Dawn Keetley
The high-profile, mainstream horror films of the 1990s were almost aggressively white: Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992), The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Curtis Hanson, 1992), Scream (Wes Craven 1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999) and The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999)—to name some notable examples. The decade did see a countervailing strand of Black horror, featuring central Black characters, including The People under the Stairs (Wes Craven, 1991), Candyman (Bernard Rose, 1992), and Tales from the Hood (1995), the latter helmed by a Black director, Rusty Cundieff. Black horror in the 1990s, as Robin Means Coleman has pointed out, was starkly different from mainstream white horror, which was set mostly in wealthy suburban, exurban, or rural spaces. Black horror films were set in (and were centrally about) cities.[i] Horror, in short, was racially divided. With its snowy mise-en-scène and all-white cast, Misery (Rob Reiner, 1990) definitely exemplifies the racial divide of 1990s horror.
Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes in a snowy landscape
Misery’s Whiteness
The whiteness of Reiner’s Misery is amplified by the fact that it excises completely the African subtext of King’s 1987 novel. King creates a rich imaginary world for Paul that gets interwoven with the Misery Chastain novel he’s writing. The latter is set mostly in Africa, where Misery spends much of her time in captivity. King is drawing explicitly on the late Victorian imperialist adventure fiction of H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines [1885] and She [1887]).[ii] And as Misery is drawn into danger in strange lands with powerful gods, so too is Paul, with King repeatedly stressing Paul’s identification with his eponymous heroine.
As Paul maps his own experience onto the fictional African adventures of Misery, his captor Annie Wilkes becomes a powerful African idol, a goddess. And in an intriguing instance of racial crossing, Paul identifies not only with his white, English heroine but also with the Africans who populate his novel, characters who are subjugated to their gods as he is subjugated to Annie: “His need for [Annie] and his vulnerability to her screamed at him to back off, to placate her while there was still time . . . as a tribe in one of those Rider Haggard stories would have placated their goddess when she was angry, by making sacrifices to her effigy.”[iii] Indeed, Paul comes to believe that Annie is so powerful she can’t be killed. “You couldn’t kill the goddess,” he thinks at the end, even after he has killed her.[iv] There’s even an enigmatic moment in the novel, after a state trooper arrives at Annie’s house and Paul glimpses rescue, when Paul screams “AFRICA!” to get his attention—repeating it “Africa! Africa! Help me!”[v] In this moment, “Africa” looms large for Paul, a sign of both his captivity and his freedom. These references to H. Rider Haggard and colonial Africa in King’s novel complicate Paul status, rendering him ambiguously both white and black, colonizer and colonized, captor and captive. All of this textured meaning, though, is erased in the film.
Race and Difference in the Hobbling Scene
The single moment in Reiner’s adaptation of Misery that disrupts its seamless whiteness is the hobbling scene. While the film changes what Anne does to Paul from amputation to hobbling, the words she uses in the film to preface her action are virtually identical to the novel:
“Do you know about the early days at the Kimberley diamond mines? Do you know what they did to the native workers who stole diamonds? Don’t worry. They didn’t kill them. That would be just like junking a Mercedes just because it had a broken spring. No, if they caught them, they had to make sure they could go on working, but they also had to make sure they could never run away. The operation was called ‘hobbling.’”[vi]
You can see the scene here:
What’s interesting about this scene is that there is no evidence of hobbling in histories of the early days of mining in South Africa.[vii] There is, however, relatively recent evidence of hobbling in Colorado’s long past—something neither King nor Reiner would have known about.[viii] But the fact that there was apparently slavery, torture, and hobbling in the prehistoric past of the American southwest just makes it even more clear that, in her speech to Paul about hobbling practices in South Africa, Annie is actively displacing racial violence from the US present onto the South African past. In a very white film, Annie Wilkes also engages in a whitewashing of American history.[ix]
Given Misery’s whiteness and its displacement of racial violence onto South Africa, it is telling that a twenty-first-century film evokes Misery in order to tell a story that is all about race, bringing what was buried to the surface. With all its repressions, Misery is ripe for exploring issues of racialized power.
