The Unbearable Whiteness of Get Out (2017) and Midsommar (2019)

Abstract

Leatherface, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger—these are monsters who happen to be white. Recent horror films Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017) and Midsommar (Ari Aster 2019) include monsters who are terrifying because they are white. The emergence of the white monster in twenty-first-century horror raises several questions about racial representation within these narratives, viewer identification and reflexivity, and gaze theory. How is the white horror fan hailed by these monsters? In what ways do these monsters affirm and communicate long-ignored Black attitudes toward white people? How does the centering of race alter the archetypical monster of horror cinema? This chapter reads these films as critical interventions into the twenty-first-century emergence of the white monster. I argue that the foregrounding of whiteness itself as a feature of horror requires critics to revisit classic theories of viewer experience and the gaze, and revise these models to center whiteness as a feature of monstrosity.