White Kids Fight Monsters, Black Kids Fight Racists
White Kids Fight Monsters, Black Kids Fight Racists
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A history of lynching in the horror genre and its place in Stranger Things season 4
A history of lynching in the horror genre and its place in Stranger Things season 4
by Akira Albar Kluck originally posted to gendergames
Where the children of Stranger Things’ main threats are supernatural beasts or evil government agencies, Lucas and Erica Sinclar face the most danger at the hands of other people from their town. The main threats to Lucas have been his girlfriend’s racist brother, and the basketball team on a witch hunt for Eddie that mirrors a lynch mob. Erica's introduction to the Upside Down was her helping Steve, Lucas, and Robin uncover a Russian plot under the mall. While this is certainly outlandish, it is still rooted in the very real threats of the world. It is the following season that she comes face to face with just how dangerous the people she is surrounded by are. She has only just started middle school but in the penultimate episode of season 4, she is physically attacked by a member of her brother’s basketball team.
Saturday Night Live addressed the criticisms of how the show portrayed race from even the first season. In 2016 they made a skit showing an imaginary scene where Lucas’ parents show up. The show has been criticized for its fluid relationship to understanding race. In some scenes, we will see how Lucas and Erica are affected by racism, often through violent attacks by much older men, but then not address it at any other time. There may be an offhand comment about Eddie Murphy’s character in Ghostbusters or the new haircut that Lucas gets in Season 4, but the main portrayal of racism is brutal but occasional violence. The Duffer Brothers seem to think that that is the only difference in black experiences of childhood, especially since it has happened twice. Racist violence is not the difference in the childhood of children of color, the skit by SNL makes note of how black parents would have a different attitude towards certain situations, and a fear of the police.
Caleb McLaughlin has noted that many fans misunderstand Lucas, underestimate how much he has been through, and ignore how racist Billy was. Neither the show nor its white fans seem to grasp the gravity of what the Sinclairs have gone through. The witch hunt that Jason incites is specifically after Eddie Munson, a white man, but the people who are in the most danger are the black kids. The scene of Jason inspiring the town to take up arms absolutely mirrors a lynch mob. Even before the last episodes of the show dropped, I texted my mother who I was watching the show with, “This is a lynch mob. I don’t know how, but this is going to affect Lucas and Erica.” And I was unfortunately correct, this mob mentality will always affect black people first. This is a very real threat to black children in America, we see this in things like the police killings of Trayvon Martin and the deadly attack on Ahmaud Arbery. Teen Vogue has an excellent op-ed on why this narrative is so real for black children, and how it was not handled as well as it should have been. I would like to focus more on the history behind racist violence in the horror genre, and how it is dealt with.
Stranger Things is certainly not the first show or movie to deal with the fears of racism from the perspective of white filmmakers. For a very long time when discussing race narratively, it would be a white author explaining race through the perspectives of white characters a la To Kill a Mockingbird or The Help. For horror specifically, it became that race was just alluded to, rather than discussed explicitly. This can be seen in the ways that monsters are used as allegories for people of color. One of the earliest and most notable examples of this is James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein. Elizabeth Young notes how the film’s depiction of a mob with dogs and torches is visually similar to that of a lynch mob, and absolutely would be in the cultural lexicon of the time in her book Black Frankenstein. In the right photo above, we see a man holding a rope and in the left we can see the dogs. Dogs were an extremely common way that white people attacked black people, particularly in the south. As well, the term lynching refers specifically to people being hung and was not originally about race as it was about how colonists retaliated against Loyalists in the American Revolution. However, it has taken on an extremely racialized context, and rope and hanging evoke the images Billie Holiday sings about in “Strange Fruit” in our cultural context.
White people’s fear of violent white racists has absolutely influenced horror and science fiction as a genre. This Smithsonian Magazine article explains how the brutal murder of Emmet Till informed Rod Serling’s work on the Twilight Zone. Serling’s goal was always to raise public consciousness through storytelling. Prior to The Twilight Zone, he wrote a story for television and Broadway about a Jewish man being lynched, in the hopes that having a white man at the center of the story would cause censors to back off. That was not the case, and Serling’s work was heavily edited and censored. He did not give up on telling stories about race, but he had to do it allegorically, and not mention race specifically. Although there were a few episodes that did talk about the execution of black men specifically like, “I Am the Night—Color Me Black” from 1964.
From the same period, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead has connections to race and racism. Zombies themselves originate from Haitian folklore, enslaved people fearing they would be trapped forever and even after death they would be stuck working the plantations. The main character of the film is a black man, and even though he survives the Zombies, he is ultimately killed by a white sheriff. This once again mirrors Lucas and Erica’s story, despite the supernatural horrors tearing the world apart, their biggest danger is racism. This particular fear is also referenced in the SNL skit, showing how the fear of police violence is very much on the minds of black people. As well it shows how guns are being used in racial violence, rather than just rope and the noose. The scene of Lucas being held at gunpoint was incredibly evocative in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the racial violence seen in 2020, as the article in Teen Vogue explains.
It makes sense that lynching and racism have such a significant place in the horror canon, even in stories by white filmmakers. Horror and the paranormal is how societies deals with the things they don’t talk about but are frightened by. The slasher films of the 80s were a reaction to the fears around AIDS. Racism is considered this nation’s original sin, from the genocide of the indigenous people to the enslavement of Africans it has haunted our country since its inception. It was not a process that could be ignored, and it was incredibly violent. White people have understood and been afraid of lynching since the practice first started, with many ghost stories being about revenge from the dead Black enslaved ghosts. The Duffer Brothers are following in a long tradition, but one that feels old and stale. Black horror has become a new genre, and many of the films have been receiving accolades for their unique and interesting takes on the way racism affects their stories. Lucas and Erica’s stories should be informed by the historical context in which they took place, as all the other characters are. However, the show currently misunderstands that context and prioritizes black pain over an accurate depiction of race in the 1980s.
Sources:
https://www.mic.com/culture/black-horror-racism-monster-tananarive-due
https://www-jstor-org.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/stable/j.ctt155jm3n
https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/09/aids-it-and-the-horror-of-the-1980s.html
https://rdw.rowan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3910&context=etd
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