Emma Tammi’s Delivered Rewrites Misery
Released on May 8, 2020, Delivered is the Mother’s Day entry in Hulu’s ongoing Into the Dark anthology horror series from the television branch of Blumhouse Productions. It’s the eighth in the twelve-episode second season and is helmed by Emma Tammi, director of The Wind (2018). Delivered has been compared, including by the director herself, to both Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Misery (1990). Indeed, in more than one interview, Tammi has said that these two films were “primary,”[x] and that she was initially drawn to the screenplay specifically because it “structurally compared to ‘Misery.’”[xi] She elaborates that, “Misery was a huge influence, and we were really trying to tip our hat in the most respectful way to that film throughout the shoot. But also try to find some unique spin on that story.”[xii] Interestingly, in none of her interviews does Tammi highlight the role that racial difference plays in her film. The central relationship of captor and captive in Misery—that between Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon—is replicated in Delivered by Jenny (Tina Majorino) and Valerie (Natalie Paul). Jenny is white and Valerie is Black. While this difference is not explicitly mentioned in the film, it definitely matters.
Delivered follows a pregnant Valerie, a woman who is clearly ambivalent about her pregnancy. She also seems less than happy with her husband, Tom (Michael Cassidy), and it soon becomes clear that there is another man in her life, Riley (Micah Parker), to whom she is currently refusing to talk. Valerie’s alienation from her life is effectively expressed by Natalie Paul and by director Tammi. She appears to be uninvolved in her life, detached from things and people around her, going through the motions of doctors’ appointments (which she doesn’t tell her husband about) and “Mamaste” childbirth classes.
Jenny (Tina Majorino) tracks Val (Natalie Paul) down to a coffee shop.
It is at “Mamaste” class that Valerie meets Jenny, also pregnant. Right after the class, Valerie again “accidentally” meets Jenny at a local coffee shop (setting off warning bells for the viewer at least). With lightning rapidity, Jenny is inviting Valerie and Tom out to her farmhouse for dinner. It is at this dinner that things take a turn for the horrifying: Jenny drugs Valerie and kills Tom, and then the film veers into a combination of Misery and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
In its resonance with The Hand That Rocks the Cradle in particular, Delivered amplifies its 90s horror roots, serving as an effective entry into what John Kenneth Muir called the “interloper” horror subgenre—dominant in the 1990s and a fairly consistent staple of the horror tradition ever since.[xiii] In, for example, Single White Female, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Poison Ivy (Katt Shea, 1992), The Temp (Tom Holland, 1993), and The Crush (Alan Shapiro, 1993), a disturbed white woman manipulates her way into the white protagonist’s life and family—intent on taking it for her own and destroying anyone who gets in her way. Although Muir does not discuss Misery as an “interloper” film, Annie is an interloper of sorts, insinuating herself into Paul’s relationship with Misery Chastain. Delivered’s Jenny fits perfectly within this horror lineage. She wants Valerie’s baby. At first, she seems bent on raising it with Valerie, telling her, “It’s our baby,” and, “Val, you’re the one.” But Jenny is also prepared to raise Val’s baby by herself if the latter remain uncooperative. And Val does remain uncooperative, so Jenny must resort to increasingly violent means to keep her from escaping.
Delivered is replete with direct references to Misery. Jenny’s farm, like Annie’s is “in the middle of nowhere.” Although Jenny has kidnapped other women, she seems fixated on Val: “Val, you’re the one,” she says. Just as Paul Sheldon finds Annie’s revelatory scrapbook, in a brief period when Jenny is absent, Val discovers a box of newspaper clippings and other documents that reveal Jenny’s history, specifically a history of sustained violent sexual abuse by her parents whom she finally murdered. Her parents took Jenny’s baby (the product of incest) in the most brutal way and left her pathologically needing another. (Significantly, what Val discovers about Jenny serves to humanize a bit more than what Paul discovers abut Annie.) Both Paul and Val are shackled to the bed, and, in their bids to escape, both threaten to destroy what their captor most values (the final Misery novel and Val’s baby). After both victims escape, they experience terrifying post-traumatic after-effects, convinced they still see their captors even after they are dead.
