College Of Charleston Historian Answers: What Horrors Will Emerge In This Generation?
College of Charleston Professor Scott Poole, a historian who teaches courses on American politics and popular culture, told Inside Edition Digital, “The United States produces more horror films than any place on Earth. Every horror film or novel suggests that everything is completely fine and yet, simultaneously suggests that there is something wrong,” Poole said. “Often, good horror puts that in capital letters. That everything seems OK, but it’s not.”
According to Inside Edition Digital, “Poole suggested that mainstream American horror is often tied to a sense of optimism, particularly amongst white middle class Americans, who, he said, ‘have generally had the privilege of imagining the world as safe.’ When the world becomes a scarier place, horror films magnify the cracks in society.”
Inside Edition Digital continued: “Americans who watched Jordan Peele’s 2017 blockbuster film, Get Out, seemed to understand the film beyond the creepy suburban setting and the falsity of the safety of the white picket fence, and that it defined America’s most frightening monster in our contemporary world: racism.
Critics and scholars see the political implications in Peele’s film and argue that Get Out became the trailblazer of contemporary Black horror.
Poole agrees that, ‘I don’t know if Get Out would have been made, or if it would have become the phenomenon it did, if it was not for Ferguson in 2014 and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement.’” Referring to the pandemic, Poole commented, “Loneliness and isolation wasn’t born in 2020.”