[music]

?Speaker: Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?

?Speaker: Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

Micah Loewinger: 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 Micah Loewinger. This week we examine fear itself. How fascist leaders weaponize it, and why we as moviegoers crave it on the silver screen.

Brooke Gladstone: One of the leading theories for why we might love to watch horror movies is that ability to transfer threat arousal over to pleasure.

Micah Loewinger: Plus how filmmakers like Jordan Peele drew on the history of the Black horror genre to explore race in America.

Jordan Peele: Give me some funhouse mirror. Let me imagine that racism is a zombie. Now we can have a good time. Okay?

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is on the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. We're at that point in the presidential race where everyone's dropping the F bomb.

[music]

?Speaker: Let me ask you tonight. Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist?

?Speaker: Yes, I do. Yes, I do.

?Speaker: I can't think of the last time a member of the Joint Chiefs called any politician, let alone someone was a presidential nominee, a fascist.

?Speaker: When we think about fascism, we have to remember that there are so many signs that are actually happening.

Micah Loewinger: 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, "The most dangerous person to this country," and a "fascist to the core." In an interview with The New York Times, John Kelly, the Trump White House's longest serving chief of staff, agreed.

John Kelly: He should be an authoritarian. He admires people who are dictators. He has said that. He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist for sure.

Micah Loewinger: On Tuesday, The Atlantic reported that according to two people, Donald Trump said during his presidency that, "I need the generals that Hitler had." The next morning, Fox and Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade tried to spin it.

Brian Kilmeade: I could absolutely see him going out. It would be great to have German generals that actually do what we ask them to do. Maybe not fully being cognizant of the third rail of German generals who are Nazis and whatever.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 "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.

Jason Stanley: I've been involved in the, let's call it, fascism wars since my 2018 book.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. He says this tug of war over America's essential nature long precedes the man with the Tan.

Jason Stanley: Yes, I think focusing on Trump is a mistake because it's really the whole fascist, social, and political movement. This is 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 a European word for Jim Crow." Now we have a much more European structure with a fascist leader of a fascist social and political movement.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 alarms you?

Jason Stanley: Well, the targets of fascism. Immigrants, LGBTQ people. Fascism is about making sure the dominant group remains numerically the largest group. Women are there to bear children. The idea of trans women is antithetical for 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. 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, "divisive concepts." 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 banning 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. They're targeting courses that give us critical perspectives on US History. The very idea that we're going to force, by law, education to be patriotic is not a democratic idea.

Brooke Gladstone: Is it fascism? You say that everyone equates fascism with Hitler and the Holocaust, but that if you go with that theory, you'd have to kill 6 million people to be fascist. What about the years before that mass killing? Was Germany a fascist state? 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.

Jason Stanley: 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. 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. It's a vehicle for far right policy at this point and for Trump. 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Everything you described represents a tipping point?

Jason Stanley: We are sinking into what has been called for many years the fascism debate. I think it can be a little misleading. I think we should actually avoid it to some extent.

Brooke Gladstone: Wait, are you saying that we shouldn't be using the word?

Jason Stanley: 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. The people who are like, "Okay, you shouldn't call it fascist," fully agree that this movement has all the dangers of fascism. I use the term fascism because we don't have another word for something that looks so much like fascism.

Brooke Gladstone: You're not worried about diluting the power of such an alarming word?

Jason Stanley: No, the word is required now to keep us out of the history books as being complicit in the rise of fascism.

Brooke Gladstone: Back in 2018, in a Guardian piece, you quoted Toni Morrison saying this.

Toni Morrison: Before there was a final solution, there was a first one.

Brooke Gladstone: This is from her 1995 address to Howard University.

Toni Morrison: Then after the first, there was a second, and after the second, there was a third. Because the descent into a final solution is not a jump. It's one step and then another, and then another.

Brooke Gladstone: You wrote that Morrison's interest wasn't in fascist demagogues. It was in forces interested in fascist solutions to national problems.

Jason Stanley: 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 using a system that locks people up in giant prisons. That's a fascist solution to a national problem, especially the targeting of the formerly enslaved population of the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: You also say that many people who employ fascist tactics or embrace them do so cynically, but they don't really believe the enemies they're targeting are so malign or so powerful as their rhetoric suggests. There comes a tipping point where rhetoric does become policy.

Jason Stanley: Because speaking about the world is a way of behaving in the world. When you describe people as vermin, you're 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. The explicit labeling of political opponents as threats to the nation, as an enemy within, is explicit justification for targeting them with the apparatus of the state.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. 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.

