This fall, award-winning science fiction writer and UCLA professor Tananarive Due will teach a “Get Out“–inspired course called “Sunken Place: Racism, Survival, and Black Horror Aesthetic,” i09 reports
Jordan Peel‘s directorial debut, which couches America’s history of scientific racism in a romantic horror plot, continues to make waves months after it became a blockbuster hit. “Get Out” inspired Due to consider the history of Black horror in fiction and film, the outlet noted.
In an interview with i09’s Evan Narcisse, Due calls herself a “horror head” who considers horror a subgenre of speculative fiction, where she reigns supreme. Winner of The American Book Award, the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature, and the Carl Brandon Kindred Award, Due has published over 10 novels since 1995.
She told i09 that “Get Out” has given film executives a way to understand her own horror adaptations for the screen. Due said that prior to “Get Out,” the most popular contemporary Black horror film was “Beloved,” the movie adaptation of Toni Morrison‘s novel that didn’t perform as well in the box office as it did in the bookstore.
“Get Out” may have helped Due move forward in her screenwriting projects, but it also prompted her to look back at the genre’s Black history. Due told i09 that for African Americans, the horror genre is “a great way to address this awful, festering wound in the American psyche, the slavery and genocide that was present during our nation’s birth.”
The professor mentioned film examples such as “Blackula,” “Def by Temptation,” and “Tales From the Hood.” She also plans to teach the short fiction of W.E.B. DuBois, whose story “The Comet” imagines a Black man and White woman as the sole survivors of apocalypse in the “era of lynching.”
Due said, “These are two very different artists in two very different times, but DuBois’ story is a great companion, in a way, to what Jordan Peele was doing with the Black man and White woman in his movie.”
SOURCE: i09
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