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I have loved horror as long as I have loved my blackness.
Horror may seem like an unlikely obsession for a young black girl growing up on the shores of Miami.
The violence is jarring, gruesome, and touched with broader racial relevance.
The sequence takes the tenor of a dream.
Hes a boogeyman by way of a sun-kissed Freddy Krueger.
Later episodes lean even further into horror.
Early in the episode, a white woman bounces up to Earn exclaiming, No way!
You look so good!
her hand lightly touching his face, checking for makeup.
The writers seem more interested in the horror that blooms inside and among black people.
Vans security in how she defines herself as a black woman is chipped away continuously throughout Helen.
The familiarity of Atlantas concrete landscape gives way to the strange and the harrowing.
Both Teddy Perkins and This Is America use horror to consider what exactly this means.
Both incorporate commentary on the evolution of black music, and hip-hop in particular.
Both are brimming with references.
It operates on multiple levels.
It can be read as a psychologically pointed spin on a haunted house.
In Glovers aching, unnerving performance, we witness an immediately iconic horror monster take shape.
He becomes a horrifying emblem of what happens when black people resent their blackness and seek to obliterate it.
Teddy Perkins immediately felt bracing and potentin its message.
In the video, Glover and Murai make blatant and blunt many of the subtextual concerns ofAtlanta.
He runs through a gamut of viral and African dance moves.
Watching it, I couldnt help but wonder, who is this video trying to instill fear in?
I give them stock answers: catharsis, empowerment, escapism, and so on.
I thought of this when watching Teddy Perkins and This Is America back to back.
Teddy Perkins left me feeling shaken and deeply sad.
As my colleagueCraig Jenkins wrote about the music video, Glover is smarter than this.Atlantais smarter than this.
Most arch black art flourishing now under the ever-present white American gaze is more careful than this.
Characters learn more about themselves or question what they thought they understood.
Violence acts as an emblem of inherited traumas or subconscious fugues.
What unites each act of violence is that they speak to how whiteness has warped characters.
For Van, its her German side that makes blackface seem like a cultural quirk rather than a nightmare.
For Teddy and Alfred, its the rigors of fame and fortune.
