marisamoorewrites

The Most Valuable Thing I Learned in a Graduate English Program

Sun, 01 May 2022 16:27:16 GMT

The most important thing I learned as an English graduate student was the value of learning to write in many different contexts.

Through a variety of both coursework and internship opportunities, I have become exposed to a much wider world of writing than I knew as an undergraduate. I started out as a self-declared literary studies student, but that love for close-reading, analysis, group discussion, and research had prepared me well for writing in many other backgrounds. As a graduate student, I became entrenched in professional and technical writing, marketing and public writing, design, and teaching writing and research. Even though these contexts seem distantly related, I have found that English Studies and writing in these many different contexts are intertwined, informing one another.

I also learned the value of a Master's degree this past year. In some emotional moments of soul-searching (as we all go through at some point in college), I realized that a doctorate program wasn't for me. I had always thought of a Master's program as just a step in that direction, and I was worried for a moment that I was moving sideways, so to speak. This couldn't be further from the truth. A Master's degree is not just a bridge between an undergraduate and a doctoral program. For me, it was the most formative years of my whole educational experience. It brought me experiences that have vastly reshaped how I understand writing, how I value my skills as a writer, and how I value a graduate English degree.

A graduate English degree is useful in far-wider contexts than I could have imagined. Studying English in this Master's program has been instrumental in developing skills such as close-reading, analysis, research, discussion in group settings, creating and defending arguments, public speaking, and much more. Writing is everywhere, even in this digital age. The ability to think critically, read closely, and communicate through text effectively will always be needed, whether we're writing on paper or through a computer screen.

Why There Needs to Be More Indigenous Horror Films Like This One

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 16:10:23 GMT

In 2018, Sgaawaay K'uuna, or Edge of the Knife, first premiered to the public at the Toronto International Film Festival.¹ It is the first film performed completely in the Haida language and about the Haida people, a First Nations tribe native to the Haida Gwaii archipelago off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. It was directed by Gwaii Edenshaw and Helen Haig-Brown in collaboration with Leonie Sandercock, a Professor at the University of British Columbia.

The film is a unique example of how film can be used to preserve and revive traditions otherwise lost to the colonizing hand of history. It was created with the goal of revitalizing the Haida language, and it is being used to teach the language today.²

The film is a thriller and horror, depicting the Haida legend of the Gaagiixiid, or the wildman. Set in the 19th century, Edge of the Knife follows Adiits'ii, a young and irresponsible man attending an annual fishing retreat on the island of Haida Gwaii. During this retreat, he accidentally causes the death of Gaas, a young boy and son of Adiits'ii's best friend. Adiits'ii disappears into the wilderness, grieving and guilted over the young child's death. In the year that follows, he becomes Gaagiixiid, or the wildman.³

"They say a fire calls you into the forest. The cold will make you desperate for fire. But no matter how long you run, you cannot catch the fire. You and run and run until your mind is sick and the spirits take you over. You become wild. You become Gaagiixid."

— Edge of the Knife³

The opening lines from the film describe the Gaagiixiid, familiarizing both Haida and wider audiences alike with the legend of the wildman. They are, of course, spoken in Haida, a beautiful and melodic language that enhances the gorgeous cinematography. Edge of the Knife is a story about fatherhood, coping with depression and trauma, and most importantly, community. When the families return to Haida Gwaii the following year for another fishing retreat, they work together to find Adiits'ii and banish the spirit that has turned him into the wildman. This sense of community is reflected both on-screen and in the production of this film.

Edge of the Knife represents the joined efforts of multiple Haida member councils, as shown in the opening credits,³ to represent Haida language and legends. Monica Butler, in recounting the history of Indigenous representations in media, observes that "the media routinely disregards its Native audience while promoting familiar, inaccurate, and profitable stereotypes of Indigenous peoples for its primarily non-Indigenous audience."⁴ A few examples of such harmful representations of Indigenous people in horror include the trope of the haunted ancient Indian burial ground, appearing in wildly popular films like The Shining (1980) and Poltergeist (1982). Dr. Kali Simmons, an Oglala Lakota Indigenous studies scholar, comments on the nature of '80s horror films in a presentation she gave in 2021 (which is available to watch here ):

