Genocide denial rarely announces itself as denial. It arrives as a demand for higher standard of proof than the destroyed archive, the unmarked mass grave, or the traumatised survivor can supply: more documents, a more precise body count, testimony calm a linear enough to satisfy a courtroom. Scholar of historical memory have long recognised that state-sponsored denialism is a rhetorical strategy that exploits the very nature of catastrophic violence, its tendency to destroy the evidence of its own occurrence and to overwhelm the capacity of those who survive it to narrate it coherently.
In this paper I try to argue that psychological horror, a genre that gets dismissed as disreputable entertainment, has quietly become one of contemporary culture's most effective instruments against this strategy, using three interlocking techniques: uncanny atmosphere, haunting and body horror (check my last paper for a more deep dive on body horror and bodily autonomy), horror media constructs an affective archive: a repository of historical memory that operates through sensation, repetition, and the refusal of narrative closure. Where denialism asks the past to prove itself in terms a courtroom would accept, horror insists that the past is still happening and therefore need not be relitigated at all.
It's important to treat the terms "genocide" and "systemic eradication" as a family of related structures rather than a legal category (it's important, but it's not the focus of this paper). Some of the histories that were considered for the paper, indigenous dispossession, the holocaust, Gaza; meet that convention's formal definition of an intent to destroy a group. Others, including the afterlife of chattel slavery, apartheid, forced disappearance, and the death regimes surrounding undocumented migration, do not meet that legal threshold but share its logic: a targeted population is marked for destruction, displacement or erasure, and the violence is followed by an afterlife of official minimisation, euphemism, or silence. Following Michael Rothberg's model of multidirectional memory, this essay does not claim these histories are equivalent to one another, only that the strategies of horror has developed to represent one form of mass atrocity travel productively across others, revealing a shared form of denial that horror is peculiarly well-equipped to answer.
This paper draws its case studies from Remi Weekes's His House, Jordan Peele's Get Out, Bernard Rose's and Nia DaCosta's respective versions of Candyman, Neill Blomkamp's District 9, Jeff Barnaby's Blood Quantum, Mati Diop's Atlantics, Issa López's Tigers Are Not Afraid, and Toni Morrison's Beloved as adapted by Jonathan Demme — a deliberately wide geography spanning South Sudan, Chicago, apartheid-era South Africa, Indigenous North America, Senegal, Mexico, and the antebellum United States. To these must now be added the emerging body of cinematic and artistic responses to the genocide in Gaza, a catastrophe whose unprecedented documentation and simultaneous official erasure have made it a defining test case for the arguments this essay advances. The genre boundaries among these works are admittedly porous: Get Out is as often discussed as social thriller, District 9 as science-fiction action, Blood Quantum as horror-adjacent genre cinema. But each deploys the specific vocabulary of psychological and body horror this paper analyses, and each has been claimed by horror scholarship and horror audiences alike as part of the genre's ongoing expansion beyond its slasher-and-haunted-house core. The sections that follow take each of the three techniques in turn: first situating them against trauma theory's account of why realist evidence fails historical violence, then examining the uncanny's spatial insistence on the past's persistence, then haunting's temporal refusal of closure, then body horror's rejection of euphemism and abstraction, before closing with a critical account of the risks and limits of this entire representational project.
The rhetoric of denial and the limits of realist evidence
State-sponsored denialism follows a recognisable pattern regardless of the atrocity in question. It reclassifies mass killing as legitimate security policy, a civil war conflict, a justified cleansing of a population deem undesirable or an unfortunate accident; it disputes casualty figures as politically motivated exaggeration; it discredits survivor testimony as inherently unreliable, either because trauma is assumed to distort memory or because the passage of time is assumed to have done so; and it insists, finally, that the present generation bears no relationship to the past one, that the matter is closed. Each of these moves depends on holding memory to an evidentiary standard modelled on the courtroom or the archive: memory must be complete, chronological, internally consistent and, most importantly, corroborated by surviving paper trails. This is precisely the standard that catastrophic violence is designed to make impossible to meet. Regimes that commit genocide typically also destroy the records of it, scatter or kill witnesses and rename or physically redevelop the sites where it occurred. (Japan, at the end of WW2 burned all the logs from squadron 731, israel killing journalist reporting on the genocide, conquistadores españoles killing any resistance and justifying by calling them savages and then raping women to "better the race" and denying it was a genocide and not an "exchange of culture").
