By Daria Goncharova

15 May 2025

As Tananarive Due notes in the 2019 documentary Horror Noire, ‘Black history is Black horror.’ Yet, the cinematic history of the plantation—‘epicenter and emblem of slavery’ and its horrors—has been (for the most part) the history of historical dramas and romances.¹

Romanticized versions of the plantation have pervaded the American screen since D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) fueled white nostalgia for an imagined past. Reignited with films such as So Red the Rose (1935), Jezebel (1938), and, most notably, the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), this cinematic tradition not only contributed to the spread of the Lost Cause ideology but also confined the image of Southern plantation to the antebellum past (Figure 1). The ‘Golden Age’ of horror not only restored the plantation as a site of terror, but also brought it into the modern day with such classics as White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1939), as well as an array of B-movies, like Ouanga/ The Love Wanga (1936) and The Vampire’s Ghost (1945). Yet, these films—a curious amalgamation of Black stereotypes and white villains—were predominantly set in the ‘exotic jungles’ of Haiti and West Africa, protecting the American viewer from their domestic ‘ghosts’ and transferring the responsibility for white characters’ actions from the system of white supremacy to Haitian ‘wickedness’.² Some post-war films, such as Pinky (1949) and Intruder in the Dust (1949), did situate the Southern plantation in the contemporary moment, but, as studio-erafilms, they did so to emphasize American progress from the plantation past to the postwar present rather than to acknowledge the deep roots of contemporary racism. Together, these films set the stage for 21st-century on-screen treatments of the plantation that too often fall into one of two categories: white savior narratives, such as The Help (2011), or Black hero stories, such as The Birth of a Nation (2016), Harriet (2019), and Emancipation (2022).³

But in the past few years, a new generation of plantation films and mini-series came to see the light of day thanks to the combined efforts of Black authors, screenwriters, and directors. Building on the success of Black Lives Matter (BLM) Gothic films, such as Get Out (2017) and BlacKkKlansman (2018), which rely on metaphors and allusions to suggest the enduring legacy of slavery (such as the auction scene in Get Out or Patricia and Ron’s conversation about the historical roots of the police force in BlacKkKlansman), these image-makers attempt to remedy the situation by reimagining the plantation as the birthplace of contemporary racism.⁴ Examples of the new ‘plantation horror’ include Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ 2020 adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Barry Jenkins’ 2021 adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016), and the less successful Antebellum (2020), directed by the Black filmmaker Gerard Bush and his white co-director Christopher Renz. By rupturing space and time and shifting the source of horror to the systemic hypersexualization and violation of Black flesh, these narratives render visible the state’s ongoing power over citizens’ bodies and lives as well as raise questions about the relationship between whiteness, property, and (social) reproduction.

Biopolitics: It’s Not in the Past

Unlike its predecessors, contemporary plantation horror refuses to confine the plantation to the distant past or remote lands. Instead, these stories—by breaking away from linear temporalities—force the viewer to confront the persistence of plantation biopolitics that continue to surveil, control, and annihilate Black lives today.

The term ‘biopolitics’ was first introduced by Michel Foucault to refer to the ways in which modern states exercise power over citizens’ lives through surveillance and management of life processes.⁵ Since then, postcolonial theorists and Black feminists have expanded the applications of Foucault’s framework by shifting attention to colonial processes and highlighting the central roles of race and death to the biopolitical project.⁶ Specifically, Achille Mbembe introduces the concept of necropolitics to highlight a racial and deadly aspect of biopolitics, which ‘stands for organized destruction, for a sacrificial economy, the functioning of which requires, on the one hand, a generalized cheapening of the price of life and, on the other, a habituation to loss’.⁷ The temporal ruptures and slippages of contemporary plantation horror render visible this interplay of biopolitics and necropolitics to address the continuity of racial modes of domination, albeit with mixed success.

