Fascism, Fear and the Science Behind Horror Films
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Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist? Yes, I do. Yes, I do. Doesn't it seem like we've reached the tipping point for the word fascist? From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Michael Olinger. This week, we examine fear itself, how fascist leaders weaponize it, and why we as moviegoers crave it on the silver screen. One

One of the leading theories for why we might love to watch horror movies is that ability to transfer threat arousal over to pleasure. Plus, how filmmakers like Jordan Peele drew on the history of the black horror genre to explore race in America. Give me some kind of a funhouse mirror. Let me imagine that racism is a zombie and now we can have a good time. Okay? It's all coming up after this.

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Hey, it's Latif from Radiolab. Our goal with each episode is to make you think, how did I live this long and not know that? Radiolab.

Adventures on the edge of what we think we know. Listen wherever you get podcasts. From WNYC in New York, this is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ellinger. Well, we're at that point in the presidential race where everyone's dropping the F-bomb. Let me ask you tonight, do you think Donald Trump is a fascist? Yes, I do. Yes, I do. I can't think of the last time.

A member of the Joint Chiefs called any politician, let alone someone who was a presidential nominee, a fascist. When we think about fascism, we have to remember that there are so many signs that are actually happening. This comes after journalist Bob Woodward released his new book, War, which detailed how former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, called Donald Trump, quote, the most dangerous person to this country and a, quote, fascist to the core.

And in an interview with The New York Times, John Kelly, the Trump White House's longest-serving chief of staff, agreed. He's certainly an authoritarian, admires people who are dictators. He has said that. So he certainly falls into the general definition of a fascist, for sure. On Tuesday, The Atlantic reported that according to two people, Donald Trump said during his presidency that, quote, I need the kind of generals that Hitler had.

The next morning, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade tried to spin it. I could absolutely see him going out, you know what? It would be great to have German generals that actually do what we asked them to do. Maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who are Nazis and whatever.

Throughout this election season, Donald Trump has described immigrants as poisoning the blood of the country, called them not human. In a recent Fox interview, he called political opponents like Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff the enemy within. The Project 2025 policy blueprint drawn up by Trump allies shows how the government could defeat all such foes. Does that equate to fascism?

This, quote, fascism debate has raged ever since Trump descended his golden escalator in 2015. Many have balked, still do, at using the word. Others, not so much. I've been sort of involved in the, let's call it, fascism wars since my 2018 book.

Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and his latest book is Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. But he says this tug of war over America's essential nature long precedes The Man with the Tan.

Yeah, I think focusing on Trump is a mistake because it's really the whole fascist social and political movement. And that's why the history of the United States is so vital. For example, Langston Hughes in 1937 said, Black Americans don't need to be told about fascism. It's just a European word for Jim Crow. But now we have a much more European structure with a fascist leader of a fascist social and political movement.

When you put out your book in 2018, Sean Illing observed in Vox that you have a controversial approach to all of this. You think that fascism is often regarded as an ideology, but you say it's a way of doing politics that feeds on a particular style of propaganda. If fascism is a way of doing politics, what is happening now that so alarms you? Well, fascism

the targets of fascism. Immigrants, LGBTQ people. Fascism is about making sure the dominant group remains numerically the largest group. And women are there to bear children. So the idea of trans women is antithetical to the central role, the identity of women in fascist ideology.

On the federal level, you can already see in Project 2025 and elsewhere, Trump has been clear that they want to remove federal funding from school districts unless they use immutable gender categories. So all children born male must be referred to with male pronouns for the school to get federal funding.

We have these concept bills in over 20 states requiring what Trump calls patriotic education. You can't teach history in a way that white Americans will feel badly about it.

in schools. This has created an authoritarian culture. Families are encouraged to report teachers who teach quote unquote divisive concepts, and they're broadening the concept of obscenity and decadence to include LGBTQ+ perspectives. This is exactly what the Nazis did early on. They targeted LGBTQ perspectives

as obscene and did book bannings and book burnings of literature that contained LGBTQ perspectives. We also have the labeling of writers from minority groups, such as Toni Morrison, as obscene. And we have that literature being banned.