The genocide in Gaza has thrown this dynamic into especially sharp relief, precisely because it inverts the usual relationship between documentation and denial. Gaza is perhaps the most extensively documented atrocity in human history: smartphone footage, satellite imagery, journalist testimony, and open-source intelligence have produced an evidentiary record that, by the standards of any previous genocide, would be overwhelming. Israel's military operations have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, the majority women and children, destroyed the majority of Gaza's housing stock, hospitals, schools, universities, and cultural institutions, and produced famine conditions that UN officials have characterised as deliberate. South Africa's case before the International Court of Justice in December 2023, and the Court's subsequent provisional measures orders, represent the first time a genocide case has been brought by one state against another on this scale in the ICJ's history. And yet denial persists, not primarily as a claim that nothing is happening, but as a relentless contestation of intent, of proportionality, of the distinction between combatant and civilian, of whether the term "genocide" is appropriate at all.
"the demand is always for more proof, different proof, proof that will satisfy a standard that the violence itself, its destruction of hospitals, its killing of journalists at unprecedented rates, its displacement of nearly the entire population, has been designed to make impossible to meet. This is denialism operating in its suffocating presence, converting the sheer scale of documentation into a kind of noise from which no single, courtroom-ready narrative can be extracted.."
Trauma theory has long recognised a second, more intimate, obstacle to evidentiary memory. As Cathy Caruth argues in Unclaimed Experience, the traumatic event is by definition one that overwhelms the psyche's capacity to register it as it happens, it's never fully known in the first place, and it shows itself as symptoms, nightmares and repetitions rather than as a story that can be told straight through. A survivor's testimony, on this account, it's a different in kind from the linear, documentary record that denialism demands (also, they are always looking for the "perfect survivor") and it's precisely this difference that denialist rhetoric exploits, treating the survivor's hesitations, gaps or repetitions as evidence of fabrication rather than as trauma's own characteristics. We are seeing this in Gaza, this dynamic is compounded by the sheer scale of the trauma, an entire population subjected to repeated displacement, bombardment, starvation and the destruction of every institution that might support memory such that no individual testimony can possibly encompass it, and the demand for a coherent survivor narrative becomes not just unreasonable but cruel.
Horror is, structurally, a genre built around exactly these characteristics. Where realist historical drama typically organises atrocity into a beginning, middle, and end, a mode that, however well-intentioned, can inadvertently supply denialism with the linear, falsifiable narrative it wants to attack, horror stages the past as something that repeats, that will not stay finished, that erupts into the present in fragmented, sensory, non-chronological form. Adam Lowenstein's Shocking Representation was among the first sustained arguments that this structural affinity is not accidental: reading films from Peeping Tom to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre against the historical traumas of the Blitz, the Holocaust, and Vietnam, Lowenstein shows that horror's formal excess — its refusal of restraint, taste, and closure — allows it to register historical violence that more respectable genres smooth over. I've tried extend that argument outward from the national-cinema and world-war contexts Lowenstein examines to the specific representational demands of genocide and systemic ethnic, racial, and colonial eradication, and isolates three techniques through which this registration occurs: uncanny atmosphere, haunting, and body horror. The genocide in Gaza, which has already begun to generate its own body of horror-inflected cinematic and artistic responses, from short films produced by Palestinian filmmakers under bombardment to experimental works by international artists grappling with the impossibility of representing the unrepresentable, serves as an urgent contemporary test case for these arguments, one in which the stakes of representation are not historical but immediately, unbearably present.