"There's a turn towards sympathetic representations…but ultimately, they would also continue to traffic in this idea that Native people were objects of the past, which doesn't help. So, rather than maybe allowing Indigenous people to tell their own stories, these narratives primarily developed to sort of allay guilt around the Anglo dispossession of Indigenous peoples."⁵

One way that this "Anglo guilt" manifests is through the trope of the ancient Indian burial ground, wherein Natives who were mistreated, disenfranchised, and murdered seek revenge on white protagonists in these horror films. "In terms of how these fit into previous trends…again, Indigenous peoples are rendered as these extinct objects of the past."⁴ By reducing Indigenous representation to angry ghosts and creepy skeletons, horror films like these create an audience perception that Indigenous people are no longer around. This attitude, among many other factors such as residential schools, contributes to the cultural loss of Indigenous people who are still alive today. This cultural loss includes the very real extinction of Indigenous languages, like the Haida language.

Before production began on Edge of the Knife, fewer than one percent of the Haida were fluent in the language, with most speakers over the age of 70.¹ This film was effectively produced during a cultural and linguistic crisis, and it's for this very reason that horror films like Edge of the Knife need to continue to be made, funded, and supported by viewers.

You can watch this visually stunning and linguistically unique film on Shudder .

Footnotes:

Sandercock, L. (2018, September 5). TIFF premiere: Sgaawaay K'uuna, the first feature film about the Haida people. The Conversation. The Conversation TIFF premiere: Sgaawaay K'uuna, the first feature film about the Haida people .
Stewart, B. (2017, November 2). Haida goes Hollywood: Making a film — and trying to save a language. CBC News. CbcHaida goes Hollywood: Making a film — and trying to save a language | CBC News
Edenshaw, G. & Haig-Brown, H. (Directors). (2018). SGaawaay K'uuna [Edge of the Knife] [Film]. Niijang Xyaalas Productions.
Butler, M. (2018). Guardians of the Indian Image. American Indian Quarterly, 42(1), 1-42.
Fantasia International Film Festival. (2021, August 7). [ Fantasia 2021 ] Haunting the National Consciousness: The Rise of Indigenous Horror [Video]. YouTube. YouTube [Fantasia 2021] Haunting the National Consciousness: The Rise of Indigenous Horror .

Reimagining Black Women in Horror in HBO's Lovecraft Country

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 17:09:01 GMT

In the fall of 2020, Misha Green's television adaptation of the novel Lovecraft Country aired on HBO. The show is a treat in genre storytelling, pulling together threads of horror, weird fiction, sci-fi, and the gothic into a tale about a black and white family's fight over magic. The show and novel's main character is Atticus "Tic" Freeman, a Korean War veteran and descendant of a woman who was enslaved by the white, rich, and magic-possessing Braithwhite family. However, it is the black female characters in the show who provide the most interesting and illuminating perspective on the intersection between blackness and womanhood in 1950s America.

Before delving any further into the characters, we need to talk about bell hooks and what she calls the "oppositional gaze." hooks argues that white slave-owners would punish enslaved black people for looking, an attitude and stigma that has trickled through history into her own experiences.¹ She points out the danger of black men looking at white women, at the violence carried out for just a gaze. An oppositional gaze is a result and response to this stigma. "All attempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming urge to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze,"¹ hooks writes.

So, what does this have to do with Lovecraft Country? Green's show and its female characters embrace this idea of an oppositional gaze and seek to rectify the erasure of black women in media through black female representation. "When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television," a time closely related to the setting of Lovecraft Country, "they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black representation."¹

In horror, a genre of storytelling most historically defined by its negation and (mis)representation of black people, Lovecraft Country uses its black female characters to subvert and combat the prevalence of white supremacist mass media. hooks argues that the construction of the oppositional gaze comes from a desire to resist media that devalues, objectifies, or dehumanizes black women's place in society, and reconstructs identities in resistance.¹ One of Lovecraft Country's black female filmmakers speaks about this issue of representation and characterization:

"We, as Black female artists, don’t have any different depth than anybody. It’s that we don’t get the opportunity to explore the depth of our instrument. How often are writers just writing stories for us to explore and play and be imaginative and curious?" - Jurnee Smollet ("Leti Lewis") Hollywood Reporter

Letitia "Leti" Lewis is a family friend and love interest of Tic. But to reduce her character to just that would be inaccurate. She's adventurous, a social activist, and a photographer. She is joyful, resourceful, and deeply caring towards her sister, Tic, the Freeman family, and her community. In episode three, "Holy Ghosts," she buys a large house in an all-white neighborhood in North Chicago, renting rooms out to black folks in an area where they would otherwise be unwelcome. When the neighbors (and disfigured ghosts in the home) begin terrorizing Leti, she searches for the truth about the trauma lingering in the house.

