Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror

by Jordan Peele

I view horror as catharsis through entertainment. It’s a way to work through your deepest pain and fear—but for Black people that isn’t possible, and for many decades wasn’t possible, without the stories being told in the first place.

Probably better to shoot than arrest her, really; dead women file no lawsuits.

The local megachurch has them everywhere, trying to scare people into buying their pastor another beach house.

Then two years ago at a Florida hospital, a newborn unfolds his jaw and eats half a nurse’s face. And you think, it’s Miami, it happens, until the video comes in.

I find this so funny

What the fuck am I even talking about? Grad school is bad for the brain.

Felt.

I have a condition. I have a condition with an ugly name. One of the symptoms of this ugly condition is that I am afraid, profoundly, that I will be abandoned. The doctor says this fear is irrational, even though I have been abandoned before.

Us and them. Those born on this island and those who crowned it the jewel of an empire.

“Has it seemed at all like shit’s just kind of run its course? Problems are obvious and no one’s that invested in fixing them? No new discoveries, no new ideas. All the new arguments are the same as the old arguments. Lost the plot with art and entertainment. Everything’s AI or a remix or remaster or expansion of the same five IPs.”

They thought that we were too young to understand, but children knew. We learned the lesson early, felt it down to our bones: Of all the tools of oppression, fear was the cruelest.

“This is why they fear us. They live with their secret shame, their secret terror that we might do to them what they’ve done to us. We don’t depend on them, don’t need them. We ‘don’t know our place,’ and they see that we’re a well-armed militia.”

“Know your place. Stay in your place. But if you build your place into something nice, they want to take it from you. All they needed was an excuse.”

Over time, I forgot that beneath the playground of passing cars was the disturbed burial ground of people who thought they were free.