Then we have these laws extended to universities. University tenure protections are being dramatically weakened. That means the speech of professors. And they're targeting courses that give us critical perspectives on U.S. history. The very idea that we're going to force, by law, education to be patriotic is not a democratic idea. But is it?

You say that everyone equates fascism with Hitler and the Holocaust, but that if you go with that theory, you'd have to kill six million people to be fascist.

But what about the years before that mass killing? Was Germany a fascist state? And when did it become one? When did it cross there? Because I think the press in general don't like to be accused of having their hair on fire, but there seems to be quite a lot of flaming tresses these days. I'm sorry, but if in 2024 you can't recognize what's going on as fascism, history will judge you.

In 2018, when I said this is a fascist social and political movement and people freaked out, that was one thing. But it's 2024 right now. It's completely inarguable that in 1935, Germany was a fascist regime. They were changing the education system, changing the media, the courts.

And we're already seeing that here. The Supreme Court has been altered. So it's just a vehicle for far-right policy at this point and for Trump. So we've got the ideology of fascism, the targets of fascism, the creation of an enemy saying that your woes are because of LGBTQ citizens, because of immigrants, because

We have the description of anyone who's not in the fascist social and political movement as Marxist. That's straight out of Nazi Germany. So everything you described represents a tipping point? Well, look, we are sinking into what has been called for many years the fascism debate.

And I think it can be a little misleading. And I think we should actually avoid it to some extent. Wait, are you saying that we shouldn't be using the word? No, we should be using the word, but people get bogged down in irrelevant details. What we have is a far-right authoritarianism that targets the same targets Hitler did. And people who are like, okay, you shouldn't call it fascist.

fully agree that this movement has all the dangers of fascism. So I use the term fascism because we don't have another word for something that looks so much like fascism. So you're not worried about diluting the power of such an alarming word? No, the word is required now to keep us out of the history books as being complicit in the rise of fascism.

Back in 2018 in a Guardian piece, you quoted Toni Morrison saying this. Before there was a final solution, there was a first one. This is from her 1995 address to Howard University. That after the first, there was a second. And after the second, there was a third. Because the descent into...

You wrote that Morrison's interest was

wasn't in fascist demagogues. It was in forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems. Yes. The United States, as Morrison is saying, has very often embraced fascist solutions to national problems. For example, we have the largest prison system in the world. We deal with many of our national problems, like racial inequality, like income inequality, by fighting

using a system that locks people up in giant prisons. And that's a fascist solution to a national problem, especially the targeting of

the formerly enslaved population of the United States. You also say that many people who employ fascist tactics or embrace them do so cynically, that they don't really believe the enemies they're targeting are so malign or so powerful, as their rhetoric suggests.

But there comes a tipping point where rhetoric does become policy. Because speaking about the world is a way of behaving in the world.

When you describe people as vermin, you're justifying treating them as vermin. The idea of justifying a practice without engaging in that practice is well nigh incoherent. The whole reason you're justifying those practices is so you can go and do them. And the explicit labeling of political opponents as threats to the nation, as an enemy within, is wrong.

explicit justification for targeting them with the apparatus of the state. You mince no words when you say that the contemporary American fascist movement is led by oligarchical interests for whom the public good is an impediment, such as those in the hydrocarbon business, as well as social, political, and religious movements with roots in the Confederacy.

And that as in all fascist movements, these forces have a popular leader unconstrained by the rules of democracy. You're saying that big oil is pushing this as well? I know Trump is making a lot of really nice promises to them. There's a number of business interests here, as there always are in fascist movements, most of which don't regard themselves as fascist movements.

A salient example is Elon Musk, who wants state regulations removed. The billionaire class want regulations lifted against them. They want taxes lessened. And they understand that the fascist leader will direct taxes.

the nation's ire against the kind of people who want more regulations on rich people and against people who have nothing to do with economic inequality, like immigrants or LGBTQ citizens. You can't really have a democracy with massive wealth inequality because resentment will flow through the nation's veins. This has been recognized in democratic political philosophy since Plato.

Jason, would you tell me about your father and your mother and your grandmother and how their experiences steered you?