Delivered and Race
With all of Delivered’s similarities to Misery, it differs profoundly from both Misery and the 1990s interloper tradition in that Valerie is Black. Not only is this fact not mentioned in the diegesis of the film itself, but it is also absent from most reviews of Delivered and interviews with Emma Tammi herself. The film has been positioned as about “motherhood” and fears of motherhood, hence Tammi’s centering not only Misery but Rosemary’s Baby as the central influences on the film. She has said that while Delivered is “structurally” like Misery, it incorporates the “twist” of a “fear of motherhood.”[xiv]
I would argue, though, that race is actually crucial to what Delivered does with its influences—with Misery and the 90s interloper film.[xv] Valerie is Black in an otherwise almost entirely white diegetic world. She is a Black woman surrounded in everything she does by white people. The mise-en-scène is gleamingly white, including the people—and much of the filming is done in sunlight.[xvi] And yet there is never that moment when race is flagged as central to the characters’ lives—that moment that happens in Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), for instance, when Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) asks Rose (Allison Williams): “Do your parents know I’m black?”
And yet, despite its silence on race, Delivered does actually evoke Get Out as well as Misery and 1990s interloper horror films. Like the Armitage family in Get Out, the very-white Jenny has no qualms about using the bodies of black people to get what she wants. Indeed, the scene in which Val discovers a file box of photographs of prior mothers-to-be whom Jenny has kidnapped and imprisoned evokes not only Misery but also Get Out—specifically the moment when Chris discovers the photographs of his girlfriend’s prior Black victims.
As the final scenes of Delivered play out, there are, also as in Get Out, unmistakable undertones of slavery. In an old-fashioned, isolated farmhouse that definitely evokes a plantation (even more so than the Armitages’ mansion in Get Out), Valerie is chained to the bed, with a literal chain around her ankle. After she briefly escapes, Jenny hobbles her. And Jenny is planning on stealing Val’s baby. The evocation of US slavery could not be clearer.
Indeed, at the end of the film, Val’s ambivalence about her baby resolves in a way that evokes one of the very worst of slavery’s horrors. Val says to her unborn baby: “One thing I do know. I swear. She will not have you.” And then Val seems to be ensuring she miscarries. In this moment, Delivered evokes Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and the stories of the many slave women whom Morrison crystallized in Sethe—women who killed their own children rather than allow them to grow up in slavery.
Delivered not only evokes the history of literal slavery in the US, however. It also shows Val trapped in an unremittingly white world, thus showing that her seeming dread of motherhood is fundamentally bound up with being a Black mother in a white world.
Early in the film, Val gets up one morning to find Tom constructing a crib. This scene demonstrates Val’s ambivalence about motherhood (and about Tom) while rooting both, more covertly, in race. The camera focuses on the side of the box in which the crib arrived. This shot tellingly repeats a shot from an earlier scene: both show a picture of a happy mother and baby on the side of the crib box, a happy white mother and white baby. Val stares at the picture on the box, and the camera pans up at her to capture not just anxiety but what also seems like anger, hostility. And then Val snaps at Tom, “I don’t like it. Put it back.”
Valerie (Natalie Paul) looks at the crib box
The box, like seemingly everything in Val’s life, emphasizes whiteness as the norm and erases Blackness. As Peele showed so effectively in Get Out, racism pervades those spaces where it goes unspoken—and, as Chris finds out in that film, not talking about it, trying to avoid it, will blow up in your face.
While Jenny is certainly pathologically damaged, enacting her very individual trauma and abuse on the bodies of women of any and all races, Delivered insists there is more going on than that. Delivered is about Jenny’s abduction of Val, a Black woman, and her intent to steal Val’s Black baby, but her individual pathology serves also to stand for a more collective and systemic pathology. Indeed, as Val resolves at all costs to save her baby, it becomes clear that Val’s earlier ambivalence about pregnancy was almost certainly connected to the white world she inhabited, in the relentless whiteness of what motherhood looked like when she looked around her.
Val is finally in a space with another black person
In the last scene, as Val is in the hospital, we finally see another African-American character, a nurse. But as Val looks at her, she transforms into Jenny. A white woman replaces the only other Black woman in the film. This turns out to be a nightmare, but it signals that it’s the nightmare Val was living all along. This final scene mirrors the final scene from Misery when Paul thinks he sees Annie long after she is dead. But Delivered insists that its protagonist’s trauma is not just individual but collective: it is the trauma of living as a Black woman, and raising a Black baby, in a white world.
I want to end by recommending a film that came out since Delivered—Spell (October 30, 2020), directed by Black director Mark Tonderai and with an all-Black cast. Like Delivered, Spell rewrites Misery, infusing the narrative not only with racial difference but also differences of class and region.