Jason Stanley: There's a number of business interests here, as there always are in fascist movements, most of which don't regard themselves as fascists. A salient example is Elon Musk, who wants state regulations removed. The billionaire class want regulations lifted against them. They want taxes lessened. They understand that the fascist leader will direct the nation's ire against the 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.

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

Jason Stanley: Yes. 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. When they returned to Poland in 1945, my mother was five years old. No one remained. All seven 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 mass violence against internal enemies that characterizes Nazism. She writes about what we're seeing in the United States today, which is denial.

Brooke Gladstone: "She recounts experience with Nazi officers who assured her that in Nazism's vilification of Jews, they certainly didn't mean her."

Jason Stanley: Yes, she was a cultured German Jewish woman, an actor for Max Reinhardt and Fritz Lang, living in a fancy area of Berlin. Many members of the Nazi party thought that they could only be favored if there were members of the Nazi party. There was a widespread thought that the antisemitism wasn't serious, it wasn't to be taken literally.

Brooke Gladstone: That seems to echo with at least the early coverage of Trump.

Jason Stanley: Yes, well, I think the media continues to not take things like the proposals in Project 2025 seriously.

Brooke Gladstone: I don't know about that. It comes up a lot.

Jason Stanley: I haven't seen the kind of 911 calls that it deserves.

Brooke Gladstone: Trump doesn't know anything about Project 2025.

Jason Stanley: Right. That's why we have to recognize that this isn't about Trump. This is a social and political movement of Christo fascism, if you will, and libertarians who want the government to be essentially eliminated so they cannot be constrained by working class Americans.

Brooke Gladstone: So they don't have to share. Isn't that what it's about?

Jason Stanley: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: What are the forces in our society that are best poised to fight fascism?

Jason Stanley: We are the force. People in local communities can see that their targeted neighbors are their friends. 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: In such a fractured media environment, we're simply preaching to the converted.

Jason Stanley: That's right. People trust their local media. The local media has been decimated in the United States.

Brooke Gladstone: You still have the network news?

Jason Stanley: Sinclair broadcast--

Brooke Gladstone: Except for-- Yes, you're right. Sinclair has bought up a lot of those stations and has directed them very explicitly and what they can say and what they can't.

Jason Stanley: We have the destruction of local media by being bought up by these, in the case of Sinclair, or far right media conglomerate.

Brooke Gladstone: A lot of local radio has been bought up by, you would call it, Christian fascists.

Jason Stanley: Yes. That's not local media. That environment combined with social media results in conspiracy theories having Ferrari engines.

Brooke Gladstone: I repeat, what are the forces in our society that are best poised to fight fascism?

Jason Stanley: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Many of which have been packed by people who were selected by Leonard Leo and the Heritage Foundation.

Jason Stanley: Precisely. We've already lost a lot of the essential ecosystem for a democracy. Then are schools and universities. Sources of critical investigation. Yes, that critical investigation can go places that you might find inappropriate. If you make that illegal, if you impose patriotic education, you have something that looks much more like fascism. We need to support teachers and university professors who do that critical work of keeping non-dominant perspectives alive. Teachers and professors, journalists, courts dedicated to the rule of law.

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. 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 and the eight hour workday. You care less about whiteness. Fascists target unions because unions give us the materialist politics that is the basis of a healthy democracy.

Brooke Gladstone: It sounds like you're saying that to support intersectionalism you have to argue, not from an intersectionalist perspective.

Jason Stanley: You need solidarity. Solidarity among difference. Solidarity is an intersectionality because it's an intersectionality between all sorts of different identities. Everybody likes the weekend.

Brooke Gladstone: Jason, that's a fabulous ender. Thank you very much.

Jason Stanley: Thank you, Brooke.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Micah Loewinger: Coming up, your brain on horror.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media.

[music]

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: 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. 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 twist twig, a flutter, a clap.

[movie clip]

Brooke Gladstone: Even now, in our everlastingly bright world, darkness is still a menace, still bred in the bone.

[movie clip]

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Nina Nesseth: Hi, thank you for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

[movie clip]

Brooke Gladstone: Your body reacts even before you're aware of it. What exactly happens when you experience that physical jolt?

Nina Nesseth: You want your body to react even before you're aware of what's going on. Because sometimes that's 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 transfer all of that energy into enjoyment. That's known as excitation transfer theory.

Brooke Gladstone: You write that the jump scare is a relatively new innovation, that they became an expected part of the scary movie around the turn of the 21st century. There are two distinct varieties, the ones you expect and the ones you don't.

Nina Nesseth: 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. As soon as the light turns off, you see a shadowy figure. This happens a few times. This figure that appears in the darkness isn't moving. As a viewer, you know that something's got to give eventually. Either it's going to not be there when the lights turn off, or it's going to be closer.

