Race in horror films

Did You Know?

• Director Ryan Coogler's film Sinners takes place in the Mississippi Delta in the Jim Crow South and highlights perspectives of Black, Indigenous, and Asian individuals during that time.
• A handful of directors are attempting to address issues of race and sexuality, and the exploitative power that horror movies have.

Themes and plot devices

In horror films, minority cultures are often used as tools to unsettle white main characters or make them feel guilty. Common examples include references to an "Indian burial ground" or a "medicine man," which rely on stereotypes of "the other" to scare a mostly white audience. Many of these stories revolve around land taken from Indigenous peoples and the terrible consequences that follow. Rather than showing these cultures as living, active parts of the world, horror movies tend to reduce them to a mythical backdrop for the evil that threatens the hero.

American horror has drained the meaning from both Native American and African American cultures, treating them as plot devices and locking them into a past that seems disconnected from the present. The "Indian burial ground" trope, especially popular in the 1970s and 1980s, shows how Indigenous people are made both hyper visible and invisible at the same time. They appear prominently in these films, yet the storylines reinforce the idea that they are vanishing or unimportant.

This paradox helps define Euro-American identity, which was built on the image of the Indigenous other. More recently, horror has begun to address race from fresh angles. Films like Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and the Guatemalan La Llorona (2019) use the genre to examine racism and history from viewpoints outside the usual white perspective.

Social commentary in horror

By the 2010s, horror films were increasingly using social commentary, largely thanks to the work of Jordan Peele. His 2017 film Get Out launched this trend with a critique of modern racism. It argues that racism isn't limited to obvious, right-wing extremism; it can also be found in supposedly progressive, liberal white people who hold deep biases. In the movie, the Armitage family doesn't seek true equality with Black people.

Instead, they want to take their physical strength, athletic skill, and artistic talent, which they see as superior to their own. Two years later, Peele's Us shifted focus away from racial bias toward American privilege and class division. The film suggests that the real monster is often within society itself. Its Tethered characters, doppelgangers living underground, represent forgotten and marginalized Americans whose hardships are ignored by their privileged counterparts above.

The story's big twist reveals that the main character, Adelaide, is actually a Tethered who swapped lives with her surface self. This shows how privilege can come from another's suffering and how circumstance can shape a person's identity.