Uncanny Atmospheres: Space, Repetition, and the Persistence of the Past
Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay on the uncanny locates horror's characteristic feeling, the unheimlich, precisely at the point where the heimlich, the homely and familiar, reveals itself to have been hiding something that should have remained secret. The uncanny is the strange, but most importantly it is the previously familiar returning in a form that exposes what domestic order was built to conceal. This makes the uncanny an unusually precise instrument for representing what official memory prefers to keep buried, because it locates historical violence not in a distant, bounded past but inside the very spaces, homes, neighbourhoods, nations, that present themselves as safe, resolved, or moved on (Think about the Backrooms movie, it's based on something familiar turned foreign).
Remi Weekes's His House (2020) stages this literally. Bol and Rial, asylum seekers who survived a South Sudanese civil war and a catastrophic boat crossing in which a child in their care drowned, are placed by British immigration authorities in a decaying council house and instructed to be grateful, to "blend in," and, implicitly, to leave their trauma at the border. The house immediately refuses this instruction: walls crack open onto visions of the flooded crossing, wallpaper peels back to reveal rot and eyes, a witch-spirit tied to the debt of the drowned child pursues the couple through rooms that rearrange themselves according to the logic of guilt rather than architecture. The film's central image (a domestic interior that is not stable but recursive, that keeps producing the past it is meant to contain) refuses the resettlement bureaucracy's premise that granting asylum retroactively resolves the violence that produced the need for it. The house is uncanny precisely because Bol and Rial's trauma will not consent to stay in South Sudan; it has, in Freud's terms, come home.
Nia DaCosta's Candyman (2021) performs a parallel operation at the level of urban space rather than the domestic interior. The Cabrini-Green public housing complex that anchors both the 1992 original and its 2021 continuation was a real site of racially discriminatory housing policy, deliberate disinvestment, and eventual demolition, a piece of Black Chicago's history that the city's redevelopment into gentrified lofts and galleries has tried, quite literally, to build over. The film's central ritual, in which saying "Candyman" five times to a mirror summons a vengeful spirit born of a nineteenth-century lynching, dramatises the return of the repressed as an act of compulsive repetition: the very gesture meant to disprove the legend is what calls the past back. DaCosta's script extends this logic across a century of anti-Black violence, revealing "Candyman" not as a single ghost but as a name that migrates onto new victims of racist and police violence in each generation, an uncanny structure in which gentrification's attempt to erase a site of memory becomes the very mechanism that reactivates it. Pierre Nora's distinction between "history," the state's reconstructed and curated account of the past, and lieux de mémoire, the sites where lived memory persists outside official control, is useful here: horror's haunted houses and haunted housing projects function as unauthorised lieux de mémoire, memory sites that neither redevelopment nor official commemoration can fully manage, because they are sustained by fiction and affect rather than by monuments the state can build, relocate, or quietly neglect.
The uncanny's spatial logic has acquired a terrible new resonance in Gaza, where the destruction of homes has been not incidental but systematic and explicitly articulated. The Israeli military's systematic demolition of Palestinian homes, neighbourhoods, and entire cities (documented in satellite imagery showing the erasure of whole urban districts) represents the most extreme possible version of the uncanny's central operation: the deliberate destruction of the domestic spaces that anchor memory, identity, and belonging. In Gaza, the home is not haunted by the past; it is the site of an ongoing violence that aims to ensure no home remains to be haunted. And yet, as with all attempts to eradicate memory by destroying its physical anchors, the uncanny returns: in the testimonies of displaced families who describe their destroyed homes as still present to them, in the persistence of keys and deeds to properties that no longer exist, in the ways that the rubble itself becomes a kind of memory site that no amount of reconstruction can fully overwrite. Palestinian filmmakers and artists working in and about Gaza have begun to develop a visual vocabulary that draws on horror's uncanny atmospheres precisely to register this impossible persistence, the sense that the past is not past, that the destruction is not finished, that the home one has lost is still somehow there, waiting.
