Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Booth, Addie C

Titel

“Hell [is] a pretty place, too”: The Ecology of Horror in the Film Adaptation of Beloved

Ist Teil von

• College literature, 2020-09, Vol.47 (4), p.752-776

Ort / Verlag

West Chester: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2020

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• This essay examines the film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved through the lenses of the ecoGothic, Critical Race Theory, and film studies to analyze how it serves as an often-unrecognized pre-text for the contemporary Black horror genre. By looking at the film’s more subtle use of Gothic horror, this reading counters many previous interpretations of the film that find its sensationalism destroys its fidelity to Morrison’s text and argues instead that the film’s attention to the ecological serves as the primary cinematic method through which it upholds the central idea of the novel: that the trauma borne from slavery is generational, pervasive, and long-lasting. Further, this analysis suggests that the film’s presentation of the natural world, both apart from and in connection with the titular character, articulates the ways in which the landscape/seascape can take on and remember the logics of the plantation—and that of the route to the plantation (displacement, commodification, and the Middle Passage)—regardless of temporal or geographic distance from the original institution of chattel slavery.