Antebellum is a bloody mess

After the country was roiled this summer by police shootings of unarmed African Americans, Hollywood imagined that a horror movie set on a 19th-century slave plantation would have audiences riveted.

Antebellum (2020) follows an enslaved Black woman named Eden (played by Janelle Monáe) as she is raped and tortured by her owner, a Confederate general known only as “Him.” That is until (spoiler alert) it is revealed that Eden is actually Veronica, a successful and wealthy writer, who has been kidnapped by a group of modern-day white racists and the “plantation” is actually a theme park of sorts where they reenact their fantasies of the antebellum era.

While the filmmakers said they hoped the film would “activate a conversation,” critics have argued that the conversation the movie wants to have is a shallow one that fails to depict Black struggle through anything other than graphic displays of racial violence.

In his review for The Atlantic, critic David Sims wrote that, far from pushing the national conversation forward, the film simply “loads up on visceral scares and disturbing imagery in service of a shallow film that feels like a gory theme park ride showcasing the horrors of slavery.” Likewise, Angelica Jade Bastién of Vulture wrote in response to the film,“I am tired. I am tired of pop-cultural artifacts that render Black people as merely Black bodies onto which the sins of this ragged country are violently mapped.”

All around, critics note that, unlike films like Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) that use the horror genre to ask deeper psychological questions about race and fear, Antebellum relies on bloodied Black bodies alone to make its grand argument which amounts to not much more than: Racism…it’s a thing.

Antebellum was written and directed by first-time filmmakers Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz, former advertising executives who specialized in making public-service announcements for Democrats, like Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and celebrities like the rapper Jay-Z. After the killing of Trayvon Martin, Wasserman Schultz hired the duo to produce content that would encourage turnout amongst Black voters. The outcome should have warned us what was to come. “We bought billboards that looked like H&M ads with this beautiful little Black boy with a bulletproof vest on,” Bush told The Hollywood Reporter.

When they came up with the concept for Antebellum, the two men found themselves in the middle of a studio bidding war. As the industry sorts out how it wants to respond to the Black Lives Matter movement and recent unrest across the United States, the fact that Antebellum was not only made, but was fought over, does not bode well.