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?" Then you get that payoff.

Brooke Gladstone: 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.

Nina Nesseth: 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. You spend time seeing this single nurse at the nurse station going back and forth. You see a security guard who comes and leaves. Then there's a strange sound off camera.

[sound effect]

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

[movie clip]

Nina Nesseth: We have that release of tension, and we go back to our long shot down the hallway. That's where we get our second jump. That is 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. Then almost immediately and impossibly, this figure dressed all in white with these giant pair of shears, walks through the apparently closed door to lop off the nurse's head.

[sound effect]

Nina Nesseth: We thought we had already gotten our jump scare, so to get that second one right afterwards is really amazing.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's move on to monsters. How do filmmakers tap into the characteristics that our brains are hardwired to fear?

Nina Nesseth: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 seems a little bit off. I remember one of the most terrifying moments I saw in a horror movie. It was in The Exorcist when Linda Blair bent backwards with her legs and feet on the ground.

[sound effect]

Nina Nesseth: It's a lot like how spiders move.

Brooke Gladstone: Many of us are wired to be arachnophobes.

Nina Nesseth: Absolutely. There are a few reasons why people might be afraid of spiders. 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. 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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 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?

Nina Nesseth: Sound waves are vibrations, but we can perceive them as a pressure. In the case of higher frequency noises, infrasound is at the other end. It's a low frequency. 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, like a low hum happening under the threshold of the rest of the soundscape that you may not notice, but is building your discomfort.

Brooke Gladstone: Those sounds are subtle. There's that sound in horror films, that staple we can't miss the blood curdling scream. Not all screams are created equal because of a quality known as roughness.

Nina Nesseth: What it amounts to is a fast change in pitch from high to low, to high to low, to high to low. If you think about how an ambulance siren tends to have that tri-tone 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.

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

Nina Nesseth: 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.

Brooke Gladstone: 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?

Nina Nesseth: Oh, gosh. There's so many parts of the brain involved in processing fear. The thalamus is a processing wave station. It would take cues from other parts of the brain, integrate them, and then 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.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's focus now on the difference between the way the brain reacts to a real horrible event and one created by filmmakers.

Nina Nesseth: 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. 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 a very much a thinking part of the brain that's all about planning and executive function. We've all had that moment when we've seen the heroine 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."

Brooke Gladstone: Explain to me how we can be scared when we know what's going to happen. Then tell me why we want to be.

Nina Nesseth: 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 outs, we expect something to be lurking in the shadows. 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. 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. Even the act of seeing someone work through their own grief narrative and come out at the other end of it can be very healing. 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 something special about the social element that can be embedded in the horror experience.

Brooke Gladstone: Nina, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much.

Nina Nesseth: Thank you so much for having me.

Brooke Gladstone: Nina Nesseth is a science writer and author of the book Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the renaissance of an old new category, Black horror. This is On the Media.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. Perhaps because they're predictable, horror films continue to enthrall us. 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.

[Movie Trailer - IT]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Yes, right about there is where I cover my eyes. That's just the trailer for the 2017 horror movie IT. Horror films in general, not that particular killer clown, are not my thing. Earlier this year, I learned there's a sub-genre, Black horror, and honestly, that confused me. Moving through the world in a Black body can provide more than enough fright, and I'd 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. I saw those as exceptions to the rule, not part of a larger category. What is Black horror?

Robin R. Means Coleman: Blacks in horror has been really with us since the start of film.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Robin R. Means Coleman is a professor of communications studies at Northwestern and author of the book Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. 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.

[Movie clip - Dracula]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Frankenstein.

[Movie clip - Frankenstein]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: The Mummy.

[Movie clip - The Mummy]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Only The Mummy featured a Black character, a servant played by Noble Johnson, who rarely speaks. Under the mummy's spell holds a knife to fleeing royalty.

[Movie clip - The Mummy]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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.

Robin R. Means Coleman: 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.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: One of the most popular was a 1930 picture called Ingagi.

[Movie clip - Ingagi]

Robin R. Means Coleman: Ingagi claims that there is mating that takes place between Africans and apes that produces children. It was marketed as truth, as a documentary, not so much as entertainment, but ethnographic. "Let's take a peek inside the savage wild ways of Africans."

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Savages, servants or unseen. Those were the most common roles for Black people in mainstream Horror. That first category, savages, proved especially profitable for movie makers. The idea of primitive monsters soon morphed into more magical ones.

Robin R. Means Coleman: There are lots of paths to talk about this history, but one that I often trace is going back to the US occupation of Haiti. Out of that occupation are these awful racist stories, particularly in the early '20s.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Stories that inspired a writer named William Seabrook to travel to the island for what he called an investigation of its people. When he came back, he wrote a book called The Magic Island that went to print in 1929.

