In the last scene of the classic 1968 zombie movie Night of the Living Dead, the hero, Ben, comes out of a cellar with a gun, and the armed vigilantes mistake him for a zombie. They surround him, shoot him, and then burn him with the rest of the ghouls. Ben was played by Duane Jones, a Black actor, and the director, George Romero, has always said he wasn’t making a statement by casting Jones. But when I watched the movie as a young teenager, something about this scene felt significant. A Black man surrounded by a pack of vigilante white people with guns, in 1968, seemed to be answering more than just the basic needs of plot.

Since then I’ve learned a lot more about how race worked in that movie. But for a Black kid interested in horror, the subtext might have been a little more obvious. Jordan Peele grew up writing horror stories in his journals, and occasionally scaring his classmates with them on school trips. In 2017, after a successful sketch-comedy career, he wrote, produced, and directed Get Out, the critically acclaimed horror film. He says the movie “felt very taboo” and “un-produceable” at the time. “I don’t know if you noticed, but Get Out doesn’t have any good white people in it,” he told me. I did notice.

After Peele made that movie, and several others, he says, Black creators started telling him that they too had a horror story to tell, but they had never thought to tell it publicly. Classic horror always seemed to be speaking to white people’s fears about the menace of “the other,” made manifest as dark and sinister forces. But Black people of course saw different monsters.

Recently Peele collected some of those stories in Out There Screaming: An Anthology of Black Horror. Like Peele’s movies, the stories blend the horror genre with the modern Black experience. The opening piece, written by the best-selling sci-fi author N. K. Jemisin, is about a small-town Black cop tortured by car headlights that are always surveilling him.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Peele and Jemisin, who used to be a practicing psychologist, about how exactly horror is working on us. And how what we consider scary changes when Black directors and writers are making the monsters.

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: Before Jordan Peele was Jordan Peele, the famous director of Get Out, he was just a ninth grader starting a new school.

Jordan Peele: And up until this moment, I was a kid who was really afraid of monsters, of the dark, of people breaking into my apartment—you know, all this stuff.

Rosin: And then one weekend, he went on a camping trip with his class and something happened.

Peele: I told a scary story, a sort of standard in my book, and it—

Rosin: You had a book. You had a book in 10th grade.

Peele: I had a couple. I had a couple.

Rosin: The one he chose was this: A woman and her husband are in a car, driving through the town where she grew up. They pass by a house, and she sees a shadow on the top floor and says to her husband—that’s where this girl Annie used to live.

Annie, the wife tells him, is a girl they all used to make fun of: “Annie with the red hair. Annie with the red hair.”

Then the car breaks down, and the husband goes to find a pay phone. Eighteen minutes go by. Twenty-nine minutes go by. Forty-five minutes. The husband isn’t back yet. And then—actually, I’m not gonna tell you the ending. It’s not my story to tell.

But for little Jordan—

Peele: It worked. I felt like I had this captive audience, and after this moment, I was able to—I just remember feeling lifted of so many fears, purged of so many fears. And I remember just feeling so liberated.

[Music]

Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin. Jordan’s fear purge—I totally get it. As a kid, I used to watch movies like The Exorcist and Damien, but only ever with my father, and at the end of each movie we watched together, I felt totally safe and calm.

Horror does this for us. It helps us settle into fear, as individuals but also sometimes on a grander scale as a society. Sometimes there can be a monster that represents a collective fear, but what that monster looks like depends on who is telling the story.

Today I’m talking to Jordan Peele about what happens when Black directors and writers tell stories about their collective fears. He’s just edited a new short story collection, in time for Halloween, called Out There Screaming.

I’m also talking to best-selling sci-fi writer N. K. Jemisin, who wrote the first story in the collection. She goes by Nora, by the way.

As it happens, Nora used to be a psychologist. So I started by asking her about that campfire moment Jordan talked about—you’re afraid, you tell a story, and then you feel liberated. How does that actually work?

N. K. Jemisin: It sounds a lot to me like the theory of catharsis, in that when you are experiencing or have experienced trauma, but even if you’re still in the moment with it, one of the ways that you can kind of purge the energy of that—the fear—is to confront it.

You know, make fun of it, or tell a story about it, or write a story down. There’s any number of ways where just simply confronting it and just letting yourself play with the thing that scares you can help you overcome your fear of it.

