Black mold is spreading through contemporary popular culture: Mark Samuels’ short story, “The Black Mould” (2011), Jill Ciment’s novel, Act of God (2015), Osgood Perkins’ film I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016), Ben Aaronovitch’s graphic novel from the Rivers of London series, Black Mould (2017), Jac Jemc’s novel, The Grip of It (2017), Mike Flanagan’s Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House (2018), Travis Stevens’ film, Girl on the 3rd Floor (2019), the segment “Gray Matter” in Shudder’s 2019 reboot of Creepshow (an adaptation of Stephen King’s 1973 story), and the Australian independent film, Relic (Natalie Erika James, 2020).
Spreading black mold, and death, in The Haunting of Hill House‘s “red room”
In most of these narratives, black mold seems to represent death: black mold sprouts up in the places characters have died or have been killed. Black mold doesn’t only signal individual death, however; it can also tell stories about species death, about the end of the human race. Black mold flourishes in decaying and ruined places of unabated moisture and heat, and the recent surge in stories about black mold is no doubt driven in part by contemporary anxieties about the fate of humans in a changing climate: black mold spreads where and when humans are not. Black mold flourishes in what both Alan Weisman and Eugene Thacker (from very different perspectives) have called the “world without us.”[i]
Centering the blackness of black mold serves to highlight how what seems to be a story about human extinction is often in fact a white story. The “world without us” is often actually the “world without whites.” Stories of black mold can serve as anxious stories not of species death but of white death in the face of a spreading and racialized “darkness.” These stories seem to worry about rising numbers of non-whites—the approaching tipping point in the US, for instance, when a majority white population will shift to majority Black and brown.
That stories of black mold in the US are inevitably racialized, depicted as a threat to the white race, is on stark display in the instance of an English classic of the fungal weird reprinted in the US fifty years after its original publication. In 1907, English writer William Hope Hodgson published “Voice in the Night,” a story of shipwrecked characters stranded on a mysterious island and consumed by fungi.[ii] The story was rather inexplicably reprinted in Playboy in July 1954 featuring a lead illustration that taps into a longstanding racialized narrative in the US (which perhaps explains why it was reprinted).
The illustration accompanying “The Voice in the Night” in Playboy in July 1954
In the story, a shipwrecked man and his fiancée have taken shelter after a shipwreck on a deserted ship that is infested with “a kind of grey, lichenous fungus” (34); one morning, “my sweetheart woke to find a small patch of it growing on her pillow, close to her face” (36). The lone illustration of the reprint in Playboy depicts this particular moment—and depicts it not as grey fungus but as black mold, menacing a white woman. In so doing, this illustration evokes a pure white womanhood perpetually threatened by the dark “nonhuman”—a longstanding racist trope in US fiction and film, especially in the horror genre. Birth of a Nation (D. W. Griffith) from 1915 is one of the first and perhaps the most notorious example, but Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931) and Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931) also purvey the trope extensively. Most tellingly, though, is Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold), which was released on March 5, 1954, just four months before Hodgson’s story was reprinted in Playboy. Arnold’s film repeatedly features a dark creature menacing a white woman on a boat—lurking outside the porthole, just as the mold in Playboy’s illustration for Hodgson’s story does.
The white woman (Kay) is threatened by the “dark” creature in Creature from the Black Lagoon
While Creature from the Black Lagoon may have driven the visual imagery of the reprint of “The Voice in the Night,” the Supreme Court decision of two months earlier, Brown v Board of Education (May 1954), undoubtedly drove the more real anxieties. Brown ended de jure racial segregation in public schools, a decision that propelled white fears that African Americans would spread into their spaces and their institutions, ending life as they knew it. Like mold. This fear is quite dramatically and visually illustrated in the reprint of Hodgson’s story in Playboy.
Mostly recently, Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out both takes up and dismantles the way in which black mold has figured white fears of encroaching black bodies, of miscegenation, and of white extinction. Shortly after African American protagonist Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) and his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) arrive at her family home, Rose’s father Dean takes Chris on a tour of their mansion. He gestures in a disarmingly dismissive way to one particular door, saying, “That’s the basement. We had to seal it up. Black mold down there.”
Chris in the basement in Get Out
Later in the film, after the Armitage family’s nefarious designs on Chris become clear, Chris is knocked out, taken down into the basement, and tied up in preparation for the operation that will replace his brain with that of an aging white man who covets his body. The seemingly off-hand “black mold” comment is thus a disguised indication of exactly how the Armitages and their white wealthy acquaintances conceive of African Americans—as black flesh to be colonized, as abject black matter that threatens to overrun the white mansion and must be kept down in the cellar and subject to absolute control by whites.
That Get Out is specifically tapping into racist fears about growing number of Black and brown bodies (often figured through black mold) is made evident in a rant Dean Armitage launches into just prior to his remark about the black mold in the basement. After he learns that Chris and Rose hit a deer with their car on the way up, he can’t resist expressing his approval: “One down, a couple of hundred thousand to go,” he says. “I do not like the deer. . . . They’re taking over. They’re like rats. They’re destroying the ecosystem.” Deer become code for black bodies, whose swelling numbers—like the spreading of black mold or rats—are “destroying the ecosystem.” And, by ecosystem, Dean Armitage clearly means the white ecosystem—the global landscape of white supremacy with its colonization of Black bodies. In Dean Armitage’s “ecological” logic, controlling population growth means appropriating Black bodies to white ends, keeping the population “white” in all that matters.
But, of course, Chris doesn’t stay in the basement: within the confines of the film, at least, he does destroy the ecosystem, flipping the narrative of white dread of black spread to one of Black triumph over white supremacy.
Notes:
[i] Weisman and Thacker.
[ii] Hodgson’s “A Voice in the Night” was adapted into the 1963 film, Matango.
Works Cited:
Hodgson, William Hope. “The Voice in the Night.” The Weird Tales of William Hope Hodgson, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes. British Library Pub., 2019.
Find on Amazon (ad):
Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of the Planet. Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1. Zero Books, 2011.
Weisman, Alan. The World Without Us. Picador, 2007.
Related: for more on Get Out, check out this post about my edited collection on the film.
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