Editorials
How Horror Movies Parallel Being Black in America
Wes Craven once famously said that horror films don’t create fear, they release it. And he’s right. We sit in a theater with people we don’t know and go through a proverbial haunted house for about two hours. We scream, we laugh, we sometimes cry. In fact, some of us scream, toss popcorn into the air and bolt out of the theater; these things happen. For most audiences, that released fear stays in the theater because the idea of being chased by an indestructible masked man is laughable.
Unless you’re Black. As author Tananarive Due says in Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, “Black history is Black horror.”
Black Americans survive true horror in this country and the things most see as fantasy on a screen are actually deeply rooted in our reality. Almost every subgenre of horror is a parallel for the racism Black Americans deal with. Whether it’s 2020, 1920, or 1619.
Systemic racism is the subtle, slow-burn horror movie, like The Witch, The House of the Devil, or The Wicker Man. These movies, often dealing with the paranormal, are filled with main characters telling anyone who will listen that something just isn’t right. Whether it’s Rosemary in Rosemary’s Baby, Renai in Insidious or pretty much any woman in the Paranormal Activity flicks. These characters know they’re not crazy when they complain to friends or significant others that something is very wrong, but no one believes them.
No matter how much they yell or how terrified they are, the burden of proof always falls on the shoulders of the aggrieved, lest they are condemned or put in an insane asylum. But how do you prove the devil wants your baby? How do you show someone there’s a ghost haunting your child? How do you provide incontrovertible proof of your affliction to someone who either can’t believe it or doesn’t want to believe it?
That’s what it’s like living in America; knowing there are things built into society that tilt against you that you can’t quantify to a White person because they can’t relate. What happened to George Floyd is no different than what happens to Black men year after year and day after day. But it’s not just dealing with cops, hence the word systemic. It’s in our education, our access to decent healthcare, and even our food choices.
How? Glad you asked. The practice of redlining lowers the property value in black neighborhoods. The lower the property value, the less property taxes paid, which results in less funding for schools and lower wages for teachers. The same equation applies to healthcare facilities and attracting the best doctors to an area.
We see this inequality in modern-day voter suppression when polling places in our neighborhoods are suddenly whisked away for…reasons. And we see it with increased police presence in our neighborhoods. But these inequalities are built into the system that claims to work for everyone.
One of the most obvious culprits of systemic racism is the Confederate flag. It flies high all-around America, along with giant participation trophies built in honor of men who lost a war, betrayed our country, and just so happen to be people who said we were lower than animals on the American totem pole. Black men and women often yell about two different Americas. And far too often, a lot of those yells are met with silence, indifference, or worse. You know how you feel watching Katie beg Mika in Paranormal Activity to take her haunting seriously and how frustrating it is that he refuses to do so? Yeah, it’s a lot like that – only multiplied by several hundred years.
But we survived and continue to survive.
If systemic racism is the methodical and tension-building horror on one hand, then overt racism is the black gloved slasher wielding a weapon on the other. Slashers are fundamental to scary movies and easy for audiences to understand. We all have a visceral fear of someone in a mask relentlessly chasing us down. No matter how fast the characters run, the big bad always manages to show up when and where they least expect. This is nonfiction for Black people in America and continues to be a part of our lives. No disrespect to Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, or Harry Warden, but they’ve got nothing on any member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Spike Lee’s ‘BlacKkKlansman’
To be Black in America is to constantly live in fear of someone with a covered face running up on you with the intent to kill. But unlike Michael and Jason, KKK members roam freely amongst us and their acts of terror and general worldview are given tacit consent. They run for office, they have statues built in their honor, and of course, the President says their associates are very fine people. Can you imagine Woodsboro High School honoring Billy and Stu in a Scream sequel? Even after they slaughtered several classmates and the school principal? And all because they were Woodsboro students therefore their legacy deserves to be preserved? Yeah, didn’t think so.
In the movies, the hero is lauded for beating the men in masks. Sidney Prescott is a legend and Laurie Strode is a tough-as-nails survivor. The kids from the Friday the 13th movies…well, they’re all rotten to begin with so the less said about them the better. But damn near every survivor of a slasher movie—who lives through the sequel anyway—is given props for making it through the night. Compare that to groups like the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter, who are vilified and put on the FBI watchlist for having the audacity to ask America to be the country it says it is. Sure, everyone wants to quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. now and cite him as their hero, but he had to die to get that popularity. Our final guys and girls get slandered and wiretapped for fighting monsters of inequality and martyrdom seems to be their only reward.
But we survive and continue to survive.
Funny Games? The Strangers? We’ve lived that in the past when neighbors, Klan members, police, or sometimes all three together, invaded our homes. Today, that terror takes a different shape. Black men and women, while relaxing in their homes, are killed by cops for no reason at all or killed while jogging as two guys reenact the end of Night of the Living Dead. We’re looked at sideways when moving into predominantly White communities. We’re followed in stores because we “fit the profile,” and we can’t even bird watch in peace.
Yeah, it’s not the same as a brick through our window or getting dragged out our front door, but the purpose is the same now as it was then, and it’s the same reason horror movie villains do it to their prey: intimidation. However, unlike most horror movies where that intimidation happens to the protagonists because of some past sin they or a friend committed or some ancient curse they stupidly chose to conjure, these things happened to us and continue to happen simply because we exist. To paraphrase Dollface from The Strangers, horror happens to us because we are home.
But we survive and continue to survive.
Black people are Nancy in A Nightmare on Elm Street when it comes to calling out race and racism in America. We tell White people what’s going on only to be ignored until they see it for themselves, and it’s always way too late. We hoped Emmett Till was them seeing it for themselves. We hoped Rodney King was them seeing it for themselves. And we continue to hope, despite past evidence, that George Floyd is truly a moment of clarity.
