Journal Article

'The suffering black male body and the threatened white female body': ambiguous bodies in Candyman

Donaldson, Lucy Fife

2011

Overview

Race is not a subject often directly encountered in the horror film, despite the highly charged conflict of black and white constituting a central oppositionary structure in American culture and in its cinema. That this conflict is dramatised in specifically physical terms, as in the threat of miscegenation that permeates the dramatic chase scenes of D. W. Griffith's films, resonates with the emphasis on the body's importance for horror's excesses, so that opposition of black and white bears a suggestive relationship to the poles of monster and victim. Linda Williams, writing on race and melodrama, suggests that there are two key icons which articulate the moral dilemma of race for America: 'the suffering black male body and the threatened white female body'. Williams' articulation of these embodiments as entwined, presents a correspondence between aspects of black and white experience (as well as between male and female) which destabilises the more common impulse to see race as opposed, polarised as the language around black and white suggests.

• Publisher: Irish Journal of Gothic & Horror Studies
• Subject: African Americans / Ambiguity / Articulation / Barker, Clive (1952- ) / British & Irish literature / English literature / Epistolography / Gender / Middle class / Motion pictures / Race relations / Stereotypes / Student writing / Threats / Violence