Yes. So my father, at the age of almost seven, got out of Nazi Germany. He arrived in the United States in August 1939 with only my grandmother. My mother and her sister were the only survivors of their family and their parents. They were among the 130,000 Jews that Stalin took into the gulag. So when they returned to Poland in 1945, my mother was five years old. No one remained. All seven of us.

of my great-uncles were killed in Sobibor, along with my great-grandmother. All of their children were murdered. My grandmother wrote a memoir called "The Unforgotten," in which she describes what is relevant for today, namely 1930s Nazi Germany. Not the Nazi Germany after the invasion of Poland, but the Nazi Germany that had the features we now should look for in the United States.

the gradual move to mass violence, the gradual ideological preparation of the citizenry for the kind of mass violence against internal enemies that characterizes Nazism.

She writes about what we're seeing in the United States today, which is denial. She recounts experience with Nazi officers who assured her that in Nazism's vilification of Jews, they certainly didn't mean her. Yeah, she was a cultured German Jewish woman, an actor for Max Reinhardt and Fritz Lang, living in a fancy area of Berlin and many members of the Nazi Party.

thought that they could only be favored if there were members of the Nazi party. So there was a widespread thought that the anti-Semitism wasn't serious. It wasn't to be taken literally. That seems to echo with at least the early coverage of Trump. Yes. Well, I think the media continues to not take things like the proposals in Project 2025 seriously. Oh, I don't know about that. It

comes up a lot. But I haven't seen the kind of 911 calls that it deserves. But Trump doesn't know anything about Project 2025. Right. I mean, that's why we have to recognize that this isn't just about Trump. This is a social and political movement of Christofascism, if you will, and libertarians who want the government to be essentially eliminated so they cannot be constrained by working-class Americans.

So they don't have to share. I mean, isn't that what it's about? It's about sharing because democracy is about sharing. Democracy is the idea that it's our country together and we work together to have public goods like public schools, which are under attack by this social and political movement. The rule of law that applies equally to the wealthy and the poor alike. That's what they want to destroy. So...

What are the forces in our society that are best poised to fight fascism? We are the force. People in local communities can see that their targeted neighbors are their friends.

So they're best poised to support them. Unfortunately, we have a fractured society, alienated, lonely people who don't have as many bonds with neighbors as are needed to protect against what's coming. And then as far as institutions are concerned, it's no surprise that we have this fascist social and political movement occurring at the same time as journalism is under such attack.

In such a fractured media environment, we're simply preaching to the converted. That's right. But people trust their local media, and the local media has been decimated in the United States. You still have the network news. Well, Sinclair Broadcasting— Except for—yeah, you're right. Sinclair has bought up a lot of those stations and has directed them very explicitly in what they can say and what they can't.

So we have the destruction of local media by being bought up by these, in the case of Sinclair, a far-right media conglomerate. And a lot of local radio has been bought up by, I guess you would call it Christopherson.

Christian fascist. Yes, that's not local media. And that environment combined with social media results in conspiracy theories having Ferrari engines. So I repeat, what are the forces in our society that are best poised to fight fascism? The independent press, local news that people can trust, the courts when they impose a rule of law that is the same for everyone.

all of which are dramatically weakened. Many of which have been packed by people who were selected by Leonard Leo and the Heritage Foundation. Precisely. So we've already lost a lot of the essential ecosystem for a democracy. And then our schools and universities.

sources of critical investigation. Yes, that critical investigation can go places that you might find inappropriate. But if you make that illegal, if you impose patriotic education, you have something that looks much more like fascism. So we need to support teachers and university professors who do that critical work of keeping non-dominant perspectives alive. So teachers and professors, journalists,

courts dedicated to the rule of law. And finally, among the regular targets of fascism are unions.

Because unions make politics material. Fascism is based around this national identity that is not material. So if people are focused on their identity as white, for instance, they're not going to be focused on their identity as a worker. When you're focused on your identity as a worker, you care about things like the weekend, right?

and the eight-hour workday. You care less about whiteness. Fascists target unions because unions give us the kind of materialist politics that is the basis of a healthy democracy. It sounds like you're saying that to support intersectionalism, you have to argue not from an intersectionalist perspective.

