Plenty of attention has been given to the place of racial politics within horror film. While many methods of reading horror focus on the achievement of affect, others focus on analyses of race, sexuality, and so on. Robin Wood’s work on the repressed and the Other provides one such analytical framework. The racial politics of horror films may be affected by a wide variety of elements, including setting. Some horrors take place within urban areas which are already regarded by many audience members as violent and dangerous, such as ghettos and housing projects. Since marginalised racial groups are often residents in these spaces, consideration of the depiction of these spaces is a possible avenue for further exploration of racial politics in the horror film. Character relationships to this space is one important part of such analysis.
Assault on Precinct 13, set within Anderson, a Los Angeles ghetto, is one film which may be explored in this manner. A vengeful street gang besieges a closed-down police station, trapping a group of police department staff, civilians, and Death Row criminals. Heavily inspired by George A. Romero’s zombie films (particularly in the portrayal of the gang), it owes a great debt to horror.
Bernard Rose’s Candyman is an outright horror. Helen Lyle is a student completing a thesis on the “modern folklore” of Cabrini-Green, a Chicago housing project. Her main topic of interest is Candyman, the ghost of an African-American artist, to whom locals apparently credit gang violence. Lyle encourages disbelief in the Candyman legend when a gangster, who also calls himself Candyman, is arrested; the real Candyman, upset that belief in him is waning, therefore begins terrorising Lyle and Cabrini-Green.
Race plays an important role in each film: the street gang of Precinct 13 are largely various people of colour, while Ethan Bishop, an African-American highway patrolman trapped in the station, was assigned there as a joke by his white superiors. Candyman, on the other hand, is largely concerned with the relationships between the white Lyle, the African-American residents of Cabrini-Green, and Candyman, the ghost of a slave’s son. Since they are both American films, they have backgrounds in similar racial politics and anxieties. They are also quite similar despite their difference in years, so this is not a significant barrier to the comparison between the two. They are thus apt case studies for the exploration of the connection between horror film’s urban spaces and racial politics.
The construction of these film’s urban spaces has relatively complex effects on their racial politics. The residents of Anderson and Cabrini-Green are sympathised with: they are isolated from the rest of society, with police either indifferent, or perpetrators of needless brutality. However, it is nonetheless suggested that the repression of the ghettos is necessary: these spaces, and their histories and cultures, are depicted as naturally violent, and thus dangerous to affluent, privileged folk. Even then, those living in the ghettos are not condemned. If they accept white authority, and supress the dangerous histories of their space, they or their descendants may someday live in an affluent neighbourhood themselves — if they work hard enough.
