Last year, I reviewed Beneath Us (2019) for Horror Homeroom–a film that positioned immigrants to the US in literal and figurative subterranean spaces beneath American society. Tellingly, that film took far longer to get a release in the land of its origin than it did in Europe. His House (2020) landed on Netflix recently, a film that pairs haunted house horror tropes with the plight of immigrants into Britain, and offers a useful comparison between horror films stemming from migration out of Africa into Europe and from South America into North America. As these examples attest, and sitting as they do alongside a spate of lyrical, challenging and important films that deal with racial disparity, from Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) to Antebellum (Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, 2020), genre filmmaking, especially horror, often has licence to address these topics in a far more nuanced and complicated manner than straight dramas, and potentially to reach far greater audiences. Read more