You need solidarity. Solidarity among difference. Solidarity is a kind of intersectionality because it's an intersectionality between all sorts of different identities. Everybody likes the weekend. Jason, that's a fabulous ender. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brooke. Jason Stanley is a professor of philosophy at Yale University, and his latest book is Erasing History, How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.

Coming up, your brain on horror. This is On The Media.

Hey, nature lovers. The podcast Terrestrials is back. Radiolab's family-friendly podcast returns for a new season with new songs. I'm Lulu Miller, and on each episode, we'll take a nature walk and encounter a creature behaving in ways that will surprise you. And sometimes we just have to break out into song about it. That's right. Original songs about chromosomes, honeybees, lichen, and more. Search for Radiolab for Kids wherever you listen to podcasts and check out the newest episodes of Terrestrials today.

This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger. And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Fascist leaders, as we've learned, are masters at stoking and escalating fear, fear of the outsider and the so-called enemy within. And those tactics often work because humans are hardwired to fear.

Back when we weren't the world's reigning predators, terror enabled us to survive. We feared the dark, where beasts lurked. Since our weak night vision couldn't discern what hid in the shadows, we jumped at the snap of a twig, a flutter, a clap. "Wanna play hide and clap?" Even now, in our everlastingly bright world, darkness is still a menace, still bred in the bone. "We're on the right!"

Turn off the light. You'll see what kind of game. Do you like scary movies? Have you ever wondered why? Science writer Nina Nesseth has. Two years ago, we discussed her book, Nightmare Fuel, the science of horror films, which delves into the neurology of horror. Welcome to the show, Nina. Hi, thank you for having me. So shortly after the horror film starts rolling, there typically emerges a threat.

Often it's nearly imperceptible. A glint in the eye, a flicker of a match, the faintest sigh. Next, a jump scare. What's in here? Record vault. Oh, where you keep the golden oldies and maybe the new music. ♪

Your body reacts even before you're aware of it. What exactly happens when you experience that physical jolt? You want your body to react even before you're aware of what's going on, right? Because sometimes that split second can mean saving yourself from that threat. Once you get your thinking brain back in and you recognize that you're not in a real threatening situation, you're able to sort of transfer all of that energy into enjoyment.

And that's known as excitation transfer theory. You write that the jump scare is a relatively new innovation, that they became an expected part of the scary movie, you know, around the turn of the 21st century. There are two distinct varieties, the ones you expect and the ones you don't. The one that you expect, we are primed with a cue. I find usually it's repetition.

The example I use in my book is from the opening teaser sequence from the film Lights Out, where a person is turning lights on and off. When the lights are on, there's nothing in the space. And as soon as the light turns off, you see a shadowy figure.

This happens a few times and this figure that appears in the darkness isn't moving. But as a viewer, you know that something's got to give eventually so that either it's going to not be there when the lights turn off or it's going to be closer. And that's exactly what happens.

Because we're waiting for that to happen with each repetition, we slowly ramp up our own tension to be like, when's it going to happen? And then you get that payoff. But the second type is the jump scare that comes out of nowhere. Long stretches of mundane moments. And the longer the audience waits, the more they expect something to happen. The perfect example that comes to mind is what's known as the nurse station sequence from Exorcist 3.

Most of it is one long shot down a hallway in a hospital at night. And you spend time seeing, you know, the single nurse at the nurse station going back and forth. You see a security guard who kind of comes and leaves. And then there's a strange sound off camera.

The nurse comes up and goes to check on the sound in one of the patient's rooms. And the sound that she heard was ice cracking as it melted in a glass. And that's when we get our first jump scare, which is a patient sitting up and yelling at her. What the hell do you want?

We have that release of tension and we go back to our long shot down the hallway. And that's where we get our second jump that is just so surprising because it's a much quieter one. We see the nurse go into another room.

There doesn't seem to be anything amiss, and she closes the door behind her. And then almost immediately and impossibly, this figure, dressed all in white with these giant parachutes, walks through the apparently closed door to lop off the nurse's head. We thought we had already gotten her jump scare, so to get that second one right afterwards is just really amazing.

