Seeing Get Out in theatres opening weekend was one of those thrilling experiences, where you and the whole audience realize that you’re witnessing A Cultural Moment. As in, there is a world before Get Out and a world after Get Out. The rare horror movie that broke through to the mainstream, and the even rarer horror movie that changed how mainstream audiences regarded and watched horror. To me, it’s a bigger seismic shift for the genre than Scream, because it brought a new, predominantly Black audience in and made horror for, by, and about Black people much more marketable. Like I said—thrilling.

Howevuh. Hollywood is always determined to learn the wrong lessons from its successes. After all, this is the industry that saw Barbie’s box office domination and piles of Oscar nominations and said, “the people want toy movies!” And so, this industry saw new Black horror fans responding to an original and relatable little weirdo of a movie and said, “the people want racial trauma!”

At first glance, Antebellum is a sci-fi horror movie with two separate timelines. The first follows Eden (Janelle Monae), an enslaved woman trying to survive and escape a vicious Louisiana plantation. The second follows Veronica (also Monae), a renowned academic finishing up a book tour in Louisiana. Eden and Veronica are the same person, so we have a mystery on our hands: how did a 21st-century public intellectual wind up on a 19th-century plantation? Is she the only one like her, or are the other enslaved people unwilling time travelers as well? And, perhaps most importantly, how does she get home?

Unfortunately, I’ve made this movie sound both more compelling and less harrowing than it is. I’ve left out, for instance, that it opens with Black people getting tortured and murdered by Confederate soldiers in excruciating slow motion for trying to escape. Or that the next scene depicts a Confederate general beating and branding Veronica until she accepts her slave name. Or that one character, Julia, asks a kind-seeming Confederate to help her, and he responds by kicking her so savagely that she miscarries.

It’s trauma porn, plain and simple, because it ultimately has no goal other than to shock.

Antebellum comes from the minds of married screenwriting and directing duo Gerard Bush and Christopher Kenz, who sometimes go by Bush Kenz, because of course they do. And here’s what I’ll say about Gerard: in an All Things Considered interview, when the host made a contextual note that Gerard is Black and Christopher is white, Gerard said, “not only am I Black, I’m super Black!” So, that’s Gerard. His nightmare about a woman named Veronica served as the inspiration for the short story that became Antebellum. I do wonder if the script needed someone slightly less in love with him than he and his husband are. Everything about the movie feels utterly indulgent, as if nobody involved ever said or heard the word “no.” Antebellum being their first feature film definitely comes across; it being their final feature film (so far) definitely makes sense.

The context is also key here. In the late 2010s, any script to do with generational trauma, especially generational racial trauma, generated a lot of buzz. This was true in 2019, when filming for Antebellum started; but it was even more true in 2020. Antebellum was originally set to open in April 2020, but then Covid turned the world upside-down. And then the summer of 2020 happened, and it seemed like our country was finally having its long-awaited racial reckoning. (Spoiler alert: it wasn’t.) By the time the movie finally hit TV screens in September 2020, Bush Kenz had spent months drumming up anticipation for it, promoting it as a movie that processed America’s racial injustices. A movie that should have come and gone with a lot less fanfare wound up getting entirely too much attention.

I really think the “not only am I Black, I’m super Black!” is derogatory enough, no?

I’ll name Gabourey Sidibe as one actor who built a whole world out of her thinly written cliché masquerading as a character. Gabourey plays the Fat Best Friend, the role that is always there to represent the protagonist’s id and make the protagonist look both more respectable by comparison and more interesting by association. She will always say the thing, whether it’s ogling a waiter or clocking a weirdo white woman. And here is what I mean by that:

Fat Black woman that I am, I am conflicted about these roles. Because it’s nice to see yourself on-screen, but it’d be a lot nicer to see yourself in a role that’s more than just the court jester, you know? Still, I’m just always happy to see Gabourey having fun, and I wish she were in way more of the movie than she is.

I honestly think Antebellum’s premise is pretty strong! But a grabby horror premise without a well-considered follow through is a haunted house of cards, and the execution here is where everything falls apart. Take the twist reveal, which anyone who has seen a single M. Night Shyamalan movie was already primed for: there is no time travel. Veronica and the other enslaved people have been kidnapped to, essentially, a theme park of a plantation in remote Louisiana that just…exists, in 2020. Not only that, but it’s owned by a Louisiana senator who insisted on Veronica’s kidnapping and enslavement because her outspokenness was such a thumb in his eye. And this brings up questions, you know? Like, how has nobody discovered this operation yet? How has nobody escaped? Why is the only person capable of escaping a PhD-educated equestrian yogi (and yes, the horseback riding and the yoga do play into her escape)? What in the talented tenth is this tomfoolery?

The problem is much deeper than a poorly executed plot twist, though. It’s that Bush Kenz have no conception of what Black liberation is. There is no joy, no beauty, no meaning to their vision. It’s all surface-level signifiers. And that becomes clear in the present-day scenes, when Veronica is in her element. She has the Mahogany greeting card home life, with a handsome, supportive husband and adorable daughter. She practices yoga wearing head-to-toe Ivy Park. I know that, nowadays, she’d have a “My Vice President wraps her hair at night” t-shirt out here somewhere. And then, she gives this speech:

I know those men were HYPE over her saying “branded as the angry Black woman” knowing that they were going to literally brand this woman. Good grief.

None of these sentences make sense, either on their own or strung together. But they have a reassuring cadence, and enough key phrases to trigger a knee-jerk “mmm” from the right audience. It’s the kind of virtue-signaling pablum that was having a big moment in 2019, and an even bigger one in 2020, but that didn’t get us any closer to real liberation. It’s pretty, but it’s cynically hollow.

A friend and I had promised each other that we’d both watch it, in a real “you jump, I jump", remember?” type of situation. Covid lockdown had everybody doing dumb shit, man. And there was something so alluring about what a shit show this might be that we just had to see it for ourselves.

Praising a horror movie’s cinematography is truly the “great gowns, beautiful gowns” of the genre, but here we are. Visually, Antebellum is kind of fucking gorgeous.

Yeah, absolutely. This movie put hate in my heart. Horror—including horror about real-life trauma—is capable of so much more than this. Check out His House, starring Wunmi Mosaku and Sope Dirisu, to see what I mean.

On the next Terrible Tuesday: my first Rachel McAdams movie was also my worst Rachel McAdams movie.

Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this essay, please take a second to feel Al Gore’s rhythm by liking and sharing it!