Thriller

You can tell from ear­ly on that Thriller is a know­ing throw­back to the sen­si­bil­i­ties of the clas­sic ​’80s slash­er, sim­ply because a black char­ac­ter – 13-year-old Amani (Bria Sin­gle­ton) – is quite lit­er­al­ly ​‘the first to die’, con­form­ing to the old trope of African-Amer­i­cans being expend­able vic­tims in horror.

In fact, Dal­las Jackson’s direc­to­r­i­al debut fol­lows a tem­plate set as along ago as Paul Lynch’s Prom Night: a cru­el child­hood prank that ends in a death comes back to haunt those who con­spired to cov­er it up and let some­one else take the blame. ​“Gonna get you!” are ​‘spe­cial’, inno­cent Chauncey’s last words as he is cart­ed off by police for a crime he did not com­mit. And four years lat­er, after a bru­tal­is­ing spell in juvie shown in pen­cil sketch­es over the open­ing cred­its, the hood­ie-wear­ing, mus­cle-bound Chauncey (Jason Woods) comes out a dif­fer­ent man, even as the high school home­com­ing event of his for­mer tor­men­tors attracts a ris­ing bodycount.

The dif­fer­ence here is that the set­ting is South Cen­tral Los Ange­les, and every­one is African-Amer­i­can, His­pan­ic or Kore­an, so that the first and last vic­tim – and every vic­tim in between – is a POC. Indeed, there is not a white face to be seen in the film. Chauncey’s for­mer school­mate Der­rick (Luke Ten­nie) gives the lay of the land when explain­ing to his teacher (Vanes­sa A Williams) why he has stopped both­er­ing to pur­sue high grades at school:

“How about these per­cent­ages: the num­ber one cause of death among young black men from ages 15 to 34: mur­der. Nine­ty-three per cent of mur­der vic­tims are killed by some­one who shares their race. And accord­ing to the CDC, last year, young black men from 15 – 34 were 10 times more like­ly to die of mur­der than whites in the same age group… My point is: my fate has already been decid­ed for me.”

Mean­while his friend Dre (Tequan Rich­mond) explains to Comp­ton High School’s hard-assed prin­ci­pal (RZA, who also pro­vides the film’s elec­tron­ic score) why he is always play­ing tough despite his mid­dle-class back­ground: ​“So I can walk down the street, and not hav­ing to wor­ry about a Blood or a Crip killing me! Or some punk-ass police look­ing to kill me! or a group of hoods try­ing to punk me! I have to act hard to survive!”

In oth­er words, the sociopo­lit­i­cal milieu in which this slash­er unfolds, though rather alien to the sub­genre, nonethe­less pro­vides a per­fect stalk­ing ground where mur­der and youth­ful death are so nor­malised that any assas­si­na­tion-mind­ed avenger can eas­i­ly blend right in. For while there may be a stone-cold killer on the loose, we are also see­ing an envi­ron­ment where armed men reg­u­lar­ly shake down passers-by on the street, where a house par­ty being bro­ken up by the sound of gun­fire is not unusu­al, where vio­lence at school is com­mon­place, and where the odds are stacked against any of these teenagers ever escap­ing the hood.

In oth­er words here, as with Jor­dan Peele’s Get Out, every­day black expe­ri­ence is exposed as part and par­cel of the film’s more gener­ic hor­ror, with each inform­ing the oth­er. Even that title Thriller, shown up front in bold red before any actu­al scene, points to a change in times and atti­tudes between slash­er hor­ror in its ​’80s hey­day and in the present day.

For it evokes the song title (from 1982) through which anoth­er Jack­son made a for­ay into the hor­ror genre, back in more seem­ing­ly inno­cent times. The mon­ster that Michael Jack­son was then so play­ful­ly con­jur­ing he has now, from beyond the grave, him­self become, as we now see hor­ror, for all its estab­lished con­ven­tions and cheesy fun, as mask­ing demons – social, psy­cho­log­i­cal, polit­i­cal – from an all-too real world.

By promi­nent­ly fea­tur­ing a ​‘Thriller’ t‑shirt, Peele’s Us played a sim­i­lar game with MJ’s now taint­ed iconog­ra­phy, exploit­ing the anx­ious cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance in our shift­ing per­cep­tions of the singer to divide us, as view­ers, from our past selves. The film Thriller cer­tain­ly deliv­ers all the cat-and-mouse death by num­bers that we expect of a stan­dard slash­er – but it simul­ta­ne­ous­ly uses the Rea­gan-era sub­genre as a dis­tort­ing prism through which we can also glimpse an actu­al com­mu­ni­ty killing itself in the here and now – which is where the real hor­ror begins.