Let's move on to monsters. How do filmmakers tap into the characteristics that our brains are hardwired to fear? We've evolved so many unconscious cues for recognizing whether something is a threat. A predator will have sharp pointy teeth. A predator will have front-facing eyes, claws to rend flesh and tear things apart.

Monsters, especially non-human monsters in horror films, tend to move classically like predator animals that we see on Earth. They'll stalk, ambush, make chase,

You noted that when you see a human moving on a screen with a creepy, jittery motion, filmmakers often ask actors to walk backwards and then reverse the tape to create that forward walk that just seems a little bit off. And I remember one of the most terrifying moments I saw in a horror movie was in The Exorcist.

when Linda Blair bent backwards with her legs and feet on the ground. It's a lot like how spiders move. And many of us are wired to be arachnophobes.

Absolutely. And there are a few reasons why people might be afraid of spiders. But one of them that comes up time and again in research is that they move in a way that is unexpected. Like you have this jittery movement. You're not sure what direction they're going to move in next. It makes it a lot harder to plan your next move and to keep yourself safe. So when you see a monster moving in that similar unexpected way, it's super threatening because you don't know what's going to happen.

Soundscapes are essential to horror, but you mentioned a specific kind that has become a staple for some filmmakers. It's called infrasound, and its frequency lives just below what we can actually detect. Why does a sound that we can't hear make the hair stand up at the back of our heads?

Sound waves are vibrations, but we can perceive them as a pressure in the case of higher frequency noises. Infrasound is sort of at the other end. It's a low frequency. And folks who do perceive infrasound tend to report that it makes them feel uneasy, uncomfortable, or nauseated. Maybe they get headaches. In horror films, this is something that's a relatively recent technique. Sort of like...

low hum happening under the threshold of the rest of the soundscape that you may not notice, but is building your discomfort. Those sounds are subtle. There's that sound in horror films, that staple, we can't miss the blood curdling scream, but not all screams are created equal because of a quality known as roughness. What it amounts to is

a fast change in pitch from like high to low to high to low to high to low. If you think about how an ambulance siren tends to have that sort of tritone high to low pitch and how you really notice an ambulance siren when it's going off, screams function in much the same way. They're a warning and that roughness is much faster. Really effective screams tend to have fast vibration between those high and low notes. And that's what makes them so attention grabbing. Ah!

The study found that rougher screams, those vibrating between 30 and 150 hertz, triggered a greater fear response.

So the amygdala is such a crucial part of the brain's fear circuitry, and that's the space in your brain that processes and sends out signals for, for example, threat responses like the fight or flight response. It's very sensitive to rough screams. What that basically amounts to is your brain is good at recognizing the difference between a toddler who's screaming because they're having a blast on a trampoline versus someone who is screaming because they're being attacked.

If the amygdala is sensitive to the roughness of a scream, suggesting that we may be wired to hear them, can we stay with the brain when we process fear? Real or not, what structures are involved?

Oh, gosh. There's so many parts of the brain involved in processing fear. So the thalamus is a processing way station. It would take cues from other parts of the brain, integrate them, and then, yes, send out signal to get that cascade of hormones. In the case of fight or flight, we have adrenaline, we have cortisol.

with the goal of activating our muscles and conserving energy to the organs that are required for this emergency situation and diverting energy away from those parts that are not strictly necessary if you're dealing with a threat. Let's focus now on the difference between the way the brain reacts to a real horrible event and one created by filmmakers.

There are studies that show that when people are watching fictional events, different parts of their brains light up than if they're watching real horrific things that are happening. That amygdala is key to processing threat responses. But all of these other parts that light up when we're watching horror movies...

such as the insula, which is involved in emotional processing, such as the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which is quite a mouthful, but is very much a thinking part of the brain that's all about planning and executive function. So we've all had that moment when we've seen the heroin run up the stairs instead of out the door. And we think in our own heads, oh, wow, that's not what I would do.

Explain to me how we can be scared when we know what's going to happen, and then tell me why we want to be. Oh, gosh, that is the question that inspired the writing of this book.

Horror is defined by tropes, a shared language where we expect the jump scare, we expect the fake out, we expect something to be lurking in the shadows. And when that doesn't happen, it defangs the tension. That doesn't explain why we love to seek out horror. There are a few theories. We already talked about excitation transfer theory and that idea that we can get that fear response and transform it into something that is enjoyment-based.