Yet the uncanny's spatial insistence on the past's persistence is only half of horror's argument against denial; the other half belongs to the ghosts themselves.
Haunting as Testimony: Ghosts, Justice, and the Refusal of Erasure
If the uncanny is fundamentally spatial, haunting is horror's temporal analogue: the insistence, staged through literal ghosts, that a violence the present wants to regard as finished is in fact still open, still owed a response. Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology describes the spectre as a figure that is neither fully present nor fully absent and that therefore disrupts linear time, making an ethical demand on the living precisely because it cannot be filed away as history. Avery Gordon's Ghostly Matters translates this into a method for social analysis, arguing that haunting is what happens when abusive systems of power are not settled, and that the ghost is a way of knowing what official accounts have worked to make unknowable. Genocide denialism depends on a specific temporal claim: that the violence in question is over, and that continued attention to it is therefore excessive, backward-looking, or politically motivated. Horror's ghosts refuse this claim by definition; a ghost's entire narrative function is to demonstrate that "over" was never true.
Mati Diop's Atlantics (2019) makes this refusal explicit and material. Souleiman and his fellow construction workers, unpaid for months of labour on a luxury tower rising above Dakar, drown attempting a desperate sea crossing to Spain in search of the wages and futures denied them at home. Rather than disappearing into the sea's long history of swallowing migrant deaths as an anonymous, naturalised tragedy, they return, possessing the bodies of the women who loved them, to confront the developer directly and demand the unpaid wages that drove them to the water in the first place. Diop's haunting is not vague grief; it is a specific, materialist accounting, insisting that these deaths have an author and a debt, and that the debt remains payable. Issa López's Tigers Are Not Afraid (2017) stages a related refusal within Mexico's drug war, a conflict marked by state complicity and inaction that has left more than a hundred thousand people officially "disappeared" rather than acknowledged dead. The orphaned children at the film's centre are trailed by the ghosts of murdered parents and by a literal ribbon of blood that marks where the dead have been, images that hold open a body count and a set of names the state's silence has tried to keep unspoken. And Toni Morrison's Beloved, adapted for film by Jonathan Demme in 1998, remains the foundational text for this mode: the murdered daughter who returns in the flesh to Sethe's Ohio home embodies what Morrison calls "rememory," a form of traumatic knowledge that persists in places and can be encountered by others independent of direct experience. Sethe's act of infanticide, committed to keep her daughter from re-enslavement, is a horror that direct narration cannot adequately hold; only the disruptive, embodied, uninvited return of Beloved herself can make the community (and us, the reader) reckon with what slavery demanded of the enslaved. Across South Sudan, Senegal, Mexico, and the antebellum United States, these hauntings share a structure: the dead refuse the resolution that assimilation, gentrification, migration "closure," or abolition-as-completed-history would prefer, and in refusing it, they perform a kind of testimony that does not require, and cannot be defeated by, the evidentiary standards denialism sets.
In Gaza, the logic of haunting has taken on an almost literal quality. The dead, more than thirty thousand by early 2024, a figure that has only continued to rise, are not buried in marked graves with names and dates; they are under the rubble of destroyed buildings, in mass graves that have themselves been desecrated, in the unmarked sites where families have been killed together and no one remains to remember them. The denialism that operates here lies in matter of refusing to allow the dead to be mourned, counted, or even named. And yet the dead return, in the dreams and visions of survivors, in the insistence of families who write the names of the dead on their own bodies, in the viral circulation of images of children killed and then denied, in the ways that Palestinian poets and artists have long understood their work as a form of haunting, a refusal to let the dead be disappeared twice. The Palestinian tradition of sumud (steadfastness) is itself a kind of haunting: a refusal to leave, to be displaced, to allow the erasure to be completed. Horror's ghosts, which insist that the dead are not gone and that their claims on the living remain, offer a formal vocabulary for this refusal, one that is already being taken up by artists working in the shadow of Gaza's destruction.
