Modern Black horror literature and film depict the complex mechanisms of social death threatening contemporary African Americans. Drawing on slavery to metaphorize social death, texts like Linden Hills and Stigmata, films such as The House Invictus and popular media like Lovecraft Country and “This Is America” also reveal how the lure of the American Dream seduces African Americans into colluding in their own suffering and the suffering of others like them. Yet even as slavery is presented as a point of historical horror, it is also presented as a source of ancestral knowledge, as African American artists rewrite the history of Black slave resistance to urge modern audiences to a much needed and long-overdue revolution.

This chapter explores how slave insurrections in the Caribbean and West Indies throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries impacted upon British and American Gothic writing. In particular, it argues that the Gothic mode became, and remains still, haunted by an ever-present racialised discourse, one which reveals the horror of modernity’s constructions and their inheritances. From the nineteenth century onwards, Gothic texts not only ask what it means to be a (wo)man among the human race, but anxiously investigate the lie of racial difference. Examining texts by Charlotte Dacre, Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, Herman Melville and Florence Marryat, the chapter explores how the Gothic depicts acts of black rebellion in unequivocal tones of horror, and the extent to which their black (enslaved) characters assume the place of the utterly monstrous while also betraying anxiety over the blurry line separating blacks from whites. Such fictions, the argument holds, debate the justice of violent black revolution and express the concern that, while slavery itself may be responsible for the violence of the enslaved, slavery may in fact debase white subjects too.