There are other theories about seeing narratives on screen that resonate with your own experience. There was a recent study that looked specifically at horror and grief and found that people who had recently experienced a loss often sought out horror movies because a lot of horror narratives are centered around grief. And even just the act of seeing someone work through their own grief narrative and come out at the other end of it can be very healing.

And then horror as a film can be very social and much more social than a lot of other movies. Watching a horror movie next to someone, you feel their reactions and they play into your reactions. This isn't to say that you can't watch horror movies alone or with your cat, but there is just something special about the social element that can be embedded in the horror experience.

Nina, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Nina Nesseth is a science writer and author of the book Nightmare Fuel, The Science of Horror Films. Coming up, the renaissance of an old, new category, black horror. This is On The Media.

Tout avec lui dit boum, l'oiseau dit boum, c'est l'orage...

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Some young Americans are figuring out that a four-year degree isn't the only path to the middle class. Any trade, like plumbers, electricians, welders, those are the dirty jobs. Those are the jobs where they couldn't afford to go to college, so they had to do this instead. Now, that is definitely starting to change. I'm Kai Wright. On the next Notes from America, how opportunities in skilled trades are changing our workforce and maybe our politics. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

This is On The Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger. Perhaps because they're predictable, horror films continue to enthrall us. I mean, I think we could all agree that descending into a dark basement is never a good idea.

Some horror movies, of course, do innovate, thus standing apart from their perennial Halloween peers. In 2017, for instance, Jordan Peele delivered the box office smash hit Get Out, which earned a place in the cinematic canon.

In fact, Peele's work was a foray into what's been called Black Horror, a category with its own fascinating history. With the election and Halloween around the corner, it seemed like the perfect time to re-air a piece by OTM producer Rebecca Clark Callender, which explored the Black Horror genre. If you'll come with me, you'll float too. You'll float too. You'll float too. You'll float too! You'll float too! You'll float too!

Yeah, right about there is where I cover my eyes. And that's just the trailer for the 2017 horror movie It. Horror films in general, not just that particular killer clown, are not my thing. But earlier this year, I learned there's a subgenre, black horror. And honestly, that confused me.

Moving through the world in a Black body can provide more than enough fright, and I never really felt the need to see that on screen. I did see Jordan Peele's films Get Out and Us, and more recently, Nia DaCosta's Candyman, and liked them. But I saw those as exceptions to the rule, not part of a larger category. So what is Black horror? Blacks in horror has been really with us since the start of film.

Robin Armeans Coleman is a professor of communication studies at Northwestern and author of the book Horror Noir, Blacks and American Horror Films from the 1890s to present. And she says that even before Black horror, there were still Black people in horror.

Sometimes. Universal Studios put out a collection of films in the 1930s that are considered genre classics today, like Dracula. You are too late. My blood now flows through your veins. Frankenstein. It's alive! It's alive! It's alive!

And The Mummy. Only The Mummy featured a black character, a servant played by Noble Johnson, who rarely speaks, but under The Mummy's spell holds a knife to fleeing royalty.

Obviously, scary films in the early 20th century catered to white audiences. Black people were not invited to be frightened by monsters. We were the monsters.

Early examples, Coleman says, are jungle films. Jungle films were about white people entering into so-called primitive spaces, being very intellectually and also physically superior. These were films that reaffirmed white superiority in the imagination.

One of the most popular was a 1930 picture called Ngagi. A company of women, unclothed, apparently living like animals. One had a child hugged to her breast, a strange-looking child, seemingly more ape than human. So Ngagi claims that there is mating that takes place.

between Africans and apes that produces children. And it was marketed as truth, as a documentary, not so much as entertainment, but sort of ethnographic, like let's take a peek inside, you know, the savage, wild ways of Africans.

Savages, servants, or unseen. Those were the most common roles for Black people in mainstream horror. But that first category, savages, proved especially profitable for movie makers. And the idea of primitive monsters soon morphed into more magical ones. There are lots of paths to talk about this history, but one that I often trace is going back to the U.S. occupation of Haiti.