These hauntings testify without conventional evidence; the final technique this essay considers dispenses with even the ghost's ambiguous visibility, making memory undeniable by inscribing it directly onto the body.
Body Horror: The Flesh as Archive
Julia Kristeva's account of abjection locates horror at the collapse of the boundary between self and other, subject and object, a collapse most viscerally figured by the corpse, "the utmost of abjection," which shows the living body what it will become and dissolves the fiction that the self is securely bounded. Body horror, the branch of the genre organised around the transformation, violation, or dissolution of the human body, weaponises this collapse for historical memory by making violence unavoidably corporeal at the exact moment that denialist rhetoric depends on abstraction. Genocide denial characteristically speaks in euphemism and statistics, "relocation," "resettlement," "ethnic cleansing," disputed body counts, unmarked or inaccessible graves, precisely because bureaucratic language and numerical dispute keep the body itself out of the sentence. Body horror puts it back in.
Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017) is the clearest recent example. The Armitage family's "Coagula" procedure (transplanting the brains of ageing, wealthy buyers into the bodies of abducted Black victims, whose own consciousness survives, paralysed and screaming, in the "Sunken Place") does not gesture at the history of medical exploitation of Black bodies in the United States, from the gynaecological experiments J. Marion Sims performed on enslaved women without anaesthesia to the Tuskegee syphilis study to the unconsented harvesting of Henrietta Lacks's cells; it restages that history as literal, on-screen surgery. The film's insistence on showing the procedure, rather than alluding to it, refuses the safety of pure metaphor: the violence is not "like" historical exploitation, it is that exploitation's logic carried to explicit conclusion, and it cannot be argued down to a misunderstanding or an exaggeration because the audience has watched it happen to a body.
Neill Blomkamp's District 9 (2009) performs a structurally similar operation from the position of the perpetrator rather than the victim. Its allegory of apartheid, extraterrestrial refugees confined to the title slum outside Johannesburg in a fictional echo of the real forced removals from Cape Town's District Six, becomes body horror when Wikus van der Merwe, the bureaucrat overseeing the aliens' relocation, is exposed to alien biotechnology and begins physically transforming into the very kind of body his job has spent years classifying, confining, and evicting. The film forces its ostensible audience surrogate to experience, from the inside, the arbitrary violence of a system that assigns or revokes rights based on the category of body one occupies, a fictionalised but pointed echo of apartheid's pass laws and classification boards, which physically inspected and categorised people to determine where they could live, work, and exist. Jeff Barnaby's Blood Quantum (2019) inverts the same logic from an Indigenous perspective: its title borrows the actual legal mechanism, used in both the United States and Canada, by which colonial governments defined Indigenous identity through fractional ancestry, a system scholars have described as a slow, bureaucratic instrument for legislating Indigenous peoples out of existence. By imagining a zombie plague to which only the Mi'kmaq residents of the fictional Red Crow reservation are immune, Barnaby reverses centuries of colonial rhetoric that pathologised Indigenous bodies as diseased or contagious, recoding immunity and survival as what Gerald Vizenor calls survivance: not mere endurance but an active, continuing resistance.
The genocide in Gaza has produced what is perhaps the most direct and devastating body horror of our time, not as a cinematic genre but as a lived reality that filmmakers and artists are only beginning to grapple with. The images emerging from Gaza, of children with amputated limbs, of bodies burned beyond recognition, of premature babies removed from incubators and left to die, of families killed together in their homes, are not horror cinema but the raw material from which horror cinema has always drawn. And the denialism that meets these images follows exactly the pattern this essay has traced: the demand for verification, the invocation of complexity, the refusal to accept the body as evidence. In response, Palestinian filmmakers and international artists have begun to produce work that insists on the body as archive — on the flesh as the site where violence is inscribed and where memory persists. These works refuse the abstraction that denialism requires; they put the body back into the sentence, and in doing so, they make the violence undeniable in the only way that ultimately matters: not as a statistic to be disputed, but as a wound that cannot be argued away.