When Tic asks about her haunted house, she says, "Hell, I thought the world was one way and I found it isn't. And that terrifies me, but I can't live in fear, I won't. I gotta face this new world head-on and stake my claim in it." This line particularly illustrates her well-developed, nuanced characterization. Leti helps exorcise the spirit of the home's previous owner, Hiram Epstein, who used to kidnap and torture black people in the house. In a charged moment, Leti takes the hands of the other spirits and banishes Epstein's spirit from the home, finally bringing peace to the others.

Leti is just one of many black female characters in this show that resist the mischaracterization or erasure of black women in film and television, especially in the horror genre. All of the characters are nuanced, driven, and reflective of the deeply complex nature of the human experience, of the black woman's experience.

Footnotes

hooks, bell. (1999). The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators. In S. Thornham (Ed.), Feminist Film Theory: A Reader (pp. 307–320). New York University Press.

For H.P. Lovecraft, with All My Conflicted Feelings

Tue, 01 Feb 2022 16:42:58 GMT

This blog title comes from the dedication in Victor LaValle's novella The Ballad of Black Tom, a retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's short story "The Horror at Red Hook." Ballad absolutely teems with these conflicted feelings, both a stark criticism of Lovecraft's xenophobic writing and appreciation for his creative mind—it is a love letter written in blood.

Lovecraft's blatant racism is evident in both his fictional and epistolary writings. In a letter to contemporary writer Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft describes the inspiration for the Red Hook short story:

"The idea that black magic exists in secret today, or that hellish antique rites still exist in obscurity, is one that I have used and shall use again. When you see my new tale "The Horror at Red Hook," you will see what use I make of the idea in connexion with the gangs of young loafers & herds of evil-looking foreigners that one sees everywhere in New York."¹

LaValle's novella is interesting in how it subverts and recontextualizes Lovecraft's xenophobia from the original short story. Tom is a black man from Harlem working for the story's main antagonist, Robert Suydam, a well-off white man. In this novella, Suydam convinces the "gangs of...evil-looking foreigners" of Red Hook to help him wake Cthulhu, appealing to their plight as people "forced to live in hybrid squalor."³ When Tom hears this, he realizes that helping Suydam would still be subjugation under white structures of power. He decides to awaken Cthulhu, but kills Suydam before he can take any throne.

This novella is what Colton Saylor would describe as radical horror. Saylor argues that horror as a genre possesses "deconstructive and diagnostic tendencies - in other words, moments of unsettling or violent spectacle - [that] allow for black radical narratives that reject the constructs of hegemony."² Tom's story is an example of a black radical narrative, one that resists white hegemonic structures of power through violence. This is first evident following the murder of his father by a policeman.

"His night with Robert Suydam returned to him, all of it, all at once. The breathless terror with which the old man spoke of the Sleeping King. A fear of cosmic indifference suddenly seemed comical, or downright naive...What was indifference compared to malice? 'Indifference would be such a relief,' Tommy said."³

During the climax of the novella, Tom, Robert, and a private investigator named Malone fight for control. This scene is from Malone's perspective, and he watches with horror as "Black Tom" brutally slices Suydam's throat with a razor. Malone also finds the policeman who had killed Tom's father, scalped by the same blade. Malone asks Tom why he's carrying out such violence, and he says, "I bear a hell within me. And finding myself unsympathized with, wished to tear up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me, and then to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin." Malone responds, "You're a monster then," to which Tom replies, "I was made one."³

Malone's perspective here particularly heightens the horror aspects of this scene. "Black Tom's" actions seem especially horrific, colored by the perspective of a white man. But we are returned to Tom's narrative in the end. While talking to his friend, Tom says, "Every time I was around them, they acted like I was a monster. So I said goddamnit, I'll be the worst monster you ever saw!... The world will be remade for Him, and His kind. That white man was afraid of indifference; well, now he's going to find out what it's like."³ He's justifying the actions he took to resist Suydam's vie for power, for the vengeance carried out on his father's murderer, and for awaking the Sleeping King Chtulhu.

