Thread by @k8dee16

I simply don't have the time nor the energy to write an Op-Ed, here are my thoughts on Black Horror & Trauma:
We refer to it as the horror genre because of the emotion it is meant to evoke--horror. It is meant to cause terror and revulsion in the viewer. 1/11

Horror is purposefully traumatic. It is meant to be a way to process trauma in a safer (from your couch) way with an (often but not always,) cathartic ending. 2/11

Horror is often teamed with comedy and/or the sexually explicit to tame the genre. Too often the watered-down, more popular films and tv shows are held as the standard when they are often purposeful deviations. 3/11

I do not believe Horror to be irrecoupable (is that a word?) Especially in having seen it done well. See @BreeNewsome's Wake, People Under the Stairs, and so much of the written work like that of @ChesyaBurkePhD . Not to mention hella comics & graphic novels. 4/11

My issue is if folks are genuinely aware of what genre does and how it does it? And what of works that cross the many genres, like Butler’s Parable of the Sower series that has a bunch of traumatic shit but is saying very important things in important ways? 5/11

Should some folks simply not fuck with horror because it traumatizes them and it ain’t for them? Not every genre is for everybody (I’ve found dramatic stories far more traumatizing—The Wire, for one—and it doesn’t get this kind of pushback). 6/11

Others have pointed out the casual Black trauma of true crime shows such as The First 48, ID Channel, etc., 7/11

I’m genuinely curious. Not all pushback is bad, it’s how things grow. Simultaneously, some of this pushback against #BlackHorror is sus af.
I’m thinking and ruminating. But also getting pissy about folks expecting horror to be something it is not and never will be. 8/11

This is why genre experts are needed. Is this what happens when the genre goes mainstream? Because sometimes I want us to go back to the margins—even as I realize it’s neither fair nor possible. 9/11

Finally, this bears repeating. Jordan Peele is neither the start nor the standard for Black Horror.

We've BEEN doing this shit: See the Haint & Devil Tales orally collected by Zora Neale Hurston 10/11

I write, in-depth, about these subjects in my book, Searching for Sycorax: Black Women's Hauntings of Contemporary Horror. 11/11
rutgersuniversitypress.org/searching-for-…

Horror is the purposeful, controlled, trafficking in trauma.

It’s like exposure therapy.

@JIJennings @Dieselfunk @ProfSARobinson