Antebellum, which drew a lot of critique for its portrayal of Black trauma, starts as a typical slave narrative: Eden (Janelle Monáe), a young Black woman, finds herself on what looks like a pre–Civil War southern plantation, where she and other enslaved people have to endure harsh labor, brutal abuse, rape, and branding.⁸ At the midpoint, the setting suddenly changes: Eden, who now goes by Veronica, wakes up in a modern apartment and goes about her life as a happy wife, devoted mother, and renowned sociologist. As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the two narratives are not branching timelines, alternative realities, or mirror universes with doppelgangers. Both take place in a modern U.S. where a contemporary Civil War reenactment park kidnaps and enslaves Black people like Veronica for the entertainment of white racist elites (see Figure 2). The impact of this horrific reveal is undercut by the film’s voyeuristic focus on Black suffering. Still, the film’s premise underscores the continuity of white bio-/necropolitics, making the viewer confront the ongoing commodification and consumption of Black bodies.

Less violent and more slow-paced, Hulu’s Kindred employs time travel in a way that reveals as much about the present moment as it does about the past. Specifically, the time travel underscores the hold that antebellum slavery has on Dana (Mallori Johnson), an inspiring African American television writer, who is repeatedly transported from her new home in LA to the antebellum past, where the life of her white slaveholding ancestor, Rufus Weylin (David Alexander Kaplan), is put in danger.⁹ In the novel, Dana’s time travel is preceded by the feeling of extreme dizziness; in contrast, on screen, Dana sees and feels the surroundings of Weylin’s plantation, whether it’s smoke from the fire that Rufus accidentally sets in his bedroom or the river in which he nearly drowns. This intrusion of the past into the present not only underscores the hold that antebellum slavery has on Dana, but also reminds the viewer that this hold is systemic and extends beyond the single character. For example, a scene in the past where Dana encounters a slave patroller on her night stroll is quickly followed by a present-day instance of surveillance in which white neighbors come over to Dana’s house in the middle of the night ‘to check on her’ when they hear a scream. This parallelism captures the ripple effects of slavery to reveal how, to quote series creator Jacobs-Jenkins, ‘we still live with the behavioral practices and economic practices that were cemented or even originated in this time period’.¹⁰

The same message underlines Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, albeit in the form of magical realism rather than time travel. In the Amazon series, the underground railroad is reimagined as an actual subterranean train system with stations, cars, and conductors rather than a network of safehouses and routes that Black people used to escape slavery. As the train travels from Georgia to South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Indiana, we are presented with different forms of social organization that are all powered by the same faith in white supremacy and Black subjugation. For instance, the second episode set in South Carolina heavily draws on the Tuskegee Experiment and the forced sterilization of Black women. The third episode, set in North Carolina, which has outlawed all Black people, evokes Oregon’s exclusionary laws through its plot and the zealous austerity of America’s founding Puritans through costume design and dark, bare mise-en-scène. The ninth episode zeroes in on the debate in the Black farming community, which comes down to the question of whether Black capitalism or revolution is the best way to ensure Black liberation–the question that has been echoing through decades from W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington’s debate about strategies for racial advancement through the civil rights era to the Black Lives Matter movement. But the circular structure of the narrative—the TV series opens in Georgia with protagonist Cora’s (Thuso Mbedu) story and closes by revisiting the story of Cora’s mother (Sheila Atim) in Georgia—makes it clear that each stop on Cora’s flight toward freedom represents a different aftereffect of the plantation.

Together, these on-screen treatments of the plantation demonstrate how racial biopolitics and necropolitics adapt and persist. Without offering an easy way out (there is none), contemporary plantation horror collapses linear temporalities to not only highlight the plantation’s ‘undeadness’ but also to raise questions about how to engage with this subject without perpetuating anti-Black violence.