Saylor provides further insight into this connection between horror and black radical narratives. Building on writing from structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov, Saylor argues that horror is like the fantastic. "The horror novel, in its images of the 'fantastic,' incites its readers into moments of contemplation that allow a space for the formation of new perspectives...These sites of 'hesitation' invoke tears in the fabric of power's infallibility, spaces that allow for the possibility of emergent black radical subjectivies."²

Now if that seems like a lot to unpack, it's because it is. But LaValle's story can help untangle Saylor's writing. The Sleeping King presents a horrific image of the "fantastic." This uncaring and enormous beast could wipe out the entire cosmos if it felt like it. Waking Cthulhu threatens the seemingly infallible nature of white power. Because it is Tom who wakes the Sleeping King, we are given the perspective of an agent of black radicalism.

It is difficult to reconcile the influence Lovecraft has had on the horror and science fiction genres with the harmful, racist underpinnings of his writing. But LaValle's novella uses the tools that Lovecraft provides the genre to create moments of "hesitation," of the "fantastic," wherein dominant structures of power can be challenged.

Footnotes:

Kranc, S. H. (2010). The Uncanny Mirror: Race, Miscegenation & the Grammar(s) of the “Weird” in H. P. Lovecraft and China Miélville [conference presentation]. International Association for the Fantastic in Arts Conference, Florida. ttps://sites.psu.edu/speculations/2014/06/12/25/
Saylor, C. (2019). Breaking Down the Door: Horror and Black Radical Fiction. Journal for the Study of Radicalism 13(2), 91-119. JhuProject MUSE -- Verification required! .
LaValle, V. (2016). The Ballad of Black Tom. Tom Doherty Associates.

Writing in New Territory: An Internship in Digital Marketing

Thu, 01 Jul 2021 16:35:01 GMT

I began interning for BizCo Studio (previously SSM Creative Collective) in May of 2021 as part of my graduate curriculum at UNCW. Before I started, I had no experience in the field of branding and social media management or the writing associated with those fields. This internship called on me to draw more from my writing background than I thought, as the work was the furthest from anything I had done before as an English major. Writing copy for various accounts required that I write with a different voice for different audiences. Understanding my audience as well as recognizing and replicating an established brand voice was something that studying English had indirectly prepared me for.

When I wrote for The Second Glass, I needed to write with a playful, alliterative attitude. This is because we were emulating the restaurant owner while running her socials. When I wrote for Bring it Downtown, a Wilmington city social media account, the copy needed to be welcoming and informative. Each account had nuances and tone that aligned with their brand values. As an intern, I sometimes needed to figure out the brand voice just from the previous copy myself, but as an English student, I was able to pick up on those nuances faster.

I think the strongest example of my writing comes from the longer-form blogs that I wrote for our business’s website. For these blogs, I had to come up with a topic related to the digital media and marketing field, research the topic, and create a piece with a clear, distilled message. Understanding my audience was key; cutting down jargon, simplifying sentence structure, and getting to the message more directly were priorities now that I did not often think about as a literary student. Blog writing surprised me in how much it made me reconsider my writing style. Overall, this internship called on a skill I have been practicing for years while also pushing that skill into new territories.

What I Learned About Collaborative Work During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 22:09:37 GMT

The opportunity and ability to communicate with trained experts in a field and produce effective writing informed by these collaborations.

My internship with the UNCW library began during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. I worked completely from home and communicated with my supervisor weekly over Zoom meetings. For the first month, I only worked and communicated with this individual. This situation, which improved my abilities to work and communicate remotely, was also at the detriment of collaborative work. For this reason, I used the resources I was revising to help me connect via my supervisor with the librarians who managed each of these resources under different subjects. I was able to work with the humanities librarian, Lisa Coats, the public health and psychology librarian, Meghan Smith, and several others.

These meetings constituted what I consider to be the most important aspect of technical writing —

This internship was also an opportunity to develop my writing skills as applied to new audiences. As a literary studies major, I primarily wrote for an academic audience using conventions and a voice meant for that group. Writing short web-based descriptions was different from this experience, and it helped widen my ability to connect and write for multiple audiences.

