It’s spooky season in the United States. We’re putting on costumes, eating a ton of candy, and voting for the least scary devils on the ballot. Plus, we’re breaking out the spine-tingling tales! Today, we’re going to talk about why White people are the monsters in several notable horror stories of the past few years. It goes back, in part, to a nineteenth century geneticist who thought we could breed humans like dogs.
Feral Whiteness
I’ve been working on an article about satirical horror for the New York Times, and during the course of my “research” I finally watched Midsommar. You know, the indie flick about a group of American grad students studying “pure” White people from an ancestral Nordic culture of the sort fetishized by Nazis? Yeah, that one. So in Midsommar, the aforementioned students go with friends to a remote part of Sweden so they can participate in summer rituals with a small pagan commune. Pretty quickly they discover that the fertility festival they expected actually involves human sacrifice, as well as coercive sperm donation from “outsiders” to prevent the commune from becoming too inbred.
Though the tone of the movie is sombre, it’s also full of trippy, gory freakouts that are occasionally so absurd that I laughed out loud. Partly that’s because of the film’s social context — it came out in 2019, at a time when White nationalists were crawling all over social media, promoting the idea that “Western civilization” is the pinnacle of culture. In Midsommar, however, we see clearly the murderous savagery at the core of this notion of Whiteness.
