The American Home Invasion Film and The History of Racial and Social Exclusion in the Pursuit of Private Property
It is possible to supplement one’s understanding of the historical linkages between racism and private property in the United States from a non-American perspective by witnessing the horrors of this form of economic exclusion and oppression through the medium of film. In particular, the subgenre of home invasion horror deals with the subject by allowing the audience to experience some of the terrors that racialized groups have had to face in the nation when navigating matters surrounding securing living arrangements. Whether that is the anxiety surrounding taking on the burden of home ownership, the instability and vulnerability that is associated with renting, the loss of privacy involved in shared communal spaces, the horror of being unable to secure any living space at all and succumbing to homelessness, or the economic and societal woes that lead to an increase in home invasions themselves, the home invasion genre has included a myriad of dynamics relating to real estate. American films that belong to the subgenre have especially been effective in their display of economic inequities relating to racial discrimination, segregation, and white supremacy.
In the article “Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film by John David Rhodes (review)” by Conn Holohan, Holohan highlights how “John David Rhodes points out in his fascinating and fine-grained study of the house in American film, the “fantasy of ownership” that underpins such rhetoric requires a willful disavowal of property’s fungible nature, a refusal to acknowledge that “whatever is promised by the house is radically susceptible to violation, displacement, and loss.”, and that ultimately “As Rhode’s book reveals, cinema’s seductive images of domesticity both whisper the promised pleasures of inhabitation and confront us with the anxieties produced “when we try to force the house to deliver on these promises”. This idea that many of the most iconic American films have tried to seduce audiences into buying into the American dream associated with gaining home ownership and eventual financial success and independence has been contrasted with the fear and anxiety surrounding these high hopes placed on material value purchases such as homes. There is reason to believe that the films that have been able to best contrast the American obsession with wealth and materialism would be the horror genre and the home invasion subgenre. Of course, home invasion films have been incredibly effective in presenting character’s anxieties in the film’s themselves from all racial and ethnic backgrounds, but within the American context there is an historical element of horror and pain that is most personally connected to African-Americans who have witnessed their own nation try to present them from taking part in the act of securing property and being able to be guaranteed wealth in their investments in private property.
On the contrary, many home invasion or intruder films play with white middle to upper middle class fears that were drummed up in the 1980’s and the 1990’s in the United States by the likes of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and were fixated on the perceived decline of “family values” as detailed by Elizabeth Susan Brent in the article “Domestic horrors: “Family values” and the intruder film, 1987–1997”. During the Reagan era in the United States there was an introduction of “economic policies, which looked very much like the waging of “war on the poor,” were coupled with an aggressive “war on drugs’’ and “war on crime,” which functioned as an excuse for putting more and more young black men in prison” (p. 10). Home invasion films of this era include the 1991 film Cape Fear directed by Martin Scorsese, which includes elements of class warfare (p. 41), as well as the 1996 film The Tie that Binds directed by Wesley Strick, which focuses a lot on the “family value” fears that were being echoed by politicians (p. 42), as well as the 1990 film Pacific Heights directed by John Schlesinger which tries to “focus on the house itself as a commodity which is the envy of the underprivileged, and which must therefore be protected through extreme measures of home security. While the intruder’s primary desire is for family, home ownership is represented as the necessary ground on which a family be maintained” (p. 45). So many of these films that centre around middle-class paranoia include the “fear of falling” by enacting fantasies in which middle-class anxieties about loss of class status, fears of creeping crime from the inner city, and residual liberal guilt about the poor and homeless achieve nightmare proportions in the form of revenge of the poor who wish to “have what you have”: a home and a family” (p. 40).
As noted by Robin R. Means Coleman in the book “Horror noire : blacks in American horror films from the 1980’s to present”, many films in the late 20th century communicated that “cities were savage, lawless terrains to which the most irredeemable in our society-the underclass and people of color, two groups often understood to be one and the same-should be consigned” (p. 145). This portrayal on-screen paralleled a common attitude among many white Americans who considered the urban centres of cities to be a scary place, and in turn looked to the expansion of suburban communities as an escape to a promised land of sorts (p. 146). There are a number of home invasion horror films that involve white middle to upper middle-class paranoia in urban settings, from the 1964 film directed by Walter Grauman Lady in a Cage to David Fincher’s 2002 film Panic Room, though neither film directly confronts the issue of racism directly. However, there are socioeconomic, class and racial dynamics in both films that could be examined and understood to reflect the experiences of non-white minorities in relation to the pursuit of coveting property.
