Race in Contemporary Horror

Catalog description

This course will examine, from a multidisciplinary lens, how films such as "Get Out," "US," and the series "THEM" generate discourse about the racial violence perpetrated against Black people and their bodies. The curriculum for this course will begin with an in-depth examination of the cultural and historical events of violence that served as the inspiration for the aforementioned works of cinema. The second part of the course will focus on the existential problems that the protagonists have to deal with as they confront the ontological fear and terror that come with being Black in a racially divided society. In light of this, we will be driven to discuss topics such as the dehumanization of the Black body, the devouring of the Black body on both a physical and a metaphysical level, and the particular ways in which Black people experience death, both socially and civically.