White Terror: The Horror Film from Obama to Trump - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Russell Meeuf is Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Media at the University of Idaho in Moscow. He is author of Rebellious Bodies: Stardom, Citizenship, and the New Body Politics and John Wayne's World: Transnational Masculinity in the Fifties.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1. Whiteness Under Siege, Part 1: Haunted House Films

In the Hollywood horror film, the haunted house is almost always the white, haunted house. In the movies, white families are tormented by some trauma in their house's history, haunted by disturbing legacies of abuse and violence that linger over the years in attics, basements, Ouija boards, unmarked graves, haunted mirrors, secret rooms, 8 mm home movies, or anything else that can be secreted in the dark corners of the house. Faced with the horrible realities of the past intruding into the present, white families in these films at first deny their victim status, then cower, eventually learning to fight back in the hopes of reclaiming their home, often with the help of some occult expert who reveals to them secrets that the mainstream refuses to acknowledge.
As Eddie Murphy joked back in 1983, the glaring plot hole in most haunted house narratives is the stubborn refusal of white people to simply leave. "Not only do they stay in the mother-fucking house in Poltergeist," Murphy quips, "they invited more white people over, sit around going, [in a nasally voice] 'Our daughter, Carol Ann, is in the television set.'"
"And in Amityville Horror," Murphy continues, "the ghost told them to get out of the house. White people stayed in there. Now that's a hint and half for your ass. A ghost say get the fuck out, I would just tip the fuck out the door."
White families in haunted house films don't get up and leave, of course, because it would make for a very short film. But they also stick around because those families refuse (at first) to acknowledge that their home might not be a safe refuge. Haunted house films make a spectacle of white incredulity that middle-class homeowners might be victimized in their own homes or, even worse, that homeownership itself doesn't insulate them from the horrors of the world. Murphy jokes that black people would never assume that proprietorship might protect them from violence and terror, so they would waste no time leaving behind their homes and their possessions to survive. If he were in Poltergeist (1982), Murphy says he would just go down to his local priest and say, "Look, man, I went home and my fucking daughter's in the TV set and shit, and so I just fucking left. You can have all that shit. I ain't going back to the motherfucker." But white folks in the haunted house film continue about their business until whatever malevolent force convinces them that they are not safe, in spite of their homeownership.
The incredulity of white families in haunted house films is driven by the sacred status of the home in the popular imagination. After decades of government policy supporting a massive expansion of home ownership after WWII (for some Americans), the single-family home has taken on revered status in U.S. culture not only as a sign of financial stability for middle class families but as the symbol of capitalist prosperity in the post-war world. For Americans, the single-family home sits at the perfect nexus of wholesome family values and meritocratic fantasies of the Protestant work ethic, making it a particularly potent distillation of US national identity, especially for white Americans who continue to represent the majority of homeowners.
It shouldn't be surprising, then, that the horror genre would see an increasing emphasis on the house in the Obama years (both in haunted house films and in its closely related cousin, the home invasion film, the subject of the next chapter). A wholesome, well-educated black family occupied the White House, all while a massive economic crisis shook the public's faith in home ownership as a means toward financial stability. Suddenly, home ownership didn't seem such a secure path toward middle-class standing, a jolt to the financial stability of white Americans who looked around and saw signs of upward black mobility in the form of the Obama family.
The haunting feeling that white Americans' place on the social hierarchy was under siege coincided with a wave of haunted house films between 2008 and 2016. The U.S. film industry produced 32 films that included haunted houses in that period, representing 21 percent of all the top-grossing U.S. horror. By comparison, Hollywood produced only 10 mainstream haunted house films in the 1980s and then only 2 in the 90s. The pace increased starting around 2005, and the haunted house reigned supreme in Hollywood horror in the Obama years, spurred on by successful franchises like The Conjuring series, the Paranormal Activity films, and the Insidious films. The latter two of which were produced by horror mega-producer Jason Blum, whose company, appropriately, is called BlumHouse.
This wave of haunted houses demonstrates the horror film's capacity for processing and mediating (white) cultural anxieties. As home ownership became a less-stable means of securing middle-class standing, Hollywood studios capitalized on the relevance they sensed in films in which the house becomes a site of terror and violence threatening to tear families apart. As a number of scholars have identified, the housing crisis of the mid-2000s produced a host of recessionary horror films that took on the terrors of neoliberal capitalism. Fears of lost equity and low credit scores become grotesque visions of spectral visitors, insidious demons, and decaying bodies embedded into one's home.
But Hollywood haunted house films in this period don't simply translate broad cultural fears about home ownership into ghosts and other unwanted visitors. Instead, the haunted house films of the Obama years tell specific stories about white families and the haunting feeling that they are losing their privileged place in the culture. These are not simply recessionary horror stories but rather white stories about precarity and guilt in the recession. What if the system that has propped up white privilege and white economic stability for so long was finally crumbling? What if white folks would have to face the same disadvantages that people of color have faced for so long? Over and again in the contemporary horror film, white families (almost always in a state of crisis concerning family relationships, their finances, or both) look to home ownership as salvation only to find that the home itself makes them vulnerable. And only in the dusty basements and shadowy attics of the haunted house can those families face the nagging dread that animates their ordeal: the horrifying realization that they might not be as privileged as they had imagined. Or, worse, that the horrific past of white violence in the U.S. means that they should feel guilty about the privileges they do have.