Racism in Horror

“Rac(ism) & Horror” is a YouTube video by creator Khadija Mbowe covering a general history of how the horror genre uses race as a storytelling mechanism and the racial stereotypes that are present in many films. Mbowe focuses on the portrayal of the victim and the perpetrator, and how they are racialized.

As a method of oppression, colonizers created a narrative surrounding race to justify oppressing entire groups of people. Author Patricia Collins writes: “Dehumanizing Black people by defining them as nonhuman and as animals was a critical feature of racial oppression.” (Collins 55) These narratives continued into chattel slavery, and still exist in some form today. The stereotypes created and reinforced by colonization are present in film and inform how Black characters are treated. This extends to horror movies, where the trope of the Black character dying first is very common. Mbowe points out that this is caused by the hegemonic idea of Black masculinity making Black men seem scary and intimidating, perpetuated by the film The Birth of the Nation. The film was about the creation of the Klu Klux Klan after the Civil War, and it comes as no surprise that the depiction of Black people in the film was very racist. It portrayed Black men as sexually violent towards white women, carrying on the stereotypes created by colonizers. “White elites apparently found men of African descent to be more threatening than women because they believed that Black men were naturally violent.” (Collins 56).The idea of Black men being hyper masculine sexual predators creates a boogeyman in the minds of audiences that informs their ideas about Black characters. If the monster is able to kill the most intimidating, hypermasculine character, it emphasizes to the audience how powerful this creature may be. 

White women are most often the final girl because of hegemonic narratives surrounding their purity. While the Black characters are killed first to communicate how terrifying the monster is, the white woman is able to survive because of her perceived innocence and passivity. As a result, white women are made the sympathetic victim that the audience is meant to root for. This privilege is never afforded to Black women because of over sexual stereotypes that were created as justification for slavery. “The institutionalized rape of enslaved Black women spawned the controlling image of the jezebel or sexually wanton Black woman.” (Collins 56). Another common trope is that overtly sexual characters die first, so this, compounded with the racist stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality, make it far more likely for Black women to be killed early on in the film. The trope of the white character surviving is similar to the white savior trope because only the white characters are able to defeat the monster. Whether that be another character or a physical monster, the white characters are able to survive for a much longer time because of their whiteness. 

The other reason that Black people are killed so early in horror films is because they are seen as expendable characters. Directors can put a Black character in a film and kill them early on, but still claim that their film has representation. Representation is not about just including minority characters in a film, but also giving the characters a good amount of screen time where they serve an important role in the narrative. An example of this is Scream 2, where the two Black characters are killed in the first couple minutes of the movie. The rest of the movie does not feature any Black characters as protagonists or antagonists. Sidney, the protagonist of the film, is a middle class white woman, the epitome of the final girl trope. Although Scream 2 does have Black characters, they have minimal screen time and are killed for shock value. Scream 2 was made over 20 years ago, and there has been an increase in Black led horror, but there are still not a lot of good examples. What there is now is a lack of good representation, not just representation in general. 

Citations:

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Sexual Politics. Routledge, 2004.

“Rac(ism) & Horror | Khadija Mbowe” Youtube, Khadija Mbowe, 29 October 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Of97EFcgtho&t=1793s&ab_channel=KhadijaMbowe