Pornotroping: It Is Sexual and Violent

One of the major challenges that any plantation narrative faces is how to tell a story without falling victim to ‘Hollywood’s overwrought tropes about slavery’ whose violence, in reality, was ‘not limited to the auction block or the whipping post’.¹¹ To theorize this enactment of Black pain for shock value and white pleasure, Hortense Spillers introduces the concept of pornotroping:

This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: 1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) at the same time—in stunning contradiction—the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness’; 4) as a category of ‘otherness’, the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general ‘powerlessness’, resonating through various centers of human and social meaning.¹²

The important insight here, as Alexander Weheliye explains, is that the ‘simultaneous thingness and sensuality of the slave’ that lies at the heart of the plantation economy also ‘produces a sexual dimension that cannot be controlled by the forces that (re)produce it’.¹³ It is important, however, not to reduce pornotroping to sexualization. Pornotroping serves the end of enfleshment—the reduction of the Black person to property (or in Spillers’ argument, mere flesh rather than body)—to which the sexualization is just a means. Simply put, Spillers’ formulation of the pornotrope highlights how violence and sexuality are interlinked and conducive to anti-Black political domination. Thus, the challenge of plantation horror becomes to explore this juncture of sexual pleasure and political violence without relishing in either.

As critical reviews demonstrate, Antebellum fails at this task. In an attempt to highlight Veronica’s forced transformation from a 21st-century subject to an ‘enfleshed slave’ prohibited even from speaking, the film subjects her (and, by extension, the viewer) to ‘extended scenes of torture, murder, and rape’ at the expense of any character development.¹⁴ In pornotoping fashion, the camera lingers on close-ups of tortured Black flesh and joyous white faces, while the frequent use of slow motion and non-diegetic sounds prolongs and amplifies the violence. In the words of one of the reviewers, the produced result ‘feels dirty, punitive, and embarrassing’ since, instead of bearing witness to Black trauma, the camera unleashes sadistic voyeurism.¹⁵ Because ‘pornotroping is very much at the heart of mainstream imaginings of slavery’, Antebellum struggles to find ways to make Black suffering legible without dehumanizing and sexualizing Black bodies in the process.¹⁶

In contrast, Hulu’s Kindred—based on Butler’s book, which very much prioritizes psychological and mundane horrors over physical torture—makes an interesting decision to mostly limit anti-Black violence to the last episode. Yet, the episode’s cinematic choices prove once again how difficult it is to escape pornotroping, even when the on-screen depiction of Black violence is kept to a minimum. In the last episode, Dana is whipped after plantation owner Tom Weylin (Ryan Kwanten) finds her in an unoccupied slave cabin and, seeing an open book on the table, mistakes her attempt to escape for an attempt to read for pleasure rather than his son’s entertainment.¹⁷ Even before Tom drags Dana into the barn and tears open her dress to reveal unprotected flesh, the scene is already sexually charged due to his costume choices; this is the only scene where we see him wearing only a loose shirt instead of his typical shirt, vest, and coat (see Figure 3). When the whipping begins, the camera lingers on Weylin’s sweaty face and captures parts of Dana—her face contorted in pain, a hand digging into the ground—as if dismembering the already tortured body. But what makes the scene unsettling is its sexual undertones. Dana’s hand digging into the earth as her body tenses in pain looks too similar to a hand twisting bed sheets in pleasure; as the sounds of Dana’s screams and Tom’s whip and shallow breath join together, they underscore the liaison between political violence and sexuality, a distinctive feature of the pornotrope. Although, as a whole, Kindred eschews Antebellum’s titillation and voyeurism, close reading of Dana’s whipping scene reveals just how much American cinema relies on the logic of pornotroping and prioritization of the white gaze.

This logic is, however, challenged by The Underground Railroad. Saturated with scenes of burning, lynching, rape, and shooting, The Underground Railroad never falls in the category of ‘trauma porn’ because it consistently privileges the Black gaze over the white gaze. For example, in the first episode, when Big Anthony (Elijah Everett) is caught after his escape attempt, his lynching is turned into a spectacle for the white audience and a horrifying lesson for other enslaved people. While Big Anthony is whipped, plantation owner Terrence Randall (Benjamin Walker) and his guests are having a picnic and sipping tea. Eventually, all the slaves are forced to watch Big Anthony’s murder—many avert their gaze, but Caesar (Aaron Pierre) and Cora stare straight on (see Figure 4). Their refusal to break eye contact not only hints at their own escape plan but also radically changes the scene’s dynamics, for it creates a site for bearing witness to the torture that contrasts with the voyeuristic spectatorship of Randall’s white guests. As the camera cuts between the white party’s merriment, enslaved people’s pain, and the gruesome injuries, the viewers are forced to reflect on their positionality in relation to the show. Have they sat down in front of the TV in the hope of being entertained? Are they being entertained now?