But how many more Black residents of Elm St. have to be aggrieved, scarred, or killed before all of White America realizes the boogeyman is real? We’ve survived 400 years of legitimate horror movies and we’re tired of merely surviving. It’s time to roll credits and allow us to breathe in, exhale, and leave it all in the theater.
LaKeith Stanfield in ‘Get Out’
In this day and age, the word “troll” is often used to describe various online nuisances. Yet as abundant and irksome as the modern troll can be, they aren’t usually as fearsome as their mythological counterparts. I’m not talking about the small and gentler versions that have become more common to see in media. No, there are much bigger and scarier trolls out there—and André Øvredal’s movie Troll Hunter is one of the best places to find them.
It doesn’t take long for Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) to dump the Blair Witch Project-esque setup and aim for something a lot fresher. The trajectory of the story is augmented by Otto Jespersen’s character Hans, the titular Troll Hunter. The second he comes barreling out of the deep, dark woods and shouts “troll” at the camera, this movie takes a turn into what feels like uncharted territory. Not only subject-wise, but also conceptually.
For fantastical and made-up subject matter in cinema, found footage is a fast way to add a guise of believability. After all, what we accept to be the most crucial aspect of documentaries—the truth—rubs off on pseudo-documentaries, despite our understanding of the pretense involved. That is what Øvredal delivered with Troll Hunter: a movie so convincing that some viewers wondered if trolls really do exist. So, had this been straightforwardly made, it likely wouldn’t have been as effective. Conventional narratives would be more inclined to treat something like trolls as flat out unreal, and never try to convince the audience to think otherwise.
Hans petrifies the three-headed Tusseladd troll.
The viewers, like the characters trailing Hans, are quickly thrown into the deeper end of that extraordinary story. They have to process all this new information while staying on the go. So, although there is no significant amount of meandering, narratively or physically, there is still a good amount of atmosphere, not to mention tension building. It’s never anything frightful, but then again, Troll Hunter isn’t your standard offering of horror; it’s more on the low end of the dark fantasy spectrum. We aren’t ever spirited away to a faraway world—we stay in rather familiar surroundings, as well as dip into those less so. The outcome is a movie where you’re constantly more in awe than in terror.
As fantasy fiction might do, Troll Hunter prefers not to deal with incredulity. There is no time to waste on doubt, as interviewer Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), soundperson Johanna (Johanna Mørck), and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) all follow Hans around, recording whatever this character is willing to reveal about his bizarre job. Of course, the Troll Hunter himself is not an open book; in that respect, the diegetic documentary fails to fully capture and unpack the more interesting of its two subjects. Yes, all those giant, monstrous trolls are indeed incredible, but understandably, your mind wanders to their pursuer. What kind of person signs up for this gig and then chooses to stick with it for so long?
Reviews have called out Troll Hunter for its lack of character development. In regard to Thomas and his fellow documentarians, that criticism is valid, but bear in mind, they aren’t the focus of the story, either. Meanwhile, Hans is a well-crafted character. At least better than first realized. Before he was introduced, Hans had already grown tired of the troll grind. Fed up with that low compensation for his services, resentful of the bureaucracy, and wanting to expose his employer on a large scale, Hans’ discontent is glaring.
Then there are those finer details about the Troll Hunter, such as that indifference to both the natural splendor of his everyday surroundings and the affections of an obviously smitten colleague, that also suggest some level of despondency. So it is fair to say this movie doesn’t feature any sizable growth for its characters; however, the namesake isn’t underwritten. No doubt, putting a real-life character like Otto Jespersen in that role is partly why Hans is so fascinating—maybe even relatable.
Otto Jespersen as Hans the Troll Hunter.
There is always a small risk whenever using the term “mockumentary” to describe a found-footage movie, as the word could imply humor where there is none. In the case of Troll Hunter, the term’s usage is appropriate. Some folks have claimed the English-dubbed version has the more comedic tone, however, the Norwegian cut isn’t exactly humorless. Apart from the trolls’ absurd appearances, this is a movie where the characters nearly choke on the monsters’ farts, and Christians are like walking targets. Hans’ complete apathy towards everything is another cause of laughter. Overall, the comedy is intentionally dry and inconsistent. Unfunny, though? Absolutely not.
In a movie where endemic creatures are maltreated, as well as disavowed from living freely and peacefully, it’s hard not to notice the ecological message buried beneath the story. In addition to that is the unmistakable political satire. There is this whole business about intrusive and unsightly power lines—like trolls, they’re big blemishes on the land—that leads to what is perhaps the movie’s funniest moment. The scene in question is that one where certain electric lines, the ones secretly being used to keep the trolls at bay, go in a loop and don’t actually send power to any residents. Yet the monitors of said lines don’t find this at all weird. So it stands to reason that Øvredal was having a go at those who accept the government’s doings without question.
Looking past the fact that trolls aren’t actually real, this movie is an enlightening source of information. And not just for international audiences; Norwegians, too, get schooled about their homeland’s own mythology. It’s also evident from everything on screen that Øvredal and his crew were enthusiastic about the topic. The creature designs are the most indicative of that zeal; those imaginative yet myth-accurate manifestations are equally amusing and grotesque. One second you’re laughing at their phallic noses, the next you’re white-knuckling during a hairy sequence. Most surprisingly is how well the trolls’ visual effects hold up after fifteen years. It’s not all spotless, but on the whole, they remain impressive.
Vouching for a mockumentary about trolls isn’t easy, but those who do come around and give it a shot will more than likely be grateful for the recommendation. For Troll Hunter is a real find in that vast and varied genre we call “found footage“.
A bridge troll reaches up for food and finds Hans decked out in armor.
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