Robin R. Means Coleman: He claims that he has lived among Black Haitians, that he's been given access to this secret devil worshiping cabal. That he's been able to observe a cannibal assembly, and he's even been allowed to sample the cuisine. Seabrook's book becomes really wildly popular in the U.S.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: In fact, it provided the inspiration for the 1932 movie White Zombie.

[Movie clip - White Zombie]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: It was the first time zombies appeared in a motion picture. While both Black and white actors played the undead, they were all under a voodoo spell.

Tananarive Due: This was back when zombies were robbed of agency and they were shamblers who would do the bidding of their master.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Tananarive Due is an author, screenwriter, and teaches Afrofuturism and Black horror at UCLA.

Tananarive Due: 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.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: As in George Romero, who directed The Night of the Living Dead movies three decades later in the 1960s.

Tananarive Due: That wasn't a part of it. It was fear of black magic. What if we get under their control instead of them being under our control?

Rebecca Clark-Callender: It's not that you're just undead, Due 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 R. Means Coleman and Horror Noir points all the way back to D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.

Robin R. Means Coleman: Another thing that came out of that era of fear of black monstrosity was respect and admiration for the good Negroes.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Good Negroes came in different varieties, like, for instance, Madrigal.

Robin R. Means Coleman: The only reason they're even in the movie-- 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.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Or spiritual.

Robin R. Means Coleman: Which is very similar to the magical Negro, even if they don't know the answer to the magic. They're there to pat you on your back and say, "Go on, you can do it. You can survive. You can figure it out."

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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?

Robin R. Means Coleman: Not always.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Sometimes we die in the middle. Friday the 13th 7, Nightmare on Elm Street 4, Terror Train, Scream 3. 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 Ingagi. Drastically different from its similarly titled but completely unrelated predecessor. From writer Spencer Williams Jr., the story features Black people living life and a revolutionary character, a scientist who was a Black woman. Dr. Helen Jackson, played by Laura Bowman.

Dr. Helen Jackson: 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.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Dr. Jackson uses her talents to try and cure a half man, half ape creature brought back from Africa. Yes, I know. Back then, it was progress. A small victory that would be followed by bigger ones. Like, for instance, Ben.

[Movie clip - Night of the Living Dead]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: That's Dwayne Jones as Ben, lead character of George Romero's 1968 hit, Night of the Living Dead. Romero had said he didn't write Ben as Black. Jones gave the best audition. 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.

[Movie clip - Night of the Living Dead]

Robin R. Means Coleman: 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.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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.

[Movie clip - Dracula]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: Or Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde in 1976.

[Movie clip - Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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.

[Movie clip - Ganja and Hess]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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.

Robin R. Means Coleman: Mobsters, gangsters, exploiters, politicians, the police. All of this is an attack on Blackness. Black people are fighting back in these movies. Blaxploitation movies, they tend to win.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: It's important to note here these films have problems. Blacula had some incredibly homophobic language and Black women were still often hypersexualized. Blaxploitation movies began a decade’s long wave of black horror films that could be pure entertainment and or convey something bigger. In 1995, a movie came out that is now considered a cult classic. Tales from the Hood.

[Movie clip - Tales from the Hood]

Rusty Cundiff: I liked horror, but I wasn't a fan of monster movies for the sake of monster movies. I also liked tales that had some moral component to them.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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.

[Film clip - The Political Tale]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: How people received 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.

[Movie clip - Tales from the Hood]

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

Rebecca Clark-Callender: To Cundiff, the pushback felt like a part of a bigger dismissal by modern young Black audiences of their predecessors.

Rusty Cundiff: 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.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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. Those tropes also had twists. The cop tries to fix his mistake. The voodoo exacts rightful vengeance. Dr. Cushing is in charge. I realized the problem was something else. The tales could be fact or fiction, but either way, they are stories I don't necessarily want a white audience to see.

Rusty Cundiff: Back when we did this, I didn't know if any white people were going to watch this movie at all. I didn't really care what they thought. Now, we did do audience test screenings, and there were definite chasms between 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 liked was the gang episode because that was pointing a finger at our own problem.

Tananarive Due: Horror is entertainment, okay? 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, too close to the thing itself. Give me a funhouse mirror. Let me imagine that racism is a zombie. Now we can have a good time, okay?

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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.

Rusty Cundiff: They said, no. This is cathartic. This is fantastic. That's what you can do in a horror film. You can give people a release or maybe a moment of happiness.

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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.

Rusty Cundiff: 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.

[music]

Rebecca Clark-Callender: 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-Callender.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wong and Katarina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer. Our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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