And out of that occupation are these awful racist stories, particularly in the early 20s. Stories that inspired a writer named William Seabrook to travel to the island for what he called an investigation of its people.

people. When he came back, he wrote a book called The Magic Island that went to print in 1929. He claims that he has lived among Black Haitians, that he's been given access to like the secret devil-worshiping cabal, that he's been able to observe a cannibal assembly, and he's even been allowed to sample the cuisine.

And Seabrook's book becomes really wildly popular in the U.S. In fact, it provided the inspiration for the 1932 movie White Zombie. White people all afraid of the mountains.

It was the first time zombies appeared in a motion picture. And while both black and white actors played the undead, they were all under a

A voodoo spell. This was back when zombies were just sort of robbed of agency and they were shamblers who would do the bidding of their master. Tanana Reeve-Dew is an author, screenwriter, and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. This was long before Romero turned zombies into what we know them into today, which is the dead rising from the dead to eat you.

As in George Romero, who directed The Night of the Living Dead movies three decades later in the 1960s. That wasn't a part of it. It was just pure black magic and what if we get under their control instead of them being under our control? It's not that you're just undead, Dew says. It's that you're undead and your fate could be in the hands of a black person. Scary stuff.

For another trope, Robin Armeen's Coleman in Horror Noir points all the way back to D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation. ♪

Another thing that came out of that era of fear of Black monstrosity was respect and admiration for the good Negroes. Good Negroes came in different varieties. Like, for instance, magical. The only reason they're even in the movie, like this would be an all-white movie, except we need a character who knows something about voodoo or magic to explain to us what's going on. Or spiritual.

which is very similar to the magical Negro. Even if they don't know the answer to the magic, they're there to, like, pat you on your back and say, go on, you can do it. You can survive. You can figure it out. And one last trope for the list, the sacrificial Negro.

We were the first to go in The Shining, Scream 2, The Unborn, Ghost Ship, One Missed Call, to name a few. I have to ask this question. Do Black folks always die first? Not always. Sometimes we die in the middle. Friday the 13th, 7, Nightmare on Elm Street, 4, Terror Train, Scream 3,

So while mainstream horror ground out features that stayed the course, Black creators were working to produce counter narratives.

In 1940, Black audiences watched The Son of Ngagi, drastically different from its similarly titled but completely unrelated predecessor. From writer Spencer Williams Jr., the story features Black people just living life and a revolutionary character, a scientist who was a Black woman, Dr. Helen Jackson, played by Laura Bowman. I've got it.

greatest discovery in medicine since Louis Pasteur. If it does what I think it will, I've done more for humanity than anyone else on Earth. I don't know why I should worry about humanity. Humanity's never done anything for me. Dr. Jackson uses her talents to try and cure a half-man, half-ape creature brought back from Africa. Yeah, I know.

But back then, it was progress, a small victory, that would be followed by bigger ones. Like, for instance, Ben. If we have to, we can run in here and board up the doors. That's Dwayne Jones as Ben, lead character of George Romero's 1968 hit Night of the Living Dead. Remember,

Romero had said he didn't write Ben as Black, Jones just gave the best audition. But Night of the Living Dead was a huge moment. A Black character was the lead of a horror movie and he was brave and smart. "Well, you're her father. If you're stupid enough to go die in that trap, that's your business. However, I am not stupid enough to follow you.

Get the hell down in the cellar. You can be the boss down there. I'm boss up here. He's not overly written as super heroic and too kind and too accommodating. He's a complex character, and we love that about Ben. Despite his complexity, Ben still ends up dead, shot by cops in the final minutes of the movie who assume he's the villain. The air, though, had changed.

Studios realized there was money to be made from Black audiences, and the Blaxploitation era was born. Rising from his tomb to fill the night with horror, Blackula.

Dracula's soul brother. Or Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde in 1976. A monster he could not control had taken over his very soul. A screaming demon rages inside, turning him into Mr. Hyde.

What the truly terrifying puns cover up is a decade in which there are serious attempts to create stories with Black characters at the center, and huge leaps forward for Black storytelling. Coleman points to vampire film Ganja and Hess in 1973, directed by Bill Gunn. I will persist and survive without gods or society's sanction.