The Underground Railroad raises these questions without succumbing to pornotroping excesses because of its attention to the Black gaze. Big Anthony’s torture ends when he is burned alive. As the flames engulf him, turning his flesh into ash, the camera gives us his POV. This insertion of the Black gaze into the moment of death and torture both reveals and subverts the mechanisms of enfleshment. The scene ends with a long shot of Anthony’s body burning before giving us his last POV as his eyes close forever. Thus, while the show’s plot draws attention to the many ways in which Black people are reduced to flesh, the cinematography restores their subjectivity and agency.

Antebellum, Amazon’s The Underground Railroad, and Hulu’s Kindred use different forms of time and space rupture and vary in their reliance on pornotroping to capture the nightmarish reality of plantation structures. But they all deliver the same message—the plantation is neither dead nor in the past. Neither offers a happy or even a definitive ending—as Maisha Wester points out, few Black horror films do.¹⁸ But they all center on Black female protagonists and narratives of motherhood, thus indirectly challenging the ‘paternal’ and ‘patriarchal’ logic of the plantation. And they all raise important questions about how we narrate plantation horrors, which morph into other forms of anti-Black violence today, without inflicting more trauma on Black bodies and psyches. 

Daria Goncharova’s article, “Reconsidering Old Hollywood Fantasies of Black Citizenship: Plantation, Whiteness, and Civil Rights in Pinky” is forthcoming in issue 23.2 of New Review of Film and Television Studies.

Sign up for NRFTS alerts so you’ll know when future articles become available, and enjoy this related read:

Jerome P. Dent Jr., The fantasies of Black Final Girls

Daria Goncharova is an Assistant Professor of English at Davis & Elkins College. Her area of expertise is 20th-century and 21st-century American literature and film with an emphasis on the intersection of space, citizenship, and whiteness, a focus largely informed by her own experience as an international scholar residing in the USA. She has published in Adaptation, Literature/Film Quarterly, and Contemporary Literature, and she is currently working on a book project examining the effects of the postwar suburban sprawl on regional literature and cultural narratives defining American citizenship.

Website

References

Adams, Jessica. Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Clukey, Amy. “Monstrous Plantations: White Zombie and the Horrors of Whiteness.” In Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner, 124-35. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2015.

Coleman, Robin R. Means. Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present. 2nd ed. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2022.

Daniels, Robert. “Let’s Talk About the Antebellum Twist.” Vulture, September 21, 2020. https://www.vulture.com/2020/09/lets-talk-about-the-antebellum-twist-ending.html.

Dobbins, April. “Antebellum Serves Up Tired Slavery Porn and Subjugation.” Miami New Times, September 21, 2020. https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/antebellum-movie-review-11695755.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, directed by Xavier Burgin, Hollywood, CA: Stage 3 Productions 2019.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019.

Sims, David. “Antebellum Isn’t Just Bad–It’s Vile.” The Atlantic, September 19, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/antebellum-review/616403/.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 64–81.

Tillet, Salamishah. “‘Kindred’ Creator Wants Viewers to ‘Question Their Assumptions.’” The New York Times, December 26, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/arts/television/kindred-branden-jacobs-jenkins-octavia-butler.html.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. “Biopower.” In Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Kyla Wazana Tompkins, 29–34. New York: NYU Press, 2021.

Ushe, Naledi. “‘Emancipation’: How Far Is Too Far When Putting Black Audiences through Trauma?” USA TODAY, December 14, 2022. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/12/14/emancipation-experts-discuss-violence-slavery-movies/10838273002/.

Weheliye, Alexander Ghedi. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.

Wester, Maisha. African American Gothic in the Era of Black Lives Matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025. 

Zornosa, Laura. “How Kindred’s Showrunner Adapted Octavia Butler ‘In the Grain of Her Thinking.’” Time, December 15, 2022, 1. https://time.com/6241264/kindred-fx-branden-jacobs-jenkins-interview/.