In Lady in a Cage the film’s protagonist Mrs. Cornelia Hilyard is a relatively wealthy white homeowner who is effectively trapped inside of her own home, largely stemming from what her and her now dead husband’s wealth provided her to be able to afford to purchase for their household. While the setting remains ambiguous and unspecified, it appears as though the community in which the house is located is a posh, and possibly gated suburban neighbourhood. The house has an elevator that connects every floor to one another conveniently, however Cornelia becomes stuck inside of the elevator when there is a mechanical malfunction with the elevator, and a series of home invasions ensue. During each home invasion that plays out around the helpless protagonist, different members of marginalized demographic groups confront her and it becomes clear that there is definitive social commentary within the film’s choice of characters and their representations. The film deals with groups such as alcoholics and the homeless, as well as the institutionalized, and vague handling of a minority group member. The film attempts to evoke sympathy for the main character, Cornelia, and the film very clearly possesses conservative elements in its portrayal of the poor and those with mental illnesses, going so far as to propagate the common stigma and stereotype against those who were banished to mental asylums at the time.
The main protagonist of the film even refers to how her tax dollars have been used improperly on these individuals, referring to them as “animals”, further showcasing society’s treatment of those who were housed in mental asylums in the 20th century. Although asylums of the 20th century are appalling by today’s standards, at the time they were still a leg up over local jails and infirmaries, as told by Amy N. Barker in the article “Shades of Insanity: The Treatment of Ohio’s African American Mental Patients from 1838–1900” (p. 87). Though the character in question in Lady in a Cage who was referred to as an “animal” for having supposedly escaped from the institution was a white man, this is still evidence of privilege in comparison to the ways in which African-Americans were excluded in society historically, directly due to government policies and decisions based on racial factors. African-Americans faced an uphill battle of obstacles to overcome the discrimination they experienced navigating the housing market, but those deemed as mentally unfit would also be housed and “confined in in jail with thieves and vagrants” or were placed into local infirmaries, which in both cases resulted in a lack of adequate treatment, if not outright mistreatment” (p. 87).
In fact, a parallel between the redlining that occurred across the country in major cities, a technique that forced African-Americans into below standard housing with significant infrastructural problems can be seen alongside the way in which those diagnosed with mental issues or labelled as dangers to society were treated. The asylum and justice system were so entrenched in bigotry that “as local infirmaries struggled with overcrowding, jails became the dumping grounds for numerous African Americans, who were systematically denied equal acceptance into Ohio’s state-funded institutions” for example, (p. 94). Institutions are practically a form of property for those who were housed there and those deemed unfit to integrate into society, whether due to being guilty of criminal acts, or unfairly stigmatized due to their psychological diagnoses, or assumed to be mentally unstable based on irrelevant and innocuous behaviours or health issues. Although these buildings were not directly funded by patients or inmates themselves, there is a very similar dynamic in how the quality of amenities and services were allotted to individuals largely based on the same racial hierarchy that imposed and continues to impose itself on citizens participating in society.
In Panic Room, the film’s protagonists Meg Altman and daughter Sarah, like Cornelia in Lady in a Cage are similarly endangered by their own motivation for enhanced security in their home using their apartment’s impenetrable panic room chamber. The two characters are white and belong to a higher-than-average socioeconomic status and again, like Cornelia in Lady in a Cage, are forced to face individuals in the form of home invaders who belong to the margins of the lower working classes. It could be argued that the three invaders in this film are from racialized backgrounds, however only one of the characters is identifiably African-American, that being Burnham played by Forest Whitaker. The other two invaders include Junior, played by Jared Leto, whose racial background remains ambiguous, and similarly, Raoul, played by Dwight Yoakam, whose background is unclear, though both actors are white men.
The character Burnham’s arrest and arguably self-sacrificial decision to put Meg Altman and daughter Sarah ahead of himself in Panic Room could be read as fitting into the common depiction of African-Americans as people who are “pressed to enter into support relationships with Whites, and to display a value system of loyalty and trust that was generally unilateral” as explained by Means Coleman (p. 151). Although Burnham does not die in this case like many black men in horror films that came before Panic Room, there are similarities to the way in which the character is portrayed, like Dick played by Scatman Crothers in The Shining, as African-American men who put their best interest second behind a white child. In the film Burnham assists Sarah as she dives into diabetic shock, and then saves the life of Meg Altman, which puts him in a vulnerable position regarding his own survival in the film. This dynamic has been repeated many times in film history, as noted by Means Coleman, and “recalls earlier popular culture Black male adult/White child asexual relationships such as that of Huckleberry Finn (Junior Durking) and Jim (Clarence Muse) in Huckleberry Finn (1931) or Virgie (Shirley Temple) and Uncle Billy (Bill “Bojangles” Robinson) in The Littlest Rebel (1935). In each of these cases it goes unquestioned why Black men would find satisfaction in the company of White children”. This trope that was used in the film, though slightly toyed with in Burnham’s arrest, rather than death, as the other two non-black burglars are killed off in the film, does continue to propagate the on-screen representation of African-American men as essentially those in-service of their white counterparts.