Everything I wrote for this internship was uploaded to the UNCW library website and even in just this short semester, I was able to see development in my writing. Every few weeks, I would review what I prepared in the Excel document for upload to the website. This really allowed me to see how my writing changed, how I began standardizing my voice, what conventions of writing I began using, and as I spoke with more specialized librarians, how my writing on topics that I don't have much experience with took a professional and informed shape.

Inventory as Identity in SOMA by Frictional Games

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 13:21:24 GMT

On September 22, 2015, Frictional Games released the survival horror single-player game SOMA . It followed their well-received Amnesia: The Dark Descent , another survival horror game, released five years earlier. SOMA takes a different route from Amnesia , opting for a streamlined inventory. In Amnesia , the player is heavily involved with the inventory, collecting clues, and managing a dwindling supply of candles ( Amnesia: The Dark Descent , Steam Version). The player suffers sanity damage if without candlelight for too long. In SOMA , you can pick up and inspect items and papers, but nothing goes into your inventory that is not needed later to move the game’s plot further. There is also no sanity damage, but as you become injured in the game, the world begins to look glitched, more and more like a busted screen. This is how SOMA integrates the player with Simon, the main character, and ultimately within the plot and themes of the horror game.

Simon Jarrett is the main character and player avatar. In the first scene of the game, a flashback reveals that Simon had been in a car accident that killed his girlfriend and left him with life-threatening brain damage. He agrees to meet with Ph.D. student David Munshi, who wants to help treat this damage by way of a brain scan, which Munshi intends to use to develop his brain reconstruction project. The treatment fails, but Simon allows Munshi to keep his brain scan. One hundred years pass between this scan and Simon regaining consciousness in an abandoned, underwater research facility called PATHOS-II at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean. Neither Simon nor the player is aware of the intervening time in which the “real” Simon dies of his injury and the terranean world is destroyed by a meteor strike. It is a disorienting shift from Munshi’s office to PATHOS-II. SOMA is about consciousness and questions the circumstances of identity. SOMA uses this streamlined inventory to ingrain the player within Simon’s awareness. There is no awkward pop-up screen with neat little virtual shelves to store items, but an effortless application from Simon’s pocket as needed. It asks players not focus on meta inventory management, but to become ingrained in Simon’s experiences as he tries to escape PATHOS-II. This theme of identity is most evident at the station Omnicron.

Simon and Catherine, a PATHOS-II employee with whom Simon establishes communication in the beginning and meets later on, are working together to launch the ARK. The ARK is a project Catherine worked on before PATHOS-II began falling apart, wherein David Munshi’s brain scan process, now a fully developed technology one hundred years into the future, is being used to store brain scans of PATHOS-II employees in a virtual reality. Catherine sees this as the only way to preserve humanity, and the game's conceit is making your way around PATHOS-II outposts to prepare the ARK for launch into space, where the virtual reality is powered indefinitely by solar energy.

With this goal in mind, Simon and Catherine make their way to the station Omnicron to retrieve deep-sea diving suits, as the ARK and its launcher rest at the deepest part of the station, where Simon’s current suit would crumple under the weight. They find one working suit, but in order for Simon to wear it, his consciousness must be transferred to the preserved remains of an employee already within it. This is possible because of a substance called structure gel, which caused the death of most PATHOS-II employees. It essentially allows for the melding of human tissue and robot. This leads to some scenes of human and robot body horror, the remaining human consciousness (and sometimes tissue) horrifically melded with the robots previously used to run operations at PATHOS-II.

It is revealed that Simon’s brain scan at the beginning of the game was placed in a robotic body with this gel, which is why he’s able to withstand the water pressure as he walks between PATHOS-II outposts along the ocean floor. In other words, he is no longer in a human body. Omnicron forces Simon to question his own humanity and sense of identity when Catherine misleads him about this process of transferred consciousness. Simon installs a battery pack, a cortex chip to store his brain scan, and structure gel to meld the robotic brain and human body together in this deep-sea diving suit they need to reach the ARK. Catherine begins the transferring process, but as Simon wakes up in the new body, he briefly hears his old self ask Catherine if the process worked before the original Simon powers down. Simon realizes that Catherine did not transfer is consciousness but copied it. For the rest of the game, Simon and Catherine are at odds about identity, Simon concerned that his copied consciousness is not valid and unethical, and Catherine convinced that copying consciousness does not matter as long as the copied version is preserved or working towards the preservation of humanity. Simon must now decide whether to remove the battery pack from his original body and let him die or leave him to eternal solitude amongst the murderous robots plaguing a human-less world.

