This book provides a concise introduction to critical race theory and shows how this theory can be used to interpret Jordan Peele's Get Out. It surveys recent developments in critical race studies and introduces key concepts that have helped shape the field such as Black masculinity, white privilege, the Black body, and miscegenation. The book's analysis of Get Out situates it within the context of the American horror film, illustrating how contemporary debates in critical race theory and approaches to the analysis of mainstream Hollywood cinema can illuminate each other. In this way, the book provides both an accessible reference guide to key terminology in critical race studies and film studies, while contributing new scholarship to both fields.

Essays explore Get Out's roots in the horror tradition and its complex and timely commentary on twenty-first-century US race relations.

"In this book, Aph Ko examines the mainstream animal rights and anti-racist movements in an effort to explain why tension exists between the two. She offers possible resolutions, and explores how such tensions represent a symptom of a deeper societal problem. Framed as a "starter guide" for having conversations on race and animals, Racism as Zoological Witchcraft draws upon television shows and films such as Jordan Peele's Get Out, Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet, and ABC's The Bachelor franchise to demonstrate how one can use media and cultural studies to provide new ways of thinking about complex social phenomena. Drawing upon Claire Jean Kim's zoological race theory and James W. Perkinson's European race discourse as witchcraft scholarship, Racism as Zoological Witchcraft concludes that white supremacy functions as a form of zoological witchcraft, a pervasive force that thrives off of metabolizing nonhuman souls. In re-framing white supremacy as a consumptive, cannibalistic force, only then can we re-imagine how Black bodies and animal bodies are used as vehicles to fulfill the racialized power fantasies of the dominant class. This book poses a crucial question: What is the interplay between the ideological and economic consumption of Blackness (both historical and contemporary) and the conception of animals as consumable entities in American society? In Racism as Zoological Witchcraft, Aph Ko argues that in order to "get out" of a problematic system, we have to thoroughly understand how we got in"--

This book offers the analysis of a selection of North American texts that dismantle and resist normative frames through the resignification of concepts such as unhappiness, precarity, failure, and vulnerability. The chapters bring to the fore how those potentially negative elements can be refigured as ambivalent sites of resistance and social bonding. Following Sara Ahmed’s rereading of happiness, other authors such as Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Jack Halberstam, Lauren Berlant, or Henry Giroux are mobilized to interrogate films, memoirs, and novels that deal with precarity, alienation, and inequality. The monograph contributes to enlarging the archives of unhappiness by changing the focus from prescribed norms and happy endings to unruly practices and unhappy beginnings. As the different contributors show, unhappiness, precarity, vulnerability, or failure can be harnessed to illuminate ways of navigating the world and framing society that do not necessarily conform to the script of happiness—whatever that means.

What kinds of terror lurk beneath the surface of White respectability? Many of the top-grossing US horror films between 2008 and 2016 relied heavily on themes of White, patriarchal fear and fragility: outsiders disrupting the sanctity of the almost always White family, evil forces or transgressive ideas transforming loved ones, and children dying when White women eschew traditional maternal roles. Horror film has a long history of radical, political commentary, and Russell Meeuf reveals how racial resentments represented specifically in horror films produced during the Obama era gave rise to the Trump presidency and the Make America Great Again movement. Featuring films such as The Conjuring and Don't Breathe, White Terror explores how motifs of home invasion, exorcism, possession, and hauntings mirror cultural debates around White masculinity, class, religion, socioeconomics, and more. In the vein of Jordan Peele, White Terror exposes how White mainstream fear affects the horror film industry, which in turn cashes in on that fear and draws voters to candidates like Trump.

This book examines horror films through a critical criminological lens. Each chapter considers how the genre impacts audiences and their understanding of topics like place, crime, and identity.

· This book is the first to focus upon Blaxploitation horror films, and the first to link these films with both mainstream horror films and classic Gothic novels and stories. · This book provides readers with innovative and thought-provoking analyses of Blaxploitation horror films, conventional horror films, and major works of Gothic fiction. · It considers how Blaxploitation horror films of the 1970s addressed issues of deep concern to their contemporary audiences, including not only racism and the Black Power movement, but also women’s and gay rights, the status of the African American family, the role of religion, and relations between the community and the police.