The film Panic Room taking place in New York City, specifically in the borough of Manhattan, the inclusion of a white homeowner whose home is invaded by economically unstable burglars including an African-American man, opens up the discussion surrounding the history of redlining in the United States, and in the country’s largest city in particular. As explained by Oliver Ayers in the article “Fred Trump, the Ku Klux Klan and Grassroots Redlining in Interwar America”, despite New York City’s reputation as a diverse and multicultural capital of the country, the city witnessed the borough of Queens become increasingly redlined from the 1920’s onward after many African-Americans often moved from Harlem in Manhattan, to the community of Jamaica, Queens (p. 5). While it isn’t mentioned where in the city the invaders live or are from, there is a definite likelihood that they are individuals who have been priced out of the borough of Manhattan, and perhaps live in close proximity to or in redlined communities. Even in Manhattan itself, as Ayers mentions, there was definite racial prejudice towards Blacks from Whites and “This was a classic in the longstanding genre of whites protesting black settlement in “their” neighborhoods on the grounds of property depreciation (p. 15).
This was an argument that fed on the purported connection between race and criminality that became part of urban sociology and real estate practices around the turn of the twentieth century. As far as New York City was concerned, these arguments had been rehearsed already by property owners’ associations in the more familiar setting of Harlem for around twenty years” (p.15). Although the FHA technically ended the practice of redlining in the 1970’s, the effects of it are still seen today, as explained by Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor in the book “Race for profit : how banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership” (p. 3). Worth noting is that Meg Altman’s apartment is located in the city’s Upper West Side, a neighbourhood that directly borders Harlem, the historically black capital of not only New York City, but the entire nation of the United States. This historical divide between these two neighbourhoods is a classic example of historical segregation, and the division is still apparent in the 21st century.
The reality for African-Americans in the United States is that they have never been granted equal access to property ownership in any part of the country, since the very inception of the nation itself. The book “Race for profit : how banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership” by Taylor reveals that “The widespread access to homeownership across the United States in the aftermath of World War II cemented it as a fundamental feature of the cultural conceptions of citizenship and belonging”, however “Despite the insistence on the rights of property ownership as integral to citizenship, African Americans faced numerous obstacles in their efforts to secure homeownership” (p. 1). However, despite the eventual ability for African-Americans to purchase property, “inclusion into the world of urban real estate sales was fraught with problems” (p. 3). There are a growing number of films in recent years that have taken on and handled the idea of the history of home ownership and citizen rights and how this very system affects those who have suffered at the hands of the hegemonic institutions that have survived into the current day.
The 2017 film Get Out, directed by Jordan Peele, is an example of this urban-suburban divide in the United States and highlights the racism involved in this division between the two types of communities. The film was incredibly effective in communicating the fear that African-Americans face in the 21st century and the nightmarish past that is deeply entrenched in the societal structure today. However, the 2019 film Us, Jordan Peele’s next film in his filmography, embraces the home invasion subgenre and focuses on black middle-class families’ struggle to overcome the weight of whiteness that actively works against the African-American community’s attempts to achieve the same level of economic advantages as white Americans. The film can be understood as a film that exemplifies the forces that African-Americans face integrating into middle-class society alongside the dominant white population in a country that is steeped in racism from its birth.
What separates Us from many other films that highlight the same issues in contemporary society in the United States, as quoted in the text “Beyond Idolatrous Whiteness I: Resisting Racism” by Daniel Boscaljon, regarding the film, “the question that it asks about resisting racism includes but is not limited to simply combating the whiteness of white people ‘’ (p. 274). The film consists of many religious references, and one of the main messages of the film is how society has come to idolize whiteness, “the movie shows the success of idolatrous whiteness in becoming increasingly pronounced and public in America” (p. 274). In Taylor’s “Race for profit : how banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership”, the author expresses how “Midcentury narratives of normative whiteness embodied in conceptions of the suburban-based nuclear family shaped the perceptions of home as an expression of use value within white communities. Conversely, developing narratives concerning perceived domestic dysfunction within Black living spaces-whether nonnormative family structures or poverty or dilapidated living structures-cast Black dwellings as incapable of achieving the status of home, thus reducing them to their base exchange value” (p. 11).