This argument comes to a climax at the end of the game when Simon and Catherine finally make it to the ARK launcher at Phi station, where Simon thinks his and Catherine’s consciousnesses will be uploaded to the ARK. Once again, Simon’s mind is copied and uploaded, leaving the original consciousness in his corporeal body. He becomes angry with Catherine, insisting that the copies “are not us!” ( SOMA, Epic Games Version). Catherine insists that they have preserved something of humanity, and that they just “lost the coin toss.” A technical issue fries the Omnitool wherein Catherine’s consciousness had been stored, leaving Simon completely alone at the bottom of the ocean. The end credits show the copied Simon and Catherine in the ARK, now digitally rendered in human bodies in an earth-like, virtual Elysium. They are happy and at ease in their new bodies and environment.

SOMA , like many other video games, lends itself to critical analysis. “Games are more commonly treated as works of entertainment, culture, or even art than as philosophical machines,” Patrick Jagoda writes in his essay, “Introduction: Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games” (131). But Jagoda argues, with reference to writings from Deleuze and Guattari, “that ‘art thinks no less than philosophy, but it thinks through affects and precepts’” (131). That is to say, art communicates ideas in a codified language of performance. SOMA is no exception, providing for the player and critical audience text with which to derive philosophical meaning. These texts include dialogue and narration, character and monster design, plot, music, and visual design, such as the use of colors, shadows, and light. The dialogue is overtly the “machine” in which philosophy is explored, with discussions about identity and consciousness between Simon and Catherine highly featured. But Simon’s questions of identity are explored through visual design as well, such as in his various bodies and the bodies of others. Horror as a genre device can even be used to explore identity, as evident in the various scenes of body horror in which PATHOS-II employees cling to life, paralyzed and perpetually revived by grotesque robotic amalgamations that are both parasitic and ingrained. In this way, the video game art of SOMA certainly philosophizes, if within the constructed affects and conventions of the video game genre.

Works Cited

Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Steam version, Frictional Games, 8 Sept. 2010.

Jagoda, Patrick. “Conceptual Games, or the Language of Video Games [Special Section].” Critical Inquiry , vol. 45, no. 1, 2018, pp. 130–233. EBSCOhost , search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=mzh&AN=2018399663&site=ehost-live.

SOMA . Epic Games version, Frictional Games, 22 Sept. 2015.

Horror and Racism in Lovecraft Country

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 19:10:40 GMT

On August 16 of this past summer, Misha Green’s television adaptation of the novel Lovecraft Country first aired on the streaming service HBO. The show is set in 1950s Chicago and follows Atticus “Tic” Freeman, a Korean War veteran, and his childhood friend “Leti” Lewis. Tic is an avid reader of Lovecraft and other pulp fiction authors, and the show’s very first scene depicts the infamous Lovecraftian monster, Cthulhu. [SLIDE 2] Howard Phillips Lovecraft was [quote] “anti-Semitic, racist, and classist,” attitudes which ultimately shine through in his work (Sharrett 22). So why would a story put itself in context with Lovecraftian horror if Lovecraft himself was a figure of such contention? Christopher Sharrett writes, “Lovecraft, more than any other writer, gave the [horror] genre its notion of the monstrous Other” (Sharrett 23). Lovecraft Country incorporates this trope, as so many horror films, novels, and shows before it, but subverts what the “Other” has historically represented. This is most evident in the first episode of the series entitled “Sundown.” [SLIDE 3]

In the first episode, Tic, Leti, and Tic’s uncle, George Freeman, travel to Ardham, Massachusetts to look for his missing father, Montrose, who wrote Tic about his [quote] “secret legacy, a birthright that’s been kept from [him]” in Arkham, Massachusetts (“Sundown” 00:13:15-00:13:20). Tic shows the letter to George who identifies the fictional Lovecraftian town of “Arkham” as the real town of Ardham, known only now as Devon County (“Sundown” 00:24:00-00:24:10). [SLIDE 4] When the three arrive at a town called Simmonsville, just outside Devon County, they are met with hostility and racism from the white people living there, chased by another car out of town under gunfire (“Sundown” 00:37:06).

