White Terror

The Horror Film from Obama to Trump

Russell Meeuf

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780253060389
• eBook ISBN: 9780253060402
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

What kinds of terror lurk beneath the surface of White respectability? Many of the top-grossing US horror films between 2008 and 2016 relied heavily on themes of White, patriarchal fear and fragility: outsiders disrupting the sanctity of the almost always White family, evil forces or transgressive ideas transforming loved ones, and children dying when White women eschew traditional maternal roles.

Horror film has a long history of radical, political commentary, and Russell Meeuf reveals how racial resentments represented specifically in horror films produced during the Obama era gave rise to the Trump presidency and the Make America Great Again movement. Featuring films such as The Conjuring and Don't Breathe, White Terror explores how motifs of home invasion, exorcism, possession, and hauntings mirror cultural debates around White masculinity, class, religion, socioeconomics, and more.

In the vein of Jordan Peele, White Terror exposes how White mainstream fear affects the horror film industry, which in turn cashes in on that fear and draws voters to candidates like Trump.

1

WHITENESS UNDER SIEGE, PART 1

Haunted House Films

IN THE HOLLYWOOD HORROR FILM, the haunted house is almost always the White haunted house. In the movies, White families are tormented by some trauma in their house’s history, haunted by disturbing legacies of abuse and violence that linger over the years in attics, basements, Ouija boards, unmarked graves, haunted mirrors, secret rooms, 8 mm home movies, or anything else that can be secreted in the dark corners of the house. Faced with the horrible realities of the past intruding into the present, White families in these films at first deny their victim status, then cower, eventually learning to fight back in the hopes of reclaiming their home, often with the help of some occult expert who reveals to them secrets that the mainstream refuses to acknowledge.

As Eddie Murphy joked back in 1983, the glaring plot hole in most haunted house narratives is the stubborn refusal of White people to simply leave. “Not only do they stay in the mother-fucking house in Poltergeist,” Murphy quips, “they invited more White people over, sit around going, [in a nasally voice] ‘Our daughter, Carol Ann, is in the television set.’”

“And in Amityville Horror,” Murphy continues, “the ghost told them to get out of the house. White people stayed in there. Now that’s a hint and half for your ass. A ghost say get the fuck out, I would just tip the fuck out the door.”¹

White families in haunted house films don’t get up and leave, of course, because it would make for a very short film. But they also stick around because those families refuse (at first) to acknowledge that their home might not be a safe refuge. Haunted house films make a spectacle of White incredulity that middle-class homeowners might be victimized in their own homes or, even worse, that homeownership itself doesn’t insulate them from the horrors of the world. Murphy jokes that Black people would never assume that proprietorship might protect them from violence and terror, so they would waste no time leaving behind their homes and their possessions to survive. If he were in Poltergeist (1982), Murphy says, he would just go down to his local priest and say, “Look, man, I went home and my fucking daughter’s in the TV set and shit, and so I just fucking left. You can have all that shit. I ain’t going back to the motherfucker.”² But White folks in the haunted house film continue about their business until whatever malevolent force convinces them that they are not safe, in spite of their homeownership.³

The incredulity of White families in haunted house films is driven by the sacred status of the home in the popular imagination. After decades of government policy supporting a massive expansion of homeownership after World War II (for some Americans), the single-family home has taken on revered status in US culture, not only as a sign of financial stability for middle-class families, but as the symbol of capitalist prosperity in the postwar world. For Americans, the single-family home sits at the perfect nexus of wholesome family values and meritocratic fantasies of the Protestant work ethic, making it a particularly potent distillation of US national identity, especially for White Americans, who continue to represent the majority of homeowners.

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that the horror genre would see an increasing emphasis on the house in the Obama years (both in haunted house films and in their closely related cousin, home invasion films, the subject of the next chapter). A wholesome, well-educated Black family occupied the White House, while a massive economic crisis shook the public’s faith in homeownership as a means toward financial stability. Suddenly, homeownership didn’t seem to be such a secure path toward middle-class standing, a jolt to the financial stability of White Americans, who looked around and saw signs of upward Black mobility in the form of the Obama family.