This narrative that had been ingrained in middle-class society in the United States can be seen in the film Us in some of the ways in which the Tyler family is portrayed in the eyes of the Wilson family, as perceived by Boscaljon, “Although the Wilsons are likeable characters, Peele allows Gabe to have one prominent and peculiar flaw-a sense of wishing to be like his friends Josh (Tim Heidecker) and Kitty (Elisabeth Moss) Tyler. The Tylers provide a different kind of double for the Wilsons than the Tetherheds: they’re white, successful, unkind, and (in Adelaide’s words) drink too much” (p. 275). The film is able to show how the almost monolithic whiteness in American society still stands today and is responsible for the perpetuation of racial discrimination and a white supremacist hierarchal structure in the country. As the film progresses and doubles of the Wilson family in the Tetherhed’s enact terror on the main characters, the violent acts are displayed as a reflection of emulating “the population “above” and how “the prominence of the appearance of “whiteness” can lure even otherwise good people (Gabe) and implicates the lives of even persons who see through it (Adelaide)” and ultimately how “pursuing this image requires the sacrifice of some “other,” refusing to see the “other” as also “us” (p. 275). By invading the home of the Wilson’s, the Tetherhed’s act as a reminder to the Wilson family of the many disadvantaged African-Americans who have suffered at the hands of racist policies regarding private property, home ownership and financial security. Although the Wilson’s have been able to find success themselves by playing the capitalist game in the United States, which is historically linked to exploitation and inequality, there could have been just as high of a likelihood that this feat would have been near impossible due to the racial oppression that exists everyday around them and derails the lives of so many other people.
Perhaps a home invasion film that presents this history of the terrorization of African-Americans by white Americans in a direct sense, while mostly metaphorically again, but quite easy to read between the lines, is the 2013 film The Purge, directed by James DeMonaco. In the film the white home owning Sandin family prepare for the annual purge where normal legalities no longer apply, and the murdering of fellow citizens is permissible. While the Sandin family secure themselves in their high-security suburban home, Charlie, played by Max Burkholder, the family’s youngest, helps an African-American man, credited as Bloody Stranger, played by Edwin Hodge, who is being pursued by purgers, in evading his attackers by entering the house. The man is presumed to be homeless, since he had nowhere to shelter in place during the night of killings and beatings on the Los Angeles city streets. As explained by Megan A. Armstrong in the article “‘A Nation Reborn’: Right to Law and Right to Life in The Purge Franchise”, the first film in The Purge franchise alongside the other films establish “certain narrative themes of economic, and later racial injustice” (p. 381).
It could be argued that the very first film from 2013 directly confronts racism and the violence associated with it, particularly enacted against African-Americans, in the sense that the very definition of “purging” is to “remove (a group of people considered undesirable) from an organization or place in an abrupt or violent way” according to the Oxford Dictionary (“Definitions, Meanings, Synonyms and Grammar by Oxford Dictionary on Lexico.com). Taking into consideration the difficulties that have been purposefully created to prevent African-American citizens from owning property in the United States, a film that depicts the state-sponsored persecution of a homeless individual who happens to be identifiably black is a very clear indicator of the film representing the atrocities of systematic racism and how it relates to the idea of private property. In the book “Race for profit : how banks and the real estate industry undermined black homeownership”, Taylor illustrates that “Racial discrimination has been a determining factor in access to owning one’s own home. In the first half of the twentieth century, homeownership among Blacks lagged between 35 and 50 percent lower than what it was for their white peers. Those disparities indicated a mix of poverty, access, and discrimination” (p. 31).
The rampant racist thinking in this time in American history meant that those in positions who could help African-Americans gain homeownership were encouraged not to, as Taylor explains that there was commonality of “The particular role of banks and the real estate industry in undermining Black homeownership, which reinforced the racist idea that African Americans lower property values,” and together with age old racist governmental structures, the system would work together to suppress black people from increasing their financial and economic standings (p. 23). Essentially, citizen rights to property were never structured to exist for every American equally, and with that historical understanding, The Purge reads a lot differently when you consider what the acts of violence against those left on the streets on the day of the legal murders and the lynching of others truly symbolizes and refers to. The very essence of “the purge” in the film represents itself as the nature of American society and how it allows for those who are disadvantaged to be easy targets of brutality and deliberate acts of violence. The government in the film characterizes itself as one that would rather see the poorest citizens be left to die or fight to survive, rather than provide these citizens with adequate housing to live safely inside of.
