Blackness of Darkness

the blackness of

darkness

fear and race in American horror

Scary stuff in scary movies

Salem witch trials

1692-1693

Candyman (1992)

"[Horror] fiction is a gradually evolving art form that mirrors the concerns of a given era or society"

Molly Boyd (2002)

"[Horror] is a strategy that (re)iterates a dominant discourse of otherness"

Corinna Lenhardt (2020)

"The call of cthulhu" (1929)

H.P. Lovecraft

“They had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles, [an] indescribable horde of human abnormality [...]. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped bonfire [...]. Although there must have been nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. [...] The prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes [...] gave a coloring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult. But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprizing consistency to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

king kong (1933)

(1954)

Lovecraft country(2020)

Uncle Tom's Cabin

"Topsy"

She was one of the blackest of her race; and her round shining eyes, glittering as glass beads, moved with quick and restless glances over everything in the room. Her mouth, half open with astonishment at the wonders of the new Mas’r’s parlor, displayed a white and brilliant set of teeth. Her woolly hair was braided in sundry little tails, which stuck out in every direction. She was dressed in a single filthy, ragged garment, made of bagging. Altogether, there was something odd and goblin-like about her appearance⁠—something, as Miss Ophelia afterwards said, “so heathenish,” as to inspire that good lady with utter dismay.

(2017)

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