The genocide in Gaza has produced what is perhaps the most direct and devastating body horror of our time, not as a cinematic genre but as a lived reality that filmmakers and artists are only beginning to grapple with. The images emerging from Gaza, of children with amputated limbs, of bodies burned beyond recognition, of premature babies removed from incubators and left to die, of families killed together in their homes, are not horror cinema but the raw material from which horror cinema has always drawn. And the denialism that meets these images follows exactly the pattern this essay has traced: the demand for verification, the invocation of complexity, the refusal to accept the body as evidence. In response, Palestinian filmmakers and international artists have begun to produce work that insists on the body as archive — on the flesh as the site where violence is inscribed and where memory persists. These works refuse the abstraction that denialism requires; they put the body back into the sentence, and in doing so, they make the violence undeniable in the only way that ultimately matters: not as a statistic to be disputed, but as a wound that cannot be argued away.
In each case, body horror refuses the abstraction that denialism needs — it renders mass violence something that happened, and continues to happen, to specific, irreducible bodies, a fact that cannot be relitigated the way a statistic can.
These three techniques, taken together, constitute a formidable representational arsenal, but no arsenal is without risk, and horror's use of atrocity has drawn serious and warranted criticism that any honest account of the genre's memorial function must address.
Risks, Limits, and the Question of Who Speaks
An essay arguing for horror's memorial function should not overstate its case. The genre's use of atrocity carries genuine risks, and the strongest scholarship on this material takes them seriously rather than treating horror-as-memory as an uncomplicated good. The first risk is aestheticisation: horror is, after all, produced and consumed as entertainment, and there is a legitimate question about what it means to derive suspense, dread, or visceral thrill from imagery adjacent to real mass death. The second is allegorical dilution: when a specific historical violence is refigured as aliens, zombies, or brain transplants, the metaphor risks smoothing the history's particularity into a generic monster narrative that says less about, for instance, apartheid specifically than about oppression in the abstract. District 9 has drawn exactly this criticism on a second front as well: its Nigerian gang subplot, which depicts African characters as cannibalistic criminals practising crude magic to gain alien powers, has been widely criticised as reproducing the very racist caricature the film's central allegory claims to critique: a reminder that a text can indict one system of dehumanisation while reinscribing another.
These risks take on a particular urgency in relation to Gaza, where the gap between the reality of mass death and any aesthetic representation of it is almost impossibly wide. There is a real danger that the cinematic or artistic response to Gaza becomes a form of what some critics have called "atrocity tourism", the consumption of Palestinian suffering as spectacle by audiences insulated from its consequences. There is also the risk that the horror genre's conventions, suspense, jump scares, the catharsis of survival, are fundamentally inadequate to a violence that is ongoing, that has no ending, that offers no survival for tens of thousands of people. And there is the deeper risk that any representation of Gaza, however well-intentioned, becomes a substitute for the political action that is the only adequate response to genocide. Horror can make violence felt; it cannot stop it.