The Purge taking place in Los Angeles is a choice in setting that can be analyzed in terms of the city’s extensive history of redlining and racial segregation. The article “Mapping and making gangland: A legacy of redlining and enjoining gang neighbourhoods in Los Angeles” by Stefano Bloch and Susan A. Phillips looks at how the historical policies in the city would have led to the clear racial inequalities and the normalization of violence against minorities and those of a lower socioeconomic class in the film The Purge. As outlined by Block and Phillips, “To be clear, not every neighbourhood that was redlined was majority economic, racial or ethnic minority, but no neighbourhood that was determined to be predominately ‘Negro’ or ‘foreign born’ was issued anything other than a ‘hazardous’ rating, and therefore redlined and deprived capital as both an outcome of racism and race-based market function” (p. 7). As explained in the article, due to the purposeful exclusion of minorities from the city’s economically thriving neighbourhoods, the city inevitably saw crime rates increase in communities that were redlined and cut-off from the rest of the city, however “not every neighbourhood with a red grading became an entrenched gang territory” (p. 7). Though it is true that the technique behind redlining intended to allow for “persistent housing segregation, underinvestment, slum designation and subsequent clearance, the construction of public housing developments, and ongoing patterns of place stratification and racialised policing” (p. 7). The fact that the character Bloody Stranger in the 2013 film The Purge is ignored by the entire street of houses until approaching the Sandin family’s property, and only saved because of the decision made by a young white adolescent, shows that perhaps there is hope for the younger generation in the United States to adopt an anti-racist mindset, and reject the older generation’s discriminatory past.
The 1992 film Candyman directed by Bernard Rose depicts the haunting of an American society that has tried to brush its horrific history under the rug and reconstruct the future over top of it without fixing the problems that caused the horrors in the first place. The article “Guess who else is coming to dinner: racial/sexual hysteria in Candyman” by Elpseth Kydd uncovers some of the historical context surrounding the plot of the film. The film stars Virginia Madsen as Helen and Kasi Lemmons as Bernadette, who are both students researching the unexplained phenomena involving the mysterious “Candyman” who is allegedly responsible for a string of murders in the city of Chicago’s Cabrini Green housing projects (p. 1). As expressed in the article, “Helen’s investigation of the Candyman’s murders lead her to the architectural discovery that the condominium building in which she lives is built on the same plan as Cabrini Green. The ghetto building is cut off from the “gold coast” by the highways and the “El”, whereas her building is on the other side of this barrier. Hence, the building “on the right side of the tracks” has been converted to luxury condos”.
This description of the divide in the city is an example of the effects of the redlining that occurred throughout the United States implemented by city policymakers as mentioned earlier, and it’s no surprise that the Cabrini-Green housing projects that are “on the wrong side of the tracks” in the city is where the violence against African-Americans is occurring. Helen is symbolically, and in some ways literally living among the ghosts of the nation’s sickening past of racial hierarchy and the oppression against black people, and as she “projects images of the city-the ghetto-onto the wall of her home.”, there is the idea that she is “bringing the forbidden parts of the city into her home, internalizing an exterior space” (p. 1). Shortly afterwards is when Candyman enters the home of Helen and brings about violence into her world (p. 2). Who exactly is Candyman? The story behind Candyman involves the “legend of a black man brutally murdered in the Cabrini Green public housing projects of Chicago at the turn of the century because of his sexual liaison with a white woman” (p. 1).
The article “Historic Home Mortgage Redlining in Chicago” by James L. Greer describes how the city of Chicago, like most American cities, experienced a “Great Migration of African Americans”, in which black residents moved into the urban centres and in turn many white residents left for communities in the outer suburbs (p. 211). The article goes on to explain how “While white families moving to new housing in suburban areas enjoyed easy access to ample, affordable, and insured mortgage financing, African American families faced starkly different circumstances” (p. 211), and black residents weren’t able to gain access to mortgage loans, and instead fell victim to financial methods that were designed to take advantage of African-Americans looking to invest in property, a system called “ILCs”, which are installment land contracts (p. 211). This also led to black Chicagoans falling into a trap “where the city’s black population, as it attempted to ostensibly “purchase” housing, in fact undermined the ability of African Americans to accumulate wealth. Instead, as blacks “purchased” properties in communities that were redlined, they in fact lost wealth that might accrue in the homes”, and this struggle to build wealth through the pursuit of property is presented on-screen with the depiction of the Cabrini-Green housing complex, apartment buildings for rent that practically kept its residents in the binds of poverty.
The 2005 film Land of the Dead directed by George A. Romero is an example of a film that shows what racist Americans in the United States might fear the most, the oppressed deciding to revolt against abusive institutions that have kept individuals from reaching economic fulfillment. The article from Leah Richards, “This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Rise of the Oppressed in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead” informs that the zombie genre of film has always had ties to human enslavement and subjugation (p. 657). Richards asserts that “most zombie films are inherently political because their subject matter is the rise of the masses.”, (p. 658) and this is certainly true with a number of Romero films, arguably the most influential director of the zombie genre. Romero has never shied away from associating the depiction of zombies with the ways in which individuals handle both consumer culture and capitalism itself (p. 658). However, in Land of the Dead “the true problem infecting humanity is capitalist oppression rather than consumerism. As the rich live in luxurious safety, the poverty-stricken denizens of the slums outside are being mobilized to storm the barricades that separate them from the wealthy” (p. 659). The film’s setting in Pittsburgh is also something worth reflecting on to truly connect with its historical context.