Here’s the trailer:
The plot follows a wealthy urban man, Marquis Woods (Omari Hardwick) who flies on a private plane with his family into the heart of Appalachia to attend his long-estranged father’s funeral. The plane crashes and Marq wakes to find himself in the house of an elderly woman Eloise (Loretta Devine), who appears to have saved him from the wreckage of the crash–but who soon also appears to be holding him captive. The plot unveils a rural cult, “old houdoo ghosts,” and a lot of references to class differences between city folks and country folks. As Eloise drily notes at one point, “We don’t have much in the way of Obamacare around here.” Spell is not a perfect film, but it hews close to the plot of Misery while interrogating intra-racial differences of class, region, and privilege–not unlike the way Misery itself explores those same differences between Paul Sheldon and Annie Wilkes.
Notes:
[i] Means Coleman, 169-97. The opening scene of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) in which a Black character from Brooklyn negotiates the “creepy-ass suburbs” evokes the racial divide of horror’s places.
[ii] King references H. Rider Haggard several times in the novel; see 8, 65, 76-7, and 80.
[iii] King, 76-7.
[iv] King, 348.
[v] Ibid., 268. Earlier in the novel, Africa seems to have become an ambiguous symbol of both confinement and freedom for Paul. He says to himself, “‘Oh, Africa’” after he escapes from his bedroom briefly (but is afraid his escape will be discovered) (164). And when Annie cuts off and cauterizes his foot, he screams, “‘The pain! The goddess! The pain! O Africa!’” (233). When he screams “AFRICA!” to the state trooper, it is a word that seems to embody, then, both his entrapment and the hope of freedom.
[vi] See King, 229. There is a little more detail in this speech in the novel, including Annie’s spelling out that it was the “British” who hobbled the natives.
[vii] Historians of early diamond mining in South Africa make no mention of hobbling as a practice; encroachers on others’ mining property and diamond thieves were flogged not hobbled. See Meredith, 44-5, 116.
[viii] Osterholtz describes the discovery at Sacred Ridge, a Pueblo site in southwestern Colorado, of the prehistoric remains of thirty-three individuals who had been hobbled by blows to the sides of the ankles.
[ix] The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), to take a counter example of a film that is almost (aside from Scatman Crothers as Hallorann) as white as Misery, and which is also set in Colorado, illuminates the region’s history of race and racism, specifically Native American displacement and democide, in almost every scene. See Blakemore.
[x] Caldwell; McGrew.
[xi] Benardello.
[xii] Caldwell.
[xiii] Muir, 23-25.
[xiv] Benardello.
[xv] At least two reviewers noted the racial connotations of Delivered. See Langberg and Musnicky. Langberg argues that the film “outright fumbled” the racial dynamics and is “irresponsible” for not developing them further. I disagree with this view since I think Delivered does “deliver” on an important message precisely because of its overwhelming whiteness and silence about race.
[xvi] In one interview, when she’s talking about directing The Wind, Tammi mentions Aris Aster’s use of sunlight in Midsommar (McGrew).
Works Cited:
Benardello, Karen. “Interview: Emma Tammi Talks Into the Dark: Delivered.” Shock Ya! 8 May 2020.
Blakemore, Bill. “Kubrick’s Shining Secret.” The Washington Post, 12 July 1987,
Caldwell, Kayla. “Interview: Director Emma Tammi of Into the Dark’s ‘Delivered.’” Creepy Kingdom, 14 May 2020.
King, Stephen. Misery. 1987. Scribner, 2016.
Langberg, Eric. “‘Delivered’ is a Misery-inspired Pregnancy Chiller with Unexplored Racial Connotations.” Medium, 8 May 2020.
McGrew, Shannon. “Director Emma Tammi for Into the Dark: Delivered.” Nightmarish Conjurings, 9 May 2020.
Means Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. Routledge, 2011.
Meredith, Martin. Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa. Perseus Books, 2007.
Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Columbia Pictures, 1990.
Muir, John Kenneth. Horror Films of the 1990s. McFarland, 2011.
Musnicky, Sarah. “Into the Dark’s DELIVERED.” Nightmarish Conjurings, 6 May 2020.
Osterholtz, Anna J. “Hobbling and Torture as Performative Violence: An Example from the Prehistoric Southwest.” Kiva: Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History, vol. 78, no. 2, 2012, pp. 123-43.
