jedioffsidetrap’s Reviews > Dark Carnivals: Modern Horrors and the Origins of American Empire > Status Update

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.