A few years ago, I stopped thinking of horror as a genre about fear. Fear is a linchpin of horror’s methods and imagery, of course. Every grotesque creature, anguished final girl, and geyser of blood and viscera is meant to incite individual and collective terrors, and maybe to help us process them in harmless and fun ways. But even in my favorite works of the genre, horror scenarios generally intrigue rather than scare me; I’m more likely to ponder than to scream. This is why I believe that the true bedrock of the genre is mood.
No other genre is as attentive to the forces—social, interpersonal, supernatural—that disturb or maintain equilibrium. Horror writers are observers and disruptors of atmosphere. In their meddling hands, flickering lights and chilly drafts augur visits from the unknown. Haunted houses, a standard horror setting, exemplify the tradition. The trope taps into the sense that our most intimate and trusted spaces can be treacherous, that normalcy is unstable and perhaps illusory. Such precarity is certainly a fear many people live with, but horror generally starts from the premise that the vibes are off, not the fact that someone anticipated that unraveling. Fear gestates in mood’s womb.
The recent horror anthology Out There Screaming serves mood in abundance. The sense of isolation its title evokes refers to the eerie tales in its pages as well as to Black people’s uneasy history with the genre. Opportunities for Black horror writers have typically been scant. In the introduction to the 2004 collection Dark Dreams, the editor Brandon Massey wryly poses a speculative premise for the book: “Could a massive anthology of original horror and suspense short stories written by black authors, with no particular theme, be published and actually find an audience?” And many of the Black characters who do appear in the genre have been marred by long-standing tropes such as the “magical Negro” and “the Black person always dies first.” Out There Screaming aims to counter and complicate that lineage. Co-edited by the filmmaker Jordan Peele and the science-fiction editor John Joseph Adams, the collection features new horror stories by more than a dozen Black writers, and lands during a period that some authors, scholars, and observers are calling a renaissance for Black horror—a rosy descriptor given how emergent Black horror is compared with, say, a niche yet richly built-up aesthetic such as Afrofuturism.
But Out There Screaming embraces the wishful mood that is driving this talk of a new era, and its stories posit what Black horror is and could be. Peele’s foreword highlights the multiplicity of the tales that follow. “In this collection, nineteen brilliant Black authors give us their Sunken Places, their oubliettes,” Peele writes, likening the entries to the bespoke mind prison of his breakout film, Get Out, and the medieval torture method that inspired it. “I always imagined that everyone’s Sunken Place would look different, a manifestation of our own personal horrors,” he explains. The passage subtly establishes the individuality of Black horror and sets the stage for the authors to explore subjects as weighty as racism and grief, and as fantastical as swamp beings and ghost girls, on their own, idiosyncratic terms. As the writer Tananarive Due once put it, “Not all black horror is about race.” Nor is it monolithic in terms of style or mood.
Violet Allen’s “The Other One,” a standout in the collection, centers on the nervous and heartbroken wreck Angela, a grad student who pines for Oglethorpe, an ex who ended their relationship abruptly. When she texts him during a spell of insomnia weeks after the breakup, his reply pulls her into a bizarre love triangle. “lol, why are u texting my boyfriend?” the message—clearly not written by him—reads. The offbeat text exchange that follows nimbly swings from jealous bickering to horrific bartering. The new girlfriend, who is hilariously droll, sends a picture and then a video of Oglethorpe’s removed heart, which sits on a coffee table “beating. Slowly, subtly, but undeniably. Thump, thump, thump, a little burble of blood spilling out each time.”
She also makes peculiar demands (for money, for brandy) that Angela obliges, her acquiescence driven by an aching loneliness that Allen brings to life with racing passages of inner monologue. The story, which channels the paranoia of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” is ultimately about the slippery relationship between loss and possession. The more Angela fears being abandoned, the clingier she grows, an arc that ends with a surprising act of dominance.
A more intimate form of possession appears in “The Most Strongest Obeah Woman of the World,” by the science-fiction veteran Nalo Hopkinson. Yenderil, a woman living in a Caribbean village, plunges into a brackish pond to slay a snake-armed creature that killed her parents. She survives, but soon after she emerges from the water, one of her legs grows twice the length of her body and sprouts cephalopodic suckers. The creature is revealed to have invaded her, a turn that sets the stage for macabre and slyly slapstick body horror that Hopkinson accents with obeah folklore and patois. Yenderil knows that supernatural forces exist but isn’t fluent in how they work, an opacity that amplifies the story’s jittery mood. To restore herself, Yenderil must harness the changes to her body rather than reject them—a conflict that casts the horrific as empowering and frightening in equal measure.
The collection’s syncretic mode is evident elsewhere too. “Flicker,” by L. D. Lewis, tells the story of an infernal darkness that snuffs all light and causes widespread plane and traffic accidents, among other catastrophes. As the flickers of darkness increase in frequency, they also grow more ominous, leaving grisly fusions of people and objects that are revealed once the light returns. The characters speculate that they live within a simulation that is being shut down, but Lewis smartly withholds the cause of the mayhem, declining to make the story a puzzle box even as she takes cues from apocalyptic religious texts and disaster flicks. Lewis’s interest is in the primordial horror of darkness, the ways its vastness and impenetrability confound the senses.
The authors’ frequent allusions to horror classics and traditions place the stories in conversation with the history of the genre and nod to the feedback loop between film and literature. Many classic horror films and their figures stem from literature, including The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Candyman, Dracula, and Frankenstein. Authors such as Due, Rion Amilcar Scott, and N. K. Jemisin, whose stories all appear in the anthology, are responding to and expanding the canon—and characters such as Angela and Yenderil could, if given the chance, easily become new classics of the genre who in turn inspire fresh works.
Some of the entries aren’t compelling as either horror or stories. The prison tale “Your Happy Place,” by Terence Taylor, rarely offers descriptions of its setting or explores the characters’ interior feelings, cornerstones of the genre. Nnedi Okorafor’s “Dark Home,” about a smart home that gets haunted by an Igbo spirit, is full of clunky passages that explain the conceit rather than embellish it. The weakest entry, “Origin Story,” by Tochi Onyebuchi, is a screenplay. The log line: A group of unnamed white male college students meets 30 minutes before a class on whiteness to whine about their victimhood. The story is meant to be satirical, but its ideas about the delusions and fragilities of whiteness are shopworn, and the narrative spins in place. Most important, it is a slog to read; Onyebuchi does not use the form to tell the story.
But aside from a few misses, the stories in this collection are distinctive, offering inventive takes on a classic genre. Peele and Adams understand that dark belies the range of moods that Black authors are interested in providing. If Black horror is to fully blossom on the page, on the screen, or in any other medium, Out There Screaming reminds us that it will depend on an array of visions and terrors and styles. There are no nightmares without dreamers.
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