The haunting feeling that White Americans’ place on the social hierarchy was under siege coincided with a wave of haunted house films between 2008 and 2016. The US film industry produced thirty-two films that included haunted houses in that period, representing 21 percent of all the top-grossing US horror. By comparison, Hollywood produced only ten mainstream haunted house films in the 1980s and only two in the ’90s. The pace increased starting around 2005, and the haunted house reigned supreme in Hollywood horror in the Obama years, spurred on by successful franchises like The Conjuring series, the Paranormal Activity films, and the Insidious films. The latter two were produced by horror mega-producer Jason Blum, whose company, appropriately, is called BlumHouse.

This wave of haunted house movies demonstrates the horror film’s capacity for processing and mediating (White) cultural anxieties. As homeownership became a less stable means of securing middle-class standing, Hollywood studios capitalized on this fear, producing films in which the house becomes a site of terror and violence threatening to tear families apart. As a number of scholars have identified, the housing crisis of the mid-2000s produced a host of recessionary horror films that took on the terrors of neoliberal capitalism.⁴ Fears of lost equity and low credit scores become grotesque visions of spectral visitors, insidious demons, and decaying bodies embedded in one’s home.⁵

But Hollywood haunted house films in this period don’t simply translate broad cultural fears about homeownership into ghosts and other unwanted visitors. Instead, the haunted house films of the Obama years tell specific stories about White families and the haunting feeling that they are losing their privileged place in society. These are not simply recessionary horror stories but rather White stories about precarity and guilt in the recession. What if the system that has propped up White privilege and White economic stability for so long was finally crumbling? What if White folks would have to face the same disadvantages that people of color have faced for so long? Over and over again in contemporary horror films, White families (almost always in a state of crisis concerning family relationships, their finances, or both) look to homeownership as salvation only to find that the home itself makes them vulnerable. And only in the dusty basements and shadowy attics of the haunted house can those families face the nagging dread that animates their ordeal—the horrifying realization that they might not be as privileged as they had imagined or, worse, that the horrific past of White violence in the US means that they should feel guilty about the privileges they do have.

FROM THE HAUNTED HOUSE TO THE HOUSING CRISIS

The house has been at the center of horror stories since the inception of modern horror, especially in the United States. Dale Bailey, in his book American Nightmares, outlines this history in horror fiction, tracing the transformation of the European Gothic’s crumbling castles into the creepy, formerly aristocratic estates of the American haunted house tradition. For Bailey, the haunted house in American fiction became a way for the genre to explore the tensions of social class in America as the aspirations of middle-class families are bogged down in the sprawling former mansions of old-money elites. From Nathaniel Hawthorne through Stephen King and beyond, the US horror story has relied on the trope of the haunted house to explore American anxieties about class and the family.⁶

The haunted house has figured so prominently in US popular culture thanks to the revered place of homeownership in the US and the important economic function of homeownership for the White middle class. Since the housing boom after World War II in the US, homeownership has been the primary means of accumulating wealth and economic stability for the middle class and a primary mechanism through which racial inequalities have been maintained. Widespread discrimination throughout US history, but particularly in the postwar housing boom, explicitly excluded African Americans and other people of color from sharing in economic prosperity. This discrimination has had long-term, multigenerational effects.⁷ In fact, the ability of some ethnic groups, such as Irish Americans and Jewish Americans, to participate in government-subsidized homeownership after World War II and more fully enter the US middle class can be seen as one mechanism through which such groups became fully White in the US racial imagination.⁸

The important role of homeownership in the US, then, explains why the housing crisis of 2006–2007 was so troubling to not only the economy but also to US culture. The mythology of homeownership as a deeply secure financial investment but also a potent symbol of middle-class standing came under threat in the aftermath of the housing bubble and the ensuing Great Recession. Mainstream media obsessed over the idea of possible declining homeownership, especially as studies began to suggest that millennials aren’t buying homes at the same rates as baby boomers, thanks to increasing student-loan debt, precarious employment opportunities, and memories of the housing market crash.⁹

