Us is different than the other two films. It wasn’t about race at all, it was simply a black family in a horror film. I enjoyed the originality of the idea, on the common take that sometimes we are our own worst enemy. Since the readings were about racial injustice and Us more so normalizes black people in horror film I’d rather go into more depth about the other two films.
The reading made some good points that we see examples of in Get Out and Candyman. It talked about how the physical self of a black person is now perceived as beautiful and desired but the life of a black citizen is not. “There needs to be clear separation from white America so we can speak with a collective voice.” (Getting in and Out: Who Owns Black Pain?) We must make improvements in schools, housing and health care! We are one people even if we see it through different lenses.
In Get Out, Chris asked Rose if her parents knew he was black because he knows there are people that still haven’t accepted other races as equal. Chris’ friend warns him not to go off into the woods with white people, again showing fear and awareness of not being accepted. As Rose and Chris are driving to her parents, she hits a deer and the white cop asked for his license too even though she was driving. Chris was going to go along because he understood what could happen if he challenged a white cop. Rose stood up to the cop but only got away with it because she was a privileged white girl. The family and the people at the party were weird and predictable in their behavior, bringing up the successful black names they knew like Obama and Tiger Woods or trying to talk about sports to him. You could tell how uncomfortable Chris was and the only sincere sounding conversation he had was with the blind guy who respected his photography but it turns out he wanted to “win the bid” on him so he could take over Chris’ body so he could see through his eyes. It was so haunting when they showed the closeups of the black people that were trapped with no way to get out. You could see the desperation and hopelessness in their eyes. With all the evil that had been done by the white people, at the end when the cop car was pulling up, there was fear that the white cop was going to wrongly accuse Chris of being the criminal. It’s sad that we live in a world where that fear is real, that we have to feel relief when it was his friend getting out of the car instead of the white cop.
In Candyman, he was born in a time period following slavery, he was the son of a slave. He was accepted by white-society as an accomplished artist. When he fell in love with a white woman, her father sent a lynch mob to murder him. His right arm was sawed off, they put honey on him and the bees stung him to death. They burned him and put his ashes on the land where a housing project was later built. When Helen was pursuing the story of the Candyman, she went to the housing project. The residents lived in fear of gangs as well as fear of white people coming into their neighborhood. When the real Candyman set up Helen, I felt bad for her. After everyone assumed that she was guilty, there’s not much she can do to convince people that the Candyman is real. It was interesting that the artwork shown where he stayed, showed an image of what appears to be the white woman that he fell in love with and it looks a lot like Helen. I liked that the community changed their opinion of her after she died to save the baby. Regardless of their racial differences with her, they still went to pay their respects at her funeral. It was a good ending for the husband to accidentally summon Helen in the same way as the Candyman and to get murdered.