The film won the Critics' Choice Prize at the Cannes Festival. But when it came to American theaters, producers recut and renamed the film because it wasn't like its punny peers.

Regardless, Black creators were carving out space for their work. Mobsters, gangsters, exploiters, politicians, the police, all of this is an attack on Blackness, and Black people are fighting back in these movies, and in Blaxploitation movies, they tend to win. It's important to note here these films have problems. Blackula had some incredibly homophobic language, and Black women were still often underrated.

hypersexualized. But blaxploitation movies began a decades-long wave of black horror films that could be pure entertainment and/or convey something bigger. And in 1995, a movie came out that is now considered a cult classic.

Tales from the Hood. Well, I liked horror, but I wasn't a fan of just monster movies for the sake of monster movies. But I also liked tales that had some sort of moral component to them. Rusty Cundiff is the director of Tales from the Hood, an anthology told in four parts.

One on police brutality, one on domestic abuse, another on racist politicians, and a final story on gang violence. The movie has moments that resonate today, like the opening ad in the political tale. The fact is, affirmative action, quotas, reparations, all mean one thing.

Another qualified individual won't get a job or an education simply because he's not the right color. But how people receive the fourth story, the one about gang violence, Cundiff says, has changed dramatically in the two decades since the movie premiered.

Here's the story in brief. A gang member named Jerome, played by Lamont Bentley, is in prison for shooting a rival gang member. He's offered a chance to participate in a rehabilitation program, which it turns out is in a very creepy underground lab running experiments.

Jerome is stripped, strapped down, and then forced to watch a montage of images that show depictions of gang violence right next to real images and videos of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate crimes. Jerome is questioned by lead scientist Dr. Cushing, played by Rosalind Cash. What's wrong, Jerome?

The gang story, when it came out, I had gang members approach me and say, because of that, they stopped gangbanging. Flash forward to today, I've talked to students at different universities and younger black people today, they don't like it as much because they think I'm blaming black people.

To Cundiff, the pushback felt like a part of a bigger dismissal by modern, young Black audiences of their predecessors. It seems like a historical thing where at some point, the fight or the struggle changes and the same people who were celebrated, all of a sudden, there's no understanding of the fact that what they did is why you can now push for this bigger thing.

Tales from the Hood was honestly hard to watch in places because each part felt like it presented one of the tropes I've outlined in this piece. A powerless black cop, voodoo dolls, violence, few pivotal black women. But those tropes also had twists. The cop tries to fix his mistake. The voodoo exacts rightful vengeance. Dr. Cushing is in charge.

And I realized the problem was something else. The tales could be fact or fiction, but either way, they're stories I don't necessarily want a white audience to see. Back when we did this, I didn't know if any white people were going to watch this movie at all. So I didn't really care what they thought. Now, we did do audience test screenings, and there were definite chasms between white

the black audience and the white audience, particularly older white audience. They hated the episode with the cops. I mean, hated it. The only one that they really kind of liked was the gang episode because that was pointing a finger at our own problem.

Okay. And I think sometimes people forget that. The horror audience doesn't want to be re-triggered and re-traumatized by horror that skews too close to the bone, like too close to the thing itself. Give me some kind of a funhouse mirror. Let me imagine that racism is a zombie and now we can have a good time. Okay. Yeah.

Rusty Cundiff told me after the screening of his domestic violence tale, he asked some audience members who worked at a women's shelter if his character's supernatural solution had been too unrealistic, even flip. And they said, no, no, this is cathartic. This is fantastic. And that's what you can do in a horror film. You can give people a release or maybe just a moment of happiness.

At its best, Black Horror is a chance to see both the beauty and bravery of a culture and people without being reminded of every battle it's fought or still fights. Like I always tell my kids, you don't need to be afraid of ghosts. You don't need to be afraid of cemeteries. You don't need to be afraid of poltergeists. Be afraid of that guy that lives across the street. That's what's most likely to give you a problem.

Black horror knows about the monsters outside the theater, but at least until the credits roll, it can offer a safe place in the dark. For On The Media, I'm Rebecca Clark-Calendar.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Calendar, Candice Wong, and Katerina Barton. Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loewinger.