Beloved: Black Trauma Centered in Black Horror

Black trauma as horror has proven itself to be difficult to capture in film, let alone convince audiences that the pain of watching such movies is worth the theater ticket price. Horror movies that revolve around Black trauma, as raw as they may be, might be simply ‘too much’ to some viewers. I believe Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a good example of this, although it is worth noting how real the film remains despite how poorly it did at the box office. In my opinion, the film does not delve into the “trauma porn” realm that many Black horror movies with white directors often go into, which is certainly not to say that some Black directors aren't guilty of doing too much when it comes to capturing Black trauma in their movies. Black trauma is just hard to center in a nonproblematic way, even if the problem is only that what viewers are watching seems too real and too grim that the power is lost in the bleakness. I believe Beloved is a good example of this area of the problem, and even if it meant deterring from the novel and straying from its ending, something positive and hopeful should have been married with the trauma as horror. 

With there always being plenty of buzz around the internet that resurfaced after Toni Morrison’s passing in 2019, the Beloved and beloved author apparently didn't want her book to be adapted into a film because of how difficult she knew it was. Whether that is true or not, the truth behind its difficulty remains a fact, especially given that it is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave from Kentucky who escaped in 1856 with her family to Cincinnati. In an interview, Morrison describes how her imagination ran wild because of how normal and sane Garner was for this choice, where her inspiration to write about her story came from learning that during Garner’s trial she simply said said “I’d do it again”.

One great thing about the film is that it is successful in maintaining the truth of the story told by 

Morrison and the power in not including any added “shock”, as the story is already horrific and traumatic in and of itself. Beloved showed it can be powerful to show this aspect of horror in an artistic way. While the film will always remain hard for me to watch, the fact is that films based on novels will always have the trouble of showing the audience their interpretation of what was to be imagined in the original story. Black trauma as horror is a difficult topic and difficult center of a story. It will always be a balancing act of showing too much and being exploitative with being real and accurate.