Creolizing Possession: Dismantling American Understandings of the Self

• In Event: Haunting, Horror, Monstrosity: Undoing Genres of Oppression

Abstract

Has American media shaped the way audiences think about Catholic possession and exorcisms through a framework of US exceptionalism and whiteness? Evidently, the face of the possessed figure has over time been trademarked as white. I argue that an intersectional approach of the possession genre in the U.S. reframes possession as a racialized experience. Through an intersectional approach, possession genre films show how society regulates racialized bodies as a way of quelling their anxieties of the past. A close attention to racialized possessed figures changes what that trope evokes both visually and audibly.

The possession genre is heavily invested in the uneven distribution of “rights,” agency, autonomy over ownership. Following the release of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, the 1974 Blaxploitation film Abby, which had parallel motifs, was sued for copyright infringement. Films that evoke conventional tropes of the possession genre have questioned the vexed cultural perceptions and slippage between plagiarism and parody. What does it mean to copy a genre that centers the threats posed to oppressed subjectivities? Trudy defines punitive plagiarists as those who, “do not only want the opportunities they can gain through exploiting me, but they are also interested in erasing my labor altogether” (On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism, 765-766).

I focus on US Black horror film from 1974 to the present day. I especially analyze the film Abby and the 2024 film The Deliverance. My methods include a close reading of film theory on race and horror, as well as Black feminist writings on Black femininity. The films in this study evoke different ideas about what it means to be spiritually possessed, and that the intersectional approach forges an entirely new genre that may not fit into the canonical cinema that centers whiteness. This research aims to challenge what is defined as “canon” within American cinema.

Biographical Information

Alicia Echavarria is a doctoral student at Northwestern University. She earned a BA at Bowdoin College in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and a minor in Cinema Studies. As both a filmmaker and film scholar, she seeks to explore notions of race, gender and proprietorship through possession tropes in U.S. and Dominican cinema. Providing an intersectional lens to the horror genre can highlight the ways horror can be used to subvert the canon and reclaim identity. In honor of the oral storytelling tradition within her culture, Alicia reckons with her own “claims” to identity through the audiovisual form. As a second-generation U.S. immigrant, Afro-Latina, and first generation college student, her work is centered around how an intersectional framework in academia can function as a tool for decolonization.

Author

• Alicia V Echavarria, Northwestern University