Event Details

Professor Elizabeth Young (Mt. Holyoke, USA) explores race and the Gothic, linking Edgar Allan Poe and the filmmaker Jordan Peele.

Jordan Peele’s films Get Out (2017) and Us (2019) have a clear lineage in modern cinematic horror, including Night of the Living Dead, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Birds. In this talk, I set Peele’s films in transmedia conversation with nineteenth-century Gothic fiction by Edgar Allan Poe. Peele reworks the writer’s lexicon of horror: Poe’s bodies wedged beneath floors become, in Get Out, Black psyches trapped in the double-consciousness terrors of the Sunken Place; in Us, Poe’s living dead become the zombified underclass beneath a California boardwalk. Poe is key to understanding Peele, while Peele allows us to rethink race and form in Poe. Though the radical politics of Peele’s films diverge from Poe, Peele also makes visible the racial allegories already implicit in the earlier writer. Their reciprocal tethering provides us with an important opportunity to examine the circulatory openness, both formal and political, between nineteenth-century Gothic literature and twenty-first century film horror.

ElizabethYoung is Carl M. and Elsie A. Small Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College, where she teaches American literature, film, and visual culture. She is the author of Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor; Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War; and, most recently, Pet Projects: Animal Fiction and Taxidermy in the Nineteenth-Century Archive.