During the chase, a third car appears and manages to flip the assailant's vehicle as if by magic. A white woman exits from the third car, unhurt, and looks at Tic with significance. We are introduced at this point to Christina Braithwhite (“Sundown” 00:38:19-00:39:10). Christina is an interesting character and establishes for the show that magic is power. This is not touched on in the first episode, which I will be primarily discussing today, but she is arguably the most important white character to the story and is actually the one who wrote and sent Tic a letter about his supposed great legacy, that is, his connection to her family and to magic.

After escaping, the three make it to Leti’s brother’s home nearby where he tells them of weird stories surrounding Bideford, a city in Devon County, claiming it to be founded centuries ago by witch-hunters who [quote] “don’t like outsiders at all” (“Sundown” 00:40:00-00:40:26). He also warns them of the violent and racist Sheriff Eustice Hunt who patrols there. While the three are driving through Devon County, looking for an overgrown road that supposedly leads to Ardham, they are pulled over by this very sheriff who asks, “Any of you all know what a sundown town is?...,Well, this is a sundown county” (“Sundown” 00:50:30-00:50:38). Sheriff Hunt threatens them with hanging if they do not leave by nightfall, giving the trio only a few minutes to escape.

They barely make it out in time only to be stopped by more officers that Sheriff Hunt had arranged as an ambush just outside the county line. The three are taken into the woods at gunpoint, but are all ambushed by Shoggoths, a Lovecraftian monster. [SLIDE 5] Shoggoths in Lovecraft Country are massive, white, wolf-like creatures with eyes covering their bodies. They infect the officers like vampires, consuming and turning the surviving ones into monsters with a bite. George quotes Dracula, “’Children of the night…what music they make,’” and explains to Leti and Tic he survived the initial attack with just a flashlight; [quote] “If I’m right, and the light hurts them, it’ll also explain why we been drivin’ in the woods all day and didn’t encounter one until the sun went down (“Sundown” 01:00:27-01:00:35). [SLIDE 6] I have included this scene, but of course, viewer warnings for gore, violence, and language. [SLIDE 7]

This is how Lovecraft Country first blends horror and racialized fear. Sundown towns were, and in some capacities still are, a real threat to black Americans, but Lovecraft Country illustrates that monstrous, consuming, and destructive threat by way of Lovecraft’s creations. The Shoggoths are the sheriffs that ambushed them, the white threat that appears after sundown. The goal of this paper is to argue for the reimagining of a highly consumed genre of media to both establish its role as a tool for social commentary, and as an instrument for exploring relevant social change. It will survey recent academic writing on the topic, covering black filmmaking from the 1970s Blaxploitation movie era to Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017). In order to appreciate and analyze the significance of black horror stories, it is important to survey how black Americans have been depicted in and treated by horror films in the past. [SLIDE 8]

In Robin R. Means Coleman’s book, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, she writes, “As the 1950s emerged, Black characters were a very scarce commodity in horror” (Coleman 94). They had appeared in films for the previous fifty years, [quote] “relegated to roles such as that of the primitive, jungle native or servant to Whites” (Coleman 66). It was not until 1968 when George R. Romero’s film Night of the Living Dead first premiered that the role of black characters in horror made a turning point. Ben, played by Duane Jones, “heroically and singularly survives a relentless, night-long attack by cannibalistic ghouls only to be shot dead in the bright light of day by a posse of White vigilantes” (Coleman 104).

Kevin Heffernan commented on the success of this film among black audiences, as Coleman puts it: “on the whole Black film-goers represented thirty percent of first-run audiences compared to [representing] fifteen to twenty percent of the general population” (Coleman 109). This would lead to the prolific Blaxploitation film era of the 1970s. Films like Blacula (1972) and many others marked this Black horror boom wherein black characters were still the “monstrous Other,” but now the empathetic lead (Benshoff). I spoke about this topic more in depth in my short presentation from earlier this semester, but I wanted to revisit it here because I see a parallel between Night of the Living Dead and Blacula, and between Get Out and Lovecraft Country. [SLIDE 9]

Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out was a landmark for Black horror. It grossed 255 million dollars worldwide (Box Office Mojo) and marked the first time a Black man won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (Desta). It is also one of six horror films ever nominated for Best Picture (Durkan). Peele’s film would help define a renaissance of black horror, marked by films and projects such as Antebellum (2020), Us (2019), The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), and, of course, Lovecraft Country (2020). In Ryan Poll’s essay, “Can One ‘Get Out?’ The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism,” Peele’s film is analyzed within this theory. Afro-pessimism is an idea that, [quote] “the modern world was created by Black slavery. The world of White Masters and Black Slaves is the world we have inherited and the world we live in today” (Poll 70). This idea is represented by the continuous reconstruction of the master/slave paradigm as seen on the plantation, during Jim Crow, with the practice of redlining in the 1950s, and in the modern prisonindustrial complex. Get Out is about slavery, about modern slavery.

