In the wake of Barack Obama’s historic presidential win in 2008, the “audacity of hope” led to the audacious claim of a “post-racial” America, in which the legacies of slavery and centuries of oppression, segregation, criminalization, and violence could be solved in one election. In 2017, at the start of Trump’s first presidency, Jordan Peele’s Get Out confronted the myth of the “post-racial” nation and revitalized horror cinema, making manifest anxieties about race and race relations in the United States’ history and present.
Screening a decade of Black horror, including Peele’s Get Out and Us (2019), Boots Riley’s genre-bending sci-fi satire, Sorry To Bother You (2018), Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (2021) and the film it reimagines, Bernard Rose’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s short story about class in England, Candyman (1992) and 2025’s Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s Oscar-winning triumph, this week-long series explores the genre’s capacity to thrill audiences, experiment with form, and resist power.
Drawing on fictions of race, particularly Blackness, across media, including literature, journalism and film, the series focuses on several films that complicate America's relationship to itself, its history of enslavement and anti-Blackness, among other tensions of race, class, gender, politics and sexuality. Featured filmmakers take horror seriously as a subgenre which slyly and deliberately subverts white supremacy and systems of power through symbolism, sensation and the representation of violence in which the personal miniaturises and exaggerates political productions of fear, hysteria and dread.
Schwarzman Centre in partnership with Ultimate Picture Palace
Curated by Dr Christy Wensley, Faculty of English, whose work is supported by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship
Content warnings: discrimination, language, sex, sexual violence, threat and horror, violence.