Rosin: So it’s like a creative form of exposure therapy.

Jemisin: I mean, exposure therapy is you’re being given something that you don’t like, you don’t feel, you don’t care about. With catharsis, and particularly with writing your catharsis or reading your catharsis or telling a story, you are making yourself love it. You’re finding a reason to care about it.

Rosin: Yeah, like, it gives you a sense of control. It’s not just, I’m not afraid anymore. It’s like, I can actually do something with this.

Jemisin: And I can see something valuable in it. Yeah.

Rosin: Jordan, when you made Get Out, which was back in 2017, did it feel like you were doing something new, or risky, mixing classic horror with the contemporary day-to-day Black experience?

Peele: Um, yeah, you know, in many ways it really did. It felt very taboo. There were a couple of things, like Scary Movie, you know, that had a very silly tone and worked for the same crowd. But this idea that you could make a movie about race that dealt with violence against Black people, and every white person in the film is a villain, as it turns out—spoiler alert. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Noticed. We noticed. Noted. Yes. I picked that up. (Laughs.)

Peele: So that, uh, I mean, yeah, it felt like it was an unproducible film, and that’s what tickled me about it. It was this box that I felt like I had been put in, in many ways, and something I was told was impossible, that I couldn’t do, and yet it was a movie I wanted to see.

And then all the way up through making it, I was sure at any moment they could realize that this was a very risky film to put out there. And I didn’t know. I thought there was a good chance that everybody could hate it, and everyone could find offense in this idea that the way I was taking my power back was through this expression of fun horror escapism. You know, fun for me, at least.

And, of course, the response was a sort of collective catharsis, is what I felt. You know, it was the opposite of my fears, and a lot of people approached me and said, you know, I have another Black horror sort of idea.

Rosin: Is that where the book came from?

Peele: Yeah. We can’t make enough movies to fit all the stories that I’m kind of giddy to read.

Rosin: So you called your new collection of horror stories Out There Screaming, Jordan. And knowing your work, my first thought was, okay, this has several meanings. Like it could mean out there in the movie theater screaming with my popcorn, or it could mean out there on the streets screaming at a protest or out there screaming.

you know, in solitary confinement and no one is listening. Am I reading too much into it, into the title?

Peele: No, you're not, you know, I think it sort of connects to this central motif of the sunken place from Get Out that is a metaphor for a certain sort of marginalization. The marginalization at the time that I was trying to get across was feeling like my point of view, my perspective, and my skin wasn't making it into this space. And it was frustrating. In many ways, what I was looking for in these short stories was other people's sunken place in a way.

Rosin: Nora, you wrote the story “Reckless Eyeballing.” Can you just say a few words about what that story is about and who the main character is?

Jemisin: Sure. “Reckless Eyeballing” is from the perspective of a cop named Carl, who is a cop in a small town. He’s a Black man, he’s not a great person, definitely has done some bad-cop things, and is part of a fairly corrupt small-town police force. But he, you know, is basically just kind of merrily going along doing his usual bad-cop life when he starts to see the headlights on cars transform into real human eyes—eyelashes, blinking, all of that.

Rosin: Have you guys ever seen the Volkswagen Beetles with the cute little eyes?

Jemisin: Oh yeah.

Rosin: Like that’s not what’s happening here. (Laughs.) That is not it. That is not it.

Jemisin: I mean, it depends on how cute you think those eyes would be if they had, like, blood vessels and eye boogers and you know. I mean, like, do you really want to see that? No one wants to see that.

Rosin: Not cute. Yeah. Maybe, if you don’t mind, we can just read, like, a paragraph here. Because I think you get the not-cute vibe from this paragraph.

Jemisin: Sure, sure, okay.

Carl started seeing the eyes a few months back. He thought they were just some new headlight fad at first. Every year there’s a new one: neon rims, insectoid multiple bulbs, designs like hearts or cobra hoods. Tacky, but not illegal. These eyes, though, are far too realistic to be simply another mod.

They blink. There are veins throughout the sclera, striations in the irises, boogers at the corners. On the lone occasion when Carl actually sees them manifest, plain old halogen one moment and then blink and they’re blinking, Carl realizes something else. The eyes are a magical thing. Or supernatural, if there’s any difference.

He asks around, casually mentioning the new headlight fad to a couple of his fellow highway patrol officers, but no one has seen them. Nobody mentions freaky car eyes. It’s Carl-specific magic, or blessing, or a psychic gift just for him.