The film opens with a young black man walking at night in the suburbs. Poll writes, “In another film, in a White movie, this could be an innocuous, establishing shot. But in a movie wrestling with the United States’ legacy of race and racism, this suburban street is immediately recognizable as a site of horror for the lone Black millennial” (Poll 73). The young man’s fear is charged and palpable. Get Out comes just five years after the real-life murder of Trayvon Martin. The opening scene is complex in several ways. It plays on the stereotypical horror film opening, like that of Halloween (1978) or Scream (1996) but inverts the suburbs as a dangerous place for the “Other,” or in this case, a young black man. A white car begins to follow the young man, a masked person emerging from the car to subdue and kidnap him. Poll writes, “Peele said he wanted the car to function similarly to the great white shark from Jaws” (Poll 77). Peele is creating the white threat in this scene – whether it be the slow following shark, the 1950s sundown sheriff, the Shoggoth, or the violent exercise of racism – all within the language of a film genre historically dominated by white people. [SLIDE 10] In an interview with TV Insider, Misha Green said, “I feel like genre, when it’s at its best – it's a metaphor on top of the real world, the truth, what we’re actually experiencing” (Green 00:00:30-00:00:37). Lovecraft Country uses the horror genre to construct this metaphor over the real world, producing for the audience an experience of fear and powerlessness that only monsters, and racism can create.

Works Cited

Benshoff, Harry M. "Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or Reinscription?"

Cinema Journal, vol. 39 no. 2, 2000, p. 31-50. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cj.2000.0001.

Desta, Yohana. "Oscars 2018: Jordan Peele Wins an Oscar and Makes History." Vanity Fair, 5

Mar. 2018, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/03/oscars-2018-jordan-peele-bestoriginal-screenplay-get-out .

Durkan, Dierdre. "'Jaws' to 'Get Out': The Only 6 Horror Films Ever Nominated for Oscar's Best

Picture." The Hollywood Reporter, 1 Mar. 2018, www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/jawsget-6-horror-films-ever-nominated-oscars-best-picture-1088677 .

"Get Out." Box Office Mojo,

www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl256280065/rankings/?ref_=bo_rl_tab#tabs . Accessed

23 Nov. 2020.

Green, Misha. Interview with Jim Halterman. TV Insider, 21 Aug. 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecoCFpKhjc0&ab_channel=TVInsider . Accessed 28

Sept. 2020.

Means, Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to

Present, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011, pp. 198-214. ProQuest Ebook Central,

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uncw/detail.action?docID=716524 .

Poll, Ryan. “Can One ‘Get Out?" The Aesthetics of Afro-Pessimism.” The Journal of the

Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 51, no. 2, 2018, pp. 69–102. JSTOR,

www.jstor.org/stable/45151156 . Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

in Popular Culture, vol. 21, no. 2, 1998, pp. 53–69. JSTOR,

Moore 7

www.jstor.org/stable/41970306 . Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.

Sharrett, Christopher. “The Haunter of the Dark: H. P. Lovecraft and Modern Horror Cinema.”

Cinéaste, vol. 41, no. 1, 2015, pp. 22–26. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26356385 .

Accessed 26 Oct. 2020.

“Sundown.” Lovecraft Country, season 1, episode 1, Monkeypaw Productions, 16 August 2020.

HBO,

https://play.hbomax.com/episode/urn:hbo:episode:GXqxX5wwHskKuqwEAAASY?icid

=hbo_streamingoverlay_max&hbo_source= hbo.com &hbo_medium=referral&hbo_camp

camp=hbomax_signinlink_hbomax_button_20200701&hbo_content=62&hbo_term=hbo

_streamsignin&_ga=2.160142392.461767543.1605813704-1761460590.1605813704.

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