In “Antebellum,” racism fuels a terrifying neo-horror ride

They walked into the Harkins North­field mul­ti­plex ten­ta­tive­ly. It was the first time that most of the atten­dees for last week’s pre­view of “Ante­bel­lum” had been in a movie the­ater since the start of the coro­n­avirus-induced arts col­lapse of 2020.

The neo-hor­ror film had been pushed from a late April the­atri­cal release to a Sep­tem­ber on-demand run (it’s avail­able on var­i­ous stream­ing plat­forms, start­ing Sept. 18.) With their unset­tling debut, writ­ers-direc­tors Ger­ard Bush and Christo­pher Renz take on slav­ery, the tox­i­c­i­ty of racism, and the per­sis­tence of what’s come to be called “microag­gres­sion” while often deliv­er­ing a vivid ride. (Thanks to Gabourey Sidibe, there are even moments of exquis­ite fun.)

The evening pre­view was host­ed by Denver’s Col­or of Con­ver­sa­tion Film Fes­ti­val (Oct. 8–10), as part of the occa­sion­al one-off social jus­tice screen­ings that the festival’s been host­ing since its launch in 2019.

In a less locked-down world, the film­mak­ers would have seen their debut fea­ture get a cov­et­ed big-screen berth. Dis­trib­u­tor Lion­s­gate was mar­ket­ing the movie heav­i­ly before the pandemic.

“We’re just thank­ful that peo­ple get to see it safe­ly in their homes and have that expe­ri­ence,” said Bush, sit­ting in a director’s chair, his face mask beneath his chin. He knows com­plain­ing about dis­ap­point­ment would be churl­ish dur­ing the ongo­ing health and eco­nom­ic crisis.

The duo has had a busi­ness togeth­er, as well as a roman­tic part­ner­ship, for more than a decade. While tag-team­ing the inter­view, they offer an intrigu­ing por­trait of dif­fer­ent yet com­ple­men­tary ener­gies. But don’t imag­ine two writ­ers across a table furi­ous­ly tap­ping out dia­log on their lap­tops and riff­ing on scenes.

“It’s inter­est­ing because we both require com­plete soli­tude indi­vid­u­al­ly,” says Bush of their writ­ing process. “We’re real­ly not at the same table togeth­er work­ing on the script until we tweak a full script,” Renz added.

He recalls how quick­ly their cre­ative alliance took hold. “Maybe the third time after meet­ing, Ger­ard talked to me about some idea he had, and I was ‘Let’s go write it up. Let’s go write it up right now!’ ” Their first sto­ry was about aliens. They wrote the short sto­ry that “Ante­bel­lum” is based on in the fall of 2017. The first draft of the script was out to mar­ket by the end of Feb­ru­ary 2018.

In the film, actress Janelle Monáe shoul­ders dual roles, one as an enslaved woman named Eden. (“Named,” in the con­text of the plan­ta­tion she plots to escape, takes on a par­tic­u­lar­ly heat­ed mean­ing.) She also por­trays super-star soci­ol­o­gist, wife and mom Veron­i­ca, who reunites with two friends for a din­ner after a suc­cess­ful con­fer­ence appear­ance in New Orleans.

Veronica/Eden’s ter­ri­fy­ing sojourn was inspired by a night­mare Bush had. It’s some­thing the movie has stayed true to, he says. “It was vivid. And it was trau­ma­tiz­ing. It was as trau­ma­tiz­ing for me as I imag­ine it is for peo­ple who expe­ri­ence the movie now. I came out of it on the oth­er side shaken.”

“Ante­bel­lum” is not with­out chal­lenges — it has already divid­ed crit­ics — but how these two women inter­sect is painful and canny.

It’s a shame that “Ante­bel­lum” won’t get its due on big­ger screens. There are sub­tle cues far eas­i­er to glean in the larg­er for­mat, nuances that hint at the ambi­tions and tal­ents of the pair. One prompt that can’t be missed, how­ev­er, is a quote from Mis­sis­sip­pi­an William Faulkner’s “Requiem for a Nun” at the movie’s onset: “The past is nev­er dead. It’s not even the past.”

“It’s an East­er Egg before the film even begins,” Renz says. It is, indeed. One of the film’s char­ac­ters will restate Faulkner’s insight (most­ly as wise­crack). But the film­mak­ers have hard-wired the very notion of “a past that is not” into their film in ways that are both inven­tive and provocative.

“The quote feels like the mantra to Amer­i­ca. It feels like we’re in a place — and we’ve always been in a place — that takes a great push for­ward and a greater slide back, a great push for­ward and even a greater slide back,” says Bush. “And that was real­ly fas­ci­nat­ing to us. We live it every day as Amer­i­cans. I think we’ve been intox­i­cat­ed by the dis­trac­tions of tech­nol­o­gy and enter­tain­ment. We don’t even real­ize we’re a bro­ken record. More than that, a record that is skip­ping. That’s why we thought the quote was perfect.”

In hav­ing Veron­i­ca and Eden occu­py dif­fer­ent spaces, “Ante­bel­lum” deft­ly reframes the rela­tion­ship of racial­ly under­pinned “microag­gres­sions” and the out­rages of chat­tel slav­ery. As assured as she is, Veron­i­ca isn’t immune to a hotel clerk’s con­de­scen­sion, for instance.

“For me, those microag­gres­sions were real­ly impor­tant to high­light,” Bush says. “In con­ver­sa­tions that Christo­pher and I would have about how we can expose the truth to a broad­er audi­ence that might not have an aware­ness of it, it was impor­tant to give voice and scene and pic­ture to the dai­ly insult that so many of us Black peo­ple — peo­ple of col­or — endure. I also think it was impor­tant for Black peo­ple to see these microag­gres­sions and real­ize that they had become not psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly immune, but deaf to the expe­ri­ence. And that is impor­tant to cor­rect. Because it is a ves­tige, an arti­fact, of this country’s orig­i­nal sin. It’s like a tox­ic waste. It still per­me­ates, it’s still in our skin.”

What isn’t in the least “micro” is how the film opens. “Ante­bel­lum” wastes no time estab­lish­ing its at times cin­e­mat­ic brava­do but also its bru­tal­i­ty. Fans of the film­mak­ers’ video pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny won’t be sur­prised by the for­mer. Bush + Renz has made ele­gant, elo­quent videos for Jay‑Z and singer-song­writer Maxwell as well as pow­er­ful PSAs and short films for Amnesty Inter­na­tion­al and for Har­ry Bela­fonte and daugh­ter Gina’s social jus­tice orga­ni­za­tion, Sankofa.

But the movie’s open­ing moments evoke mem­o­ries of two Oscar win­ners: “Gone With the Wind” and “12 Years a Slave.” The for­mer not mere­ly for the sweep­ing shot of a white, pil­lared veran­da; the lat­ter, not mere­ly because the scenes plunge us into slavery’s vio­lent claims on black bod­ies. Togeth­er they cap­ture the Kafkaesque mind-warp­ing that accom­pa­nies slavery’s exis­ten­tial affront. Crit­ics can, and have, right­ly ques­tioned the eth­i­cal mer­its of con­tin­u­ing to high