[Music]

Rosin: When we come back, we talk about the eyes. They show up in a lot of Jordan’s movies too. That’s after the break.

Rosin: The eyes. What are the eyes? What are they doing?

Jemisin: I always leave room for interpretation, but I will talk about what they are for me, which is just—if you were a cop, if you were a Black cop, and you are still doing this work in the year of our Lord 2023, you have got to be aware of the strange space that you occupy between your role as an enforcer of systemic racism and being a person who is targeted by that role. And I just feel like, you know, anybody that is doing this work is probably constantly aware of being watched—being watched by their fellow officers, being watched by their fellow Black people, and being judged the whole time. So I just wanted to make that literal.

Peele: I mean this, yeah, this story really, uh, creeped me out. It really, um, shivered me timbers. (Laughs.) So to speak. I feel like the eyes motif, as you mentioned, emerges in several of these stories. And it is so fascinating because in so many ways, the eyes are this sometimes beautiful but often nightmarish source of the trauma of the Black experience. You know, with Get Out, I realized this idea of the white gaze, so to speak. And at its most benevolent seeming, there’s still an undertone of being worth as much as you look like, as opposed to worth who you are, what’s inside.

And on the flip side, eyes from the Black experience—this is our way of knowing the truth and being assured of the truth that we’re often told isn’t true.

Rosin: I would love to put what you guys are doing in a broader context. One common, strong interpretation of horror is that it was historically made to process white people’s fears. You know, The Birth of a Nation, the character Gus, King Kong, zombie movies—it’s just a fear of the dark other. And I just wonder, if you’re a young Black person interested in horror, is that something you pick up on a subconscious level, on a conscious level, and you think you want to push back against?

Peele: Well, I, you know, I think you pick it up on a subconscious level. You know, the thing I threw out earlier about the fact that Get Out doesn’t have any white good guys in it—obviously it was one of the riskiest pieces of the film, but I think it actually is, in many ways, the single-most cathartic part of it.

You’ll note one of the, you know, the most classic moments is when Rose, Chris’s adoring white girlfriend, says, You know you can’t leave? You know I can’t give you the keys, right, babe? And it all kind of dawns on you what’s been right in front of you the whole time. But I think what is happening for filmgoers is that we’re so ingrained that any film that exists must have at least one good white person so that the white audience feels okay.

Rosin: Mm-hmm.

Peele: So that they have somebody that they can say, Well, that’s, that’s me. I’m not racist. I relate to this person.

Well, the second this movie, you know, Get Out, removed that comfort, the film sort of showed itself for what it really was, which was a movie for Black people first. (Laughs.)

Jemisin: Mm-hmm.

Rosin: Yeah. Yeah.

Jemisin: I’m still amazed you got that movie made.

[Laughter]

Peele: Me too.

Jemisin: I’m delighted, but I’m still like, Wow, they let this out.

Peele: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rosin: Nora, I remember in a profile of you in The New Yorker, you recalled a moment when Octavia Butler was asked, “Why do you incorporate Black characters?” And she said, “Just to say, Hey, we’re here.” And your response to that is we have to keep saying it. Do you still think that’s true?

Like there’s a part of me that thinks the popularity of Get Out and Jordan’s movies made it clear. Like, it injected the whole genre with this whole new life and relevancy. And I wonder if you feel like we have to keep saying it.

Jemisin: I very much do. The presence of one great Black film auteur in horror is not enough. We need terrible Black films. (Laughs.) We need, you know, I mean—this is the thing that I’ve been saying, you know, kind of, in every medium, but we will have arrived when we can put out just as much mediocre crap as, you know, white creators do. And it’s simply because right now, you know, you’re seeing our best and brightest. You’re seeing our most exceptional.

But that doesn’t mean we’ve arrived; that means the door has just cracked open.

Rosin: That’s amazing. I feel like that’s the perfect place to end, a rousing call for mediocre crap.

[All laugh]

Rosin: All right. Thank you both so much for joining us.

Peele: Thank you. Happy Halloween.

Rosin: Thanks.

Jemisin: Thank you to you too.

Peele: All right.

Rosin: This episode was produced by Ethan Brooks. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Isabel Cristo. The executive producer of Atlantic Audio is Claudine Ebeid. And our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back next week.