effects of Black pain in media: “Maybe because I see this pain so readily, and sometimes experience it personally, I wonder: Who do they think it is for? What good is all of this pain doing any of us when we live with it daily?” He references Them as well as the Oscar-winning short Two Distant Strangers, which uses a sci-fi horror premise to put Black trauma on loop. Parham grimly asserts that for Black people “the cost of attention is the constant reminder of our suffering.”
Representation can cut both ways.
Something that White people can take for granted—like opening a social media app—can prove harrowing for Black people in America and elsewhere. As stated by journalist/activist A. Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez, “There is nowhere to hide from trauma when you’re a Black person in 2020, and the more time online, the higher the risks.”
Terrie Williams founded her own public relations agency while struggling with untreated depression, and her book Black Pain: It Just Looks Like We’re Not Hurting unpacks the toll of (and possible solutions to) emotional pain in Black communities. The connection to this topic doesn’t need to be spelled out.
When it comes to critiques of Them in particular, there are Black critics who have fairly and astutely spelled out the issue. Angelica Jade Bastién’s scathing writeup for Vulture calls the show “degradation porn,” going so far as to call it not just morally bankrupt but “anti-Black.”
Lovia Gyarkye’s piece for The Hollywood Reporter drives the point home with a rhetorical question: “If this kind of art doesn’t say anything new or different about the relationship between Black people and America, then it risks becoming little more than trauma porn. After all, do we really need more images of Black people dying?”
Gyarkye finds something crucial in that first sentence.
Films like Get Out, Us, Candyman, Ganja & Hess, and Eve’s Bayou do not shy away from Black pain, but they do it while adding something to the ongoing cultural conversation about the Black experience in America. That experience is tied to historical and modern trauma, certainly, but it isn’t the whole picture.
The dominance of pain in the emotional spectrum of Black storytelling (particularly when the storytellers are not Black themselves) reduces the Black experience to something immovable and obscuring. It risks (by accident or motive) profiting off trauma rather than making any attempt to heal or contextualize it. There is a welcome and increasing insistence by many to not forget about Black joy in our rush to declare a renaissance of representation. For Black stories in particular, pain is not off the table—but it shouldn’t be the table.
This “golden age” will live and die on the ability and willingness of storytellers to depict the Black experience with humanity and empathy, compassion and humor—regardless of genre. It will also depend on the willingness of studio executives to green light these kinds of stories, which in turn depends on audiences’ appetites for projects that tell human stories responsibly. Representation in casting doesn’t do anything to dismantle a Hollywood system that is still largely anti-Black: we need more Black and Brown people in boardrooms and directors’ chairs—behind the camera as well as in front of it.
The alarmingly widespread comparisons between Them and the works of Jordan Peele indicate a still-present lack of representation in Black horror, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the content itself.
Them may bear some superficial resemblance to movies like Us and Get Out (and the marketing made sure to emphasize this) but any similarities dissolve once the writers show their cards. If anything, Them is more similar in spirit and structure to American Horror Story than anything Peele has directed or produced. It is stylish and provocative, but with little moving underneath the surface.
From a critical perspective, Them plops itself down in the middle of an ongoing debate about the validity of Black trauma in media as if it hasn’t been listening. Its violence is extreme, its symbolism is ham-fisted, and its tone comes across as shockingly oblivious. I am certain that it was made with good intentions by talented people, but it lacks the complexity or empathy to add anything meaningful to the conversation. As a work of horror it is largely inept, and as a work of social commentary it is at best hollow—and at worst irresponsible.
In its singular attempt to depict the blunt cruelty of overt racism, it largely misses the silent evil of complicity referred to by Martin Luther King Jr. as the “White moderate,” more interested in order than justice. White people do not see themselves in this show because no one besides the most openly vile think of themselves as racist. White viewers can tsk tsk at the appalling behavior of fictional Whites without learning a lesson, while tacitly accepting yet again that to see a Black person on the screen is to watch them suffer. Many Black viewers, by their own admission, are tired of it.
So I echo the question raised by Parham and others: who is this for? Because it’s a shame to have nothing to show for all this pain.