Jordan Peele’s Us: Black Horror Comes Out of the Shadows
“It’s our time now.” –Us
SPOILER FREE
When I was growing up in Miami, my late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, would sit with me and my two sisters and watch the Saturday “Creature Features” — reruns of old Universal horror movies like The Wolf Man, Dracula and The Fly. I never saw black characters in those films, but I was hooked on horror at a young age. So were many black men and women I know — especially black women. Our love of horror was gifted to us by our mothers and grandmothers.
The 1958 version of The Fly famously ends with the troubled scientist stuck in a spider’s web with his tiny fly body and human head, plaintively crying, “Help me! Help me!” The spider advances, and the scientist’s voice is too thin to be heard by human ears. It’s the first time I remember being truly terrified by a film — not by the shambling monsters, but by invisibility and inconsequence. By erasure.
Until recently, that’s how it has felt to be a black fan of horror films. But this weekend, with the release of Jordan Peele’s Us, a black family’s story is at the heart of a horror film in a way I never could have imagined as that child sitting between my mother’s knees. Peele’s follow-up to Get Out (which won him the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay) isn’t the same…
