Is race a trope of horror? What is racial horror? This talk addresses the abjection of race through the lens of the contemporary horror film. From the Haitian origins of the enslaved zombie to gothic multiculturalisms, the nonwhite figure has been continually enfleshed and encoded in the West as monstrous, alien, and foreign.

Often frightening, overly desirous and hyper-appetitive, racialized creatures are the source of terror and jouissance—objet petit a in Lacanian terms. From the horrific specters of slavery and genocide of Black and Indigenous populations to Yellow Peril techno-orientalism, white Western horror thrives upon the abjection of racialized bodies.

Drawing together psychoanalytic approaches, critical race theorists together with horror, we will analyze the recent turn of Black and Indigenous horror films as well as global Asian films to reveal the ways in which such conventions are troubled by global nonwhite filmmakers. Finally, we will speculate on the extent to which racial horror casts (counter)spells on its audiences through tempo, color, rhythm, and affect.

We end with the lecturer’s own horror short Carnal Orient (2016) to discuss the ways in which horror can critique the fetishization of Asian bodies through estrangement.

Detailed outline

I. Racial horror and gothic traditions

a. In the West, legacies of slavery and indigenous genocide undergird and inflect the genre in racialized ways (Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter, etc.)

i. The literary and cinematic Gothic American deals with legacies of slavery (Higgins and Swartz, “The Knowing of Monstrosities” (it takes a monster to kill a monster)

b. Meanwhile Yellow Peril produces Asian/Alien otherness and desire for the foreign simultaneously (Stephen Sohn)

c. Liberal multiculturalism also creates a horrific pressure cooker of sorts: legacies of 1990s multiculturalist nightmares and POC “first to die” trope (The Crow, The Craft)

d. The rise of Asian shock horror and the monstrous Asian (Audition, The Ring)

II. Racial abjection and anti-Blackness (Frank Wilderson)

a. King Kong: historical allegories of Black monstrosity

b. Blacula: post-Blaxploitation horror

c. Get Out; Us; Candyman; Lovecraft Country: new Black horror and critiques (Them, Antebellum)

III. White monsters (American occupation)

a. White zombies: Blood Quantum

b. Japanese and Korean responses to American occupation: Godzilla, The Host and Squid Game

c. Carnal Orient: discussing my own work as an Asian American woman grappling with Asian fetishization through horror (drawing on Anne Anlin Cheng’s Ornamentalism)

Please note this is a live broadcast event – the class cannot be watched later, so please be sure you are available at the date and time the class is being offered in before registering. All sales are final, and we will not give refunds for any reason other than class cancellation. Classes curated by Miskatonic Los Angeles are in Pacific Time.