Looking Through Splayed Fingers: Fear, Race, and Who Gets to Look Away

I watch horror movies through splayed fingers, or just above my glasses, where everything dissolves into a soft, colourful blur. For someone so sensitive to loud sounds and jump scares, I return to the genre again and again, beneath covers, beside friends, laughing, gripping hands, half-hiding, half-looking.

But Sinners did something different. I did not flinch. I did not look away. I watched it with eyes wide, mind alert, heart full. I was not scared. I was thrilled. And even after the fourth watch, it lingers—not as fear, but as recognition. The many accolades it has received still do not feel like enough. But more than that, it forces a question: what does it mean that horror, particularly horror concerned with race, has re-emerged so forcefully now?

We are living in a moment where truth itself feels unstable. People retreat into echo chambers, arguing over whether all lives matter, or most lives, or Black lives. “Woke” becomes both insult and identity. Immigration raids turn deadly and still, for some, unbelievable. Meanwhile, mainstream media is consolidated, corporatised, filtered through the interests of the ultra-wealthy and struggles to hold collective attention long enough to make real meaning or change.

Non-fiction strains under this weight. Statistics can be dismissed, and lectures can be ignored. Even first-hand accounts are questioned, reframed, or reduced.

But horror does something differently. At its most basic, horror unsettles; it produces fear, discomfort, and unease. When horror turns its gaze toward race, it does something more: it renders visible what is so often denied—not as argument, but as feeling, as experience. And yet, it would be too easy to say that horror creates empathy. Horror by itself does not always create empathy. Horror can just as easily turn suffering into spectacle, something to be consumed, reacted to, and forgotten or worse. The question is not whether horror works, but when and for whom. Still, there are moments when it cuts through.

In Get Out, the “sunken place” is not just a metaphor; it is a sensation. The loss of control, the watching of oneself from a distance, the quiet horror of being present but powerless. It is not new knowledge, but a translation of that feeling we have not yet been able to put into words. For those who know the feeling, it is recognition. Horror does not set out to prove racism’s existence. It asks, instead, what does it taste like, sound like, feel like inside the bones? And that distinction matters because in a post-truth moment, feeling often travels further than fact.

The genre has always relied on disrupting the familiar. The haunted house, made popular in the 1980s, is terrifying not because of what is strange, but because of where it appears. The home, supposedly safe, becomes hostile, uncanny, wrong. This disruption begs the question: what happens when the idea of safety itself begins to erode? Today, perhaps the haunted house is a rented flat. An overcrowded apartment. A temporary accommodation assigned without care. In His House, two refugees arrive in Britain after surviving unimaginable loss, only to find themselves trapped again, this time within the walls meant to shelter them. The horror is not just supernatural. It is bureaucratic. It is systemic. It is cold. The ghost is not the only thing haunting them.

In the Caribbean, our horrors have always been close to us. The La Diablesse, the Soucouyant, the Ti Bolom... are all figures that live in story, in warning and in memory. Their power has never been in their form alone, but in belief.

I imagine them now in a fluorescent-lit office, gathered around a table, restless.“Since electricity come, nobody afraid again,” Bolom mutters.

“There was a time people would turn their clothes inside out in the middle of the road if they think I coming. Some running naked!”

“Not even one proper story,” another complains, hoofs scuffing the floor. “Child missing and people laughing, saying they gone by their friends or the girl go by her man.”

They grumble. They worry. Because their power has always depended on fear. On attention. On the willingness to believe that something unseen could still shape your life.

Our monsters have changed. Because here, now, the horror is not hidden in the bush or the dark road home. It is structural. It is visible. It is ongoing. It is land we cannot afford to own. Hotels rising where communities once stood. Hurricanes growing stronger, seas inching further inland, coastlines quietly disappearing. Fishermen blasted from their boats with no recourse. Laws that exist only on paper. Leaders who bend, who stall, who wait. So today, the horror is not that we cannot see it. It is that we see it clearly, we are aware and still feel unable to move. The illusion of safety is gone.

So perhaps the question is not simply what makes horror effective. It is who gets to experience it as a genre, and who is already living inside it. Because for some, horror is still something watched through splayed fingers, blurred at the edges, shared between laughter and fear. And for others, it is not a story at all. It is the condition of the world as it is.

I pull my hand from my face. The blur remains. I write.

(This essay is a preliminary articulation of arguments that will be further developed in a forthcoming academic work.)