“It’s Not Supernatural”: Racial Hauntings in Mariama Diallo’s Master (2022)

• In Event: Black Horror and Haunting in Literature and Film

Abstract

This paper examines Mariama Diallo’s repurposing of cinematic horror conventions and iconography to render visible Black women’s experiences of haunting in her film Master (2022). Decentering the default White gaze of horror, Diallo focalizes her film through two Black women navigating a fictional predominantly White university--freshman Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee) and the college’s first Black “master”/head of college Gail Bishop (Regina Hall). The two women’s experiences in what’s shown to be a hostile place with a colonial history generate the film’s terror, bringing into relief the everyday horrors faced by Black women at elite institutions. In Master, microaggressions are jump scares, the elite university is the haunted house, and the legacy of slavery, the omnipresence of structural racism are the restless spirits who linger in the shadows. My analysis aims to map out Diallo’s aesthetics and further articulate how her cinematic approach helps us understand the ways that systemic racism terrorizes Black women. I posit that Diallo’s imbrication of psychological and supernatural horror represent the severe bodily and mental impacts of these hauntings on Black women. To this end, using my own experience with the film as an example, I also make the case to view Master as a heuristic for Black women in academia to identify, confront, and/or disinvest from institutions that exploit our labor. Drawing from horror’s narrative logic, I surface how Diallo uses The Final Girl trope to weigh up two competing strategies for surviving these spaces—reform and withdrawal. Through these engagements, my paper elucidates how Diallo’s Master harnesses the creative affordances of horror to devise a new idiom of Black cinematic expression.

Author

• Kay R. Barrett, Stanford