Status Updates From Dark Carnivals: Modern Horr...

Wars of extermination on the empires frontier were only the beginning. The human catastrophe the history textbooks file under “westward expansion” served only as precursor for the global violence of the 20th & 21st c.

Empire’s beginnings are soaked in blood, in genocide…Few know that hundreds of massacres…occurred from period of earliest settlement…In first 70 yrs as a nation almost continuous warfare carved out a continental empire, killing 100s of thousands…survivors penned in apartheid-style homelands. Massive fortunes accrued to white elites & plantation slavery spread Southwest…

The roots of Am power, memory, & historical amnesia are deep reaching back to when a handful of violent settler societies seized Indian lands

White supremacy b/c more than a domestic institution. Racism played the central role in the creation of the Am empire. Its shadows whisper all around us in the present…

Horror films dealt w/memory of Am’s imperial begin by turning to trope of haunted Indian burial ground

Pool regurgitates its dead, an eldritch portal pulls house into Hades & part of planned dev where dreams come true goes down in the dark.

We will enter that darkness. The phantoms of a thousand Native American massacres are roused throughout this book…Beware how the roots of history clutch & call us back to a past as criminally deranged as the present.

Poltergeist—Spielberg/Hooper conflict, both infl on film but H more dark

Family moves to home in planned community, old idea but more common phrase in 80s…”where dreams come true.” In a Hopper film we need no further warning that this is nightmare country…in his dark dream of Am…incl political commentary…More importantly H did what Sp never would: he placed the horror in the cold guts of the Am home.

It puts the idea that we are the white hats under a hot light in a dark room. It asks whether we are telling the truth when we look at some atrocity & say “this is not who we are.”

Am & Americans lighted on an innovative way of being imperial. We see this in our horror fictions & find it in the difficulty many Am exhibit, esp those who thrive most in its system, of even thinking of their country as an empire. We tell our stories to distort the real story…this book explores horror & the empire’s infl on present cultural moment it also questions what we think we know about the deeper past.

How could such diff films b/c so pop in same country? To understand this is to und the nature of Am empire & it’s citizens profound lack of interest in confronting that reality. It’s different from every imperial power that came before it. It pretends not to exist.

The horror emerges then subsides, corpse appears only to vanish, the past surfaces then gets premature burial, shark attacks but hero blows to chum

Who could watch Jaws & cheer while country faced defeat, economic decline & govt maleficence (1975)? Didn’t Hooper’s vision make more sense? Chainsaw’s popularity needs no expl—it suited the times. But the sun-drenched seascapes of Amity Is are straight out of a 50s creature feature & promised escape from very real fears.

Chainsaw & Jaws appearing @ the same cult turn are the twin poles of Am imagination @ crucial moment in country’s history. Jaws offered nightmare but one met on way to dream come true. It’s film manifesto for an Am where men w/square jaws destroy monsters…not…warning about monsters hatched from dragons teeth Am sowed in its own soil…coming for all of us.

This book not suggest audiences leave a horror film pondering geopolitics or cost of Am empire. Nor leave a monster-hunt story thinking about how good it is to live so well in the U.S. But they do leave w/either a feeling of the rightness or wrongness of the world. They’ve been asked to question the story they tell themselves. They’ve been asked to pay attention or…told to go back to sleep, everything’s ok.

The dirty wars of empire have to be submerged so…the fighting can go on & on. This is why so much of the truth of the last 100yrs survives not in museums or documentaries…but in horror films.

We have more to learn about what kind of midnight ride the U.S. really is & the collective trauma its violent traveling circus has visited on the world. Who will survive America?

Always been sthg deeply political about 20thc horror, back to its roots as a cry of anger&despair in the aftermath of the Great War’s savagery. Arguably the late 40s & much of 50s were one of most politically charged eras of horror film…as flying saucers & mad scientists justified Am military might in the face of outside threat, transformed ppl of color into monsters/villains, offered worldview of paranoia, rage

Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Midsommar
Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Us

“a horrorsaince of social relevance”

12: the question has been less about whether horror films are good & more a question of whether they matter.

Is there a lonely crossroad where the nightmares of horror & the American century meet?

COVID— We thought we didn’t have to worry about such things.

COVID-19 exposed the absurdity of claiming any kind of exceptionalism for a country w/basic social & econ weaknesses unknown to much of Europe Japan & East Asia.

Though frequently called into question, the idea of the Am century, the ideal of Am Ex & certainty U.S. is & has always been greatest nation on earth remain deeply rooted in Am politics.

The bloody wake left by America’s ascent into empire has been legitimized by the notion of American exceptionalism… it’s only been in the last few years that some of the basic tenets of Am Ex have been questioned.
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Today, grasping at the idea that the U.S. has a special destiny seems almost a kind of psychosis after the sacrifice of almost 7,000 Am lives in Iraq & Afghanistan.