The clearest corrective to both risks, evident across the case studies examined here, is authorial and communal proximity to the history represented. Jordan Peele and Nia DaCosta are Black American filmmakers working within a specifically Black American history of exploitation and racist violence; Jeff Barnaby was a Mi'kmaq filmmaker from the Listuguj First Nation making a film about Indigenous survival on Indigenous terms; Issa López is Mexican, making a film about a crisis her country is living through rather than observing; Mati Diop is French-Senegalese, filming in Dakar with a cast drawn from the community whose labour and loss the film concerns. This pattern suggests that horror functions as anti-denialist memory most powerfully not simply because of its formal techniques but because those techniques are, in the strongest examples, deployed by artists with a testimonial stake in the history rather than an extractive relationship to it, closer to what Marianne Hirsch, writing on the transmission of Holocaust memory to the children of survivors, calls postmemory: not the event itself, but an inherited, mediated relationship to it that nonetheless carries real ethical weight and responsibility. In the Gazan context, this principle is both urgent and fraught: the filmmakers and artists who are producing work from within Gaza itself, often under bombardment, often with the knowledge that they may not survive to complete their work, represent the most direct possible form of testimonial proximity, while those working from outside must navigate the difficult terrain between solidarity and appropriation, between amplifying Palestinian voices and speaking over them. Finally, horror cannot substitute for the political and legal work of accountability, truth commissions, prosecutions, reparations, formal archives, education, and this essay does not claim otherwise. Its argument is narrower and, this essay contends, still significant: horror shapes the cultural and affective terrain on which the reception of denialist claims either finds purchase or does not, and in doing so performs work that formal historiography, constrained by evidentiary norms denialism can exploit, is not equipped to do alone.
Conclusion: Horror as Counter-Archive
Uncanny atmosphere, haunting, and body horror are not three unrelated techniques but three coordinated answers to the specific rhetorical structure of denial. Denial asks the past to prove it is still relevant; the uncanny answers by making haunted houses and haunted housing projects into memory sites the state cannot redevelop or relocate out of existence. Denial asks the dead to stay finished; haunting answers by giving them a continued, demanding presence that no truth commission's absence can silence. Denial speaks in euphemism and disputed statistics; body horror answers by making violence sensorially, corporeally undeniable. None of this replaces the archive, the tribunal, or the history book. It supplements them, and does so precisely where they are structurally weakest, in registering the forms of knowledge, testimony, and historical truth that catastrophic violence, by its nature, prevents from ever reaching the courtroom standard denialism insists upon.
The genocide in Gaza has made this argument not a matter of historical memory but of urgent contemporary necessity. The violence is ongoing; the denialism is ongoing; the demand for a standard of proof that the violence itself makes impossible is ongoing. In this context, horror's counter-archive is not a supplement to the historical record but a vital form of witness, one that insists on the reality of what is happening even as the official mechanisms for acknowledging that reality are systematically dismantled. As long as states and perpetrators continue to rely on the destruction of evidence and the discrediting of survivors as tools of erasure, the genre built around what returns despite destruction, and what cannot be argued away once it is felt in the body, will remain an unlikely but indispensable archive of the atrocities history would prefer to forget, and of those it is still trying to commit in plain sight.
Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Grove Press, 1967. Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." 1919. The Uncanny, translated by David McLintock, Penguin Classics, 2003. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press, 2012. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982. Lowenstein, Adam. Shocking Representation: Historical Trauma, National Cinema, and the Modern Horror Film. Columbia University Press, 2005. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Nora, Pierre. "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire." Translated by Marc Roudebush, Representations, no. 26, 1989, pp. 7–24. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press, 2009. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Wesleyan University Press, 1994.
Filmography
Atlantics (Atlantique). Directed by Mati Diop, 2019. Beloved. Directed by Jonathan Demme, 1998. Blood Quantum. Directed by Jeff Barnaby, 2019. Candyman. Directed by Bernard Rose, 1992. Candyman. Directed by Nia DaCosta, 2021. District 9. Directed by Neill Blomkamp, 2009. Get Out. Directed by Jordan Peele, 2017. His House. Directed by Remi Weekes, 2020. Tigers Are Not Afraid (Vuelven). Directed by Issa López, 2017.There are questions that I feel I'm not smart to answer right now, What does it mean to analyse ongoing genocide through the lens of horror? Does the genre's memorial function work differently when the violence hasn't ended?. But hopefully I can go back to these and do another review of this essay or if someone feels inspired to answer them feel free to do it.