1. Jessica Adams, Wounds of Returning: Race, Memory, and Property on the Postslavery Plantation (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 4 ↩︎
2. For a more nuanced argument about the plantation horror films of the 1930s-1940s, see Amy Clukey, “Monstrous Plantations: White Zombie and the Horrors of Whiteness.” In Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture, edited by Eric Gary Anderson, Taylor Hagood, and Daniel Cross Turner (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2015), 124–35; Robin R. Means Coleman, Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present, 2nd ed. (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2022), 54-72. ↩︎
3. While the latter is crucial for highlighting the stories of Black leaders and Black resistance, the films in this category have occasionally been criticized for exploiting Black suffering for profit and prioritizing happy resolutions over a nuanced exploration of long-lasting effects of the plantation system. See, for example, Naledi Ushe, “‘Emancipation’: How Far Is Too Far When Putting Black Audiences through Trauma?” USA TODAY, December 14, 2022. https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/movies/2022/12/14/emancipation-experts-discuss-violence-slavery-movies/10838273002/. ↩︎
4. Maisha Wester defines BLM Gothic as the ‘latest vein of African American Gothic, [which] centres upon a racially targeted violence that defies rational explanation’ and ‘is intrinsically Afropessimistic’. See Maisha Wester, African American Gothic in the Era of Black Lives Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025), 3. ↩︎
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 136-138. ↩︎
6. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Biopower.” In Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Kyla Wazana Tompkins (New York: NYU Press, 2021), 30-31. ↩︎
7. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 40. ↩︎
8.  For a critical review of Antebellum, see Robert Daniels, “Let’s Talk About the Antebellum Twist.” Vulture, September 21, 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/09/lets-talk-about-the-antebellum-twist-ending.html; David Sims, “Antebellum Isn’t Just Bad–It’s Vile.” The Atlantic, September 19, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/09/antebellum-review/616403/. ↩︎
9. Butler’s Kindred (1979) is set in 1976, but Jacobs-Jenkins made a decision to set the TV series in 2016 to make the story more relevant to “the complexity of our post-Obama racial reality.” See Jacobs-Jenkins’s interview in Salamishah Tillet, “‘Kindred’ Creator Wants Viewers to ‘Question Their Assumptions.’” The New York Times, December 26, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/26/arts/television/kindred-branden-jacobs-jenkins-octavia-butler.html ↩︎
10. Jacobs-Jenkins quoted in Laura Zornosa, “How Kindred’s Showrunner Adapted Octavia Butler ‘In the Grain of Her Thinking.’” Time, December 15, 2022, https://time.com/6241264/kindred-fx-branden-jacobs-jenkins-interview/.” ↩︎
11. Zornosa, “How Kindred’s Showrunner Adapted.” ↩︎
12. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 67. ↩︎
13. Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 90. ↩︎
14. April Dobbins, “Antebellum Serves Up Tired Slavery Porn and Subjugation.” Miami New Times, September 21, 2020. https://www.miaminewtimes.com/arts/antebellum-movie-review-11695755. ↩︎
15. Dobbins, “Antebellum Serves Up.” ↩︎
16. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 97. ↩︎
17. An educated Black woman from 2016, Dana secures a unique position on Weylin’s plantation at the beginning of the TV series by taking on the role of caretaker for the injured Rufus (Tom Weylin’s son) and posing as the slave of her white boyfriend, Kevin (Micah Stock), who accidentally time-travels with her. Because Kevin is white, he is automatically granted a degree of authority and respect by the Weylins, who in turn ‘permit’ Dana to read—though only for Rufus’s amusement. However, after Tom banishes Kevin from the plantation following a drunken dispute, Dana is left vulnerable. In the final episode, she attempts to flee to find Kevin but is caught by Tom, who paradoxically notices an open book rather than a packed bag. To him, this act—reading without permission—constitutes a breach of their agreement and becomes grounds for whipping. ↩︎
18. As Wester explains, the racial pessimism of contemporary BLM horror ‘results in endings which are mere pauses in the nightmare, not actual escapes’. See Wester, African American Gothic in the Era of Black Lives Matter, 6. ↩︎