The article “The Lingering Effects of Neighborhood Appraisal: Evaluating Redlining’s Legacy in Pittsburgh” by Devin Q. Rutan and Michael R. Glass exposes the racism in the city that was so vehement that “Some industries, particularly high-paying ones, were nearly exclusively available to native-born white Pittsburghers; lower paying and lower status industries such as domestic service disproportionately employed African Americans” (p. 341). This employment-based discrimination resulted in severe housing inequalities, such as how “Neighborhood characteristics varied considerably across Pittsburgh with pockets of luxury and new development located adjacent to pockets of profound blight and despair. Housing in Pittsburgh’s affluent communities was often equipped with modern technologies such as indoor plumbing, electric lighting, and furnace-type heating” and this was juxtaposed with how “Housing for African Americans was “‘more concentrated at the lowest standards recorded’” (p. 341). The racism against African-Americans that persisted through the 20th century in Pittsburgh, and the choices made by wealthy employers allowed for the deeply troubling economic disparities across the city, and this is portrayed on-screen in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as the film’s commercial centre “is ruled by Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), who employs the workers sent out into the surrounding zombie-infested region to forage, keeping himself in control of the means of production” (p. 660). Means Coleman is in fact a Pittsburgh native and recounts in the preface to “Horror noire : blacks in American horror films from the 1890s to present”, how “Pittsburgh was, and is, a segregated city. Its neighborhoods are culturally rich, but they also serve as de-facto racial boundaries. The Bloomfield neighborhood is predominantly Italian. The Polish Hill neighborhood speaks for itself. On the north side of the city, Black folks, especially those living in the segregated remote elevations of the Northview Heights housing project, have to go through great efforts to reach Pittsburgh’s downtown.” (p. xvii). Considering the context of Pittsburgh’s incredibly segregated past, the idea of the working class masses made up of the underprivileged classes within the film Land of the Dead, make for an interesting twist on the idea of racial commentary and subtext within the home invasion horror genre, and not home invasion in its truest sense, but rather the masses invading and entering past the invisible yet devastatingly real community lines that have been drawn, separating people based on racial background and economic class.
A very recent take on the home invasion horror genre, told through the perspective of an African-American family, in the form of a period piece, is the TV series Them created by Little Marvin. As suggested in the article “Little Marvin Goes Hitchcock” by Danielle Turchiano, the series follows the story “set in the 1950’s, when the Emory family moves from the South to Compton, Calif. Prior to relocating, they experience a “family tragedy,” which “creates fissures and cracks and grief and trauma within each of these characters,” and this storyline takes place within the historical context of the Second Great Migration, a period of time in the middle part of the 20th century where many African-Americans from the South moved elsewhere in the United States, in order to evade the deeply racist policies of southern states. The TV series follows the family’s move to a new community and “Once in their new town, they endure other forms of violence and racism from their white neighbors, as well as several supernatural occurrences”, thematic elements that share many similarities depicting the resistance against black family’s integrating into majority white communities, with Jordan Peele’s Us.
As mentioned in the article from Turchiano, the series creator Little Marvin has commented “Tananarive Due says it most eloquently, very simply: ‘Black history is horror’”, undoubtedly taking shape to express a brutally honest take on the discrimination African-Americans faced when trying to pursue a better life in supposedly more progressive parts of the country, and those with better economic opportunities. Also in the article, Turchiano outlines how “Little Marvin says, quoting the author, but ‘there was never any sense in my mind that I would explore a haunted country without having a haunted story”, which was similarly explored in both of Jordan Peele’s recent films Get Out and Us, as well as Bernard Rose’s Candyman. These films all handled the way in which the United States is haunted by racially motivated hatred that is often recognized as being just a “part of the past” but continues to exist on a slightly deeper, and less transparent level than before. The series is also noted in the article by Turchiano to depict “the cabal of forces that conspired to keep Black folks, or any minority, out while keeping some folks in”, which also reflects the sort of misleading integration of black families in white communities associated with the Wilson family in Us. By witnessing a black family find a way to properly move into a white community in an area of the nation that isn’t initially overtly preventing them from doing so, it might appear as though racism is from a bygone era and that white Americans have moved on and are willing to accept African-Americans as new neighbors, but the historical haunting is too much to ignore and seeps into the community and presents itself in a terrifying new form.
The film Us and the series Them, although set approximately 65 years or so apart, could both be analyzed in the context of the history of the greater state of suburban California’s redlining and racial segregation policies. The article “Eugenic Housing: Redlining, Reproductive Regulation, and Suburban Development in the United States” written by Laura L. Lovett explains how the vicious racism of eugenics extended into housing policies during the 1930’s and attempted to try to prevent white and black Americans from living near one another (p. 67). Lovett observes that “the eugenic roots of redlining is not to merely fill in a gap in our understanding of racist reasoning in the United States but to refigure our understanding of housing as a site of reproductive regulation” (p. 68). Shockingly, advocates of eugenic based thinking were responsible for enacting new policies in communities that pressured families to have many children and at the same time limiting the number of minority residents who could move into these areas and in turn essentially established a system to ensure that whiteness prevailed in these neighbourhoods (p. 68).
As Lovett writes, “The conjunction of their efforts with those of regional planners and new governmental housing agencies informed the rise of American suburbs and reinforced the systematic exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities. The resulting racial inequities in home ownership and in housing segregation were motivated by reproductive concerns among an influential group of policy makers and planners sympathetic to eugenic thinking” (p. 68). For many of these eugenicist sympathizers, like Edward A. Ross, a sociologist who came up with “the concept of social control”, as Lovett points out, it was a fascination to try to revive the “frontier experience” since “The hardships of the pioneer life pitilessly screened out the weak and debilitated, leaving only the hardy and vigorous” (p. 68). Essentially, this eugenic-like housing policy all derived from this notion that “celebrated the farmer and castigated “the deteriorating influences of the city and factory” and saw minorities living in urban spaces, including women, who were becoming increasingly educated and less interested in childbearing, as inferior to the hardy rural people and lifestyle of yesteryear who were romanticized by eugenicists like Ross (p. 69).
The housing policies in the United States in the 1930’s, also included grading individuals based on their professional backgrounds, along with their racial origin, as explained by Lovett, and eventually led to the ways in which the “FHA Underwriting Manual recommended preventing financial risk by rejecting “incompatible racial elements” (p. 74). Eventually “Homer Hoyt, who became the chief economist at the FHA in 1934, created the system of valuing real estate by ethnicity in such a way that it re-created the racial hierarchy espoused by American eugenicists. According to Hoyt, “Certain racial and national groups, because of their lower economic status and their lower standards of living, pay less rent themselves and cause a greater physical deterioration of property than groups higher in the social and economic scale” (p. 74). This was then turned into a racial hierarchy in which “Hoyt placed the English, Germans, and Scandinavians at the top; northern Italians, Poles, and Lithuanians in the middle; and southern Italians, African Americans, and Mexicans at the bottom”, which is definitive proof of the conscious racist thinking that was pushed forward by those in power to preserve racial segregation, white domination and preventing upward mobility for non-white racialized minorities (p. 74).
Analyzing the purposefulness of the decisions made by individuals who were given the reign in planning the future of the United States’ residential communities, makes it apparent that at the very root of the film The Purge (2013), the same eugenicist minded government policies of the country’s past were reimagined in the film’s dystopian near future where the typically whiter home ownership community would have a better chance of survival and continuing on reproducing at a higher rate than the disproportionately non-white population, of those who aren’t able to protect themselves in personally possessed houses and living spaces. Considering how securer communities, better built homes, comparatively more isolated communities and wealthier residents have historically been those who appear as “whiter” on the social hierarchy scale imposed by many racially biased American officials, those who would be dying at a higher rate on the night of the purge would unmistakably those who appear further down the scale of “whiteness”. The history of the United States as a land of immigrants all chasing the same dream of economic success has been often presented as an equal opportunity experience for all by many who wish to retell, remold, and resell the perception of the nation’s past, however, the most influential and consequential policies in the country were purely enacted out of a fear of the country becoming less white. The facts are there that communicate that the same eugenicist models and attitudes that were used in Nazi Germany were also used in the United States, as expanded upon in Stefan Kuhl’s book “The Nazi Connection Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism”, and in turn should drastically alter any reading of the American home invasion horror films that even subtly deal with race, in which they all inevitably do.
The book explains how American high schools frequently screened a propaganda film entitled Erbkrank which translates to Hereditary Defective in English, which was created by Nazis to convince the population that those with perceived mental disabilities should be eliminated from their society (p. vii). Like the wealthy white homeowner protagonist Cordelia in the film Lady in a Cage and her echoing of societal discrimination against the institutionalized, the film promoted hatred against those with mental illnesses and “showed mentally handicapped people living in a luxurious asylum near Berlin and contrasted their “atypicality” to the “saneness” of “hereditarily healthy” children who had to live in the slums of Germany’s large cities. By stressing the “abnormality” of the handicapped people, this movie helped to pave the way for Nazi policies of mass sterilization and elimination of the mentally handicapped” (p. vii). The idea that those with perceived disabilities or illnesses should be purged from society is a fundamentally fascist train of thought and was adopted into American society from the same enemy they fought in World War II. As highlighted earlier, mental asylums were in some way a form of governmental run communal properties and housed many patients for long periods of time, and provided very substandard living standards for those who stayed there, which reflects the hateful attitudes against those who were perceived as being physically and mentally unfit, and connects directly with eugenicist ideologies that firmly believed in racial superiority and the need to prevent minorities from integrating into the dominating white population.
In all the American home invasion horror films listed that deal with themes of the horrors of racial and social exclusion regarding equal rights especially focusing on property rights and economic opportunities, there are historical linkages to major influencing decisions and motives made behind decision makers and powerful figures who had intentions on preserving the dominant class of white, able-bodied individuals. This of course is based on pseudoscientific and scientifically rejected theories like eugenics which is largely responsible for much of the violence enacted on individuals who were systemically discriminated against in the 19th and 20th centuries, from the Holocaust and World War II to Jim Crow laws in the United States. In both historical events, property rights were outwardly revoked, intentionally manipulated in policymaking and or simply not given equally based on a belief of racial superiority. While there are parallels in the way that African-American segregation, discrimination and oppression in history is represented in the films Us, Candyman, The Purge and the television series Them in particular, and the broader economic and social inequalities depicted in films like Panic Room, Lady in a Cage, Land of the Dead, what all of these films share in common is the effect of hierarchal systems, ideologies and attitudes and how it leads to the exploitation of those who do not belong to the oppressor class, and in turn become members of the oppressed. The films show how people of all identities can become members of the societally oppressed, however there is a clear historical bias in terms of the classification of individuals based on their racial origins and this has been propagated by white supremacists and those who share similar attitudes with white supremacists, including those who would merely be considered or defined as sympathizers. Some of the subgenre’s most thought-provoking contributions have found ways to both subtly and boldly confront the prejudiced innerworkings of American institutions and state sponsored policies and presented the horrors that occur in relation to private property and its undeniable discriminatory nature in the United States.
Bibliography
Ayers, Oliver, “Fred Trump, the Ku Klux Klan and Grassroots Redlining in Interwar America”, Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications, 2021, Fred Trump, the Ku Klux Klan and Grassroots Redlining in Interwar America — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Bloch, Stefano & Phillips, Susan A, “Mapping and making gangland: A legacy of redlining and enjoining gang neighbourhoods in Los Angeles”, SAGE Premier — CRKN, 2021, Mapping and making gangland: A legacy of redlining and enjoining gang neighbourhoods in Los Angeles — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Boscaljon, Daniel, “Beyond Idolatrous Whiteness I: Resisting Racism”, 2020, Beyond Idolatrous Whiteness I: Resisting Racism — Boscaljon — 2020 — Religious Studies Review — Wiley Online Library (mtroyal.ca)
Brent, Elizabeth Susan, “Domestic horrors: “Family values” and the intruder film, 1987–1997”, ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, 1998, Domestic horrors: “Family values” and the intruder film, 1987–1997 — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Definitions, Meanings, Synonyms, and Grammar by Oxford Dictionary on Lexico.com Definitions, Meanings, Synonyms, and Grammar by Oxford Dictionary on Lexico.com
Greer, James L., “Historic Home Mortgage Redlining in Chicago”, Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 1998, Historic Home Mortgage Redlining in Chicago — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Holohan, Conn, “Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film by John David Rhodes (review)”, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019, Spectacle of Property: The House in American Film by John David Rhodes (review) — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Kydd, Elspeth, “Guess who else is coming to dinner: racial/sexual hysteria in Candyman”, CineAction, 1996, Guess who else is coming to dinner: racial/sexual hysteria in Candyman — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Lovett, Laura L, “Eugenic Housing: Redlining, Reproductive Regulation, and Suburban Development in the United States”, New York: The Feminist Press, 2020, Eugenic Housing: Redlining, Reproductive Regulation, and Suburban Development in the United States — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Means Coleman, Robin R., “Horror noire : blacks in American horror films from the 1890s to present”, New York : Routledge, 2011, Horror noire : blacks in American horror films from the 1890s to present — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Richards, Leah, “This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Rise of the Oppressed in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead”, Wiley Subscription Services, Inc, 2018, This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Rise of the Oppressed in George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Rutan, Devin Q & Glass, Michael R, “The Lingering Effects of Neighborhood Appraisal: Evaluating Redlining’s Legacy in Pittsburgh”, Routledge, 2018, The Lingering Effects of Neighborhood Appraisal: Evaluating Redlining’s Legacy in Pittsburgh — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
Turchiano, Danielle, “Little Marvin Goes Hitchcock”, Los Angeles: Penske Business Corporation, 2021, Little Marvin Goes Hitchcock — Mount Royal University (mtroyal.ca)