But while the housing market crash was often framed in the media as a devastating blow to the US middle class in general, in reality, people of color bore the brunt of the crisis and the ensuing recession. As sociologists Jacob Rugh and Douglas Massey document, the long history of racial segregation and discriminatory housing practices in the US meant that racial and ethnic minorities were disproportionately targeted by unscrupulous lenders as the housing bubble grew in the mid-2000s. (In fact, Rugh and Massey argue that racial disparities were not simply by-products of the crisis but key, contributing factors to the foreclosure crisis itself.) And once the bubble burst, African Americans and especially Hispanic Americans were hit hardest by foreclosures and the following recession.¹⁰

In the wake of this crisis, mainstream horror intensified its attention on fears of the home as a site of terror, but not for the non-White homeowners who were most targeted by predatory lenders and most impacted by the economic downturn. Rather, the almost exclusive focus of this cycle of films were middle-class White families working through their own economic anxieties.

This cycle starts around 2005, at the peak of the housing market bubble in the US. That year, five haunted house films were produced (the remake of The Amityville Horror, the Southern plantation haunting in The Skeleton Key, Boogeyman, the international remake Dark Water, and An American Haunting). As US popular culture obsessed over the fantastical growth of the housing market with narratives about house flipping and home renovations, the horror film seemed to anticipate the impact that the housing bubble would have on the family home.

Building on this initial commercial success, the home-based horror cycle really picked up steam around 2009 in the wake of the housing market crash and subsequent financial crisis. Between three and eight mainstream horror films were produced each year with elements of the haunted house or home invasion narrative. The popularity of the cycle yielded seven haunted house films in 2016, suggesting its continuing resonance at least up through the contentious presidential election that year. Even the titles of horror films in this period became obsessed with property, prioritizing the house as the central figure of the film. These included Last House on the Left (2009), Dream House (2011), Silent House (2011), and The House at the End of the Street (2012).

The timing of this cycle indicates a clear relationship with the housing crisis: at a historical moment when the economic stability of homeownership plummets, Hollywood narratives tap into those anxieties with a cycle of films foregrounding homes that try to ruin the middle-class White families who occupy them. As a number of scholars and critics have noted, the housing market crash ushered in a wave of recessionary haunted house films and TV shows exploiting cultural fears around the economic instability of the family home. Bernice Murphy, for example, identifies the post-2009 haunted house cycle in US horror as a repository of cultural anxieties over homeownership and looks particularly at BlumHouse films as exemplars of suburban angst over the Great Recession.¹¹ Julia Leyda likewise explores the Paranormal Activity films and “the horror of debt that cannot be evaded or expunged” against the backdrop of neoliberal capitalism and the housing market crash.¹² And Dawn Keetley uses American Horror Story: Murder House (2011) to identify a pervasive sense of cultural entropy and torpor brought about by the trauma of economic collapse and perceived cultural decline.¹³ As these scholars (and others) affirm, the haunted house film became a reflection of a culture grappling with the fallout of the Great Recession and the declining value (literal and cultural) of the family home.

HAUNTED FAMILIES AND SOCIAL PRECARITY

The structure of the haunted house film tends to be fairly regular. Many haunted house films begin on moving day, with a new family unpacking boxes and getting to know the quirks of their new spaces. The newness of the house for the family serves to explain the family’s obliviousness to the dangers of their new abode; strange occurrences around the house are rationalized away as idiosyncrasies that they haven’t adjusted to yet, so they push past all the warning signs that they are in spiritual, psychological, or physical danger and try their best to make the creepy house their home.

The Sinister films (2012, 2015), in fact, make the act of moving a prerequisite for the horrors that the family will face, centering the story ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Whiteness, Politics, and Horror
• 1. Whiteness Under Siege, Part 1: Haunted House Films
• 2. Whiteness Under Siege, Part 2: Home Invasions
• 3. American Dreams: Fantasies and Social Mobility in Dream House and Drag Me to Hell
• 4. Sad White Men and Their Demons: Possession Films
• 5. Suffering and Reluctant Mothers Meet Their Match: Horrific Children
• 6. Motor City Gothic: White Youth and Economic Anxiety in It Follows and Don’t Breathe
• 7. Surveilling Whiteness: The Horrific Technology Film
• 8. Making Horror Great Again: The Horror Remake
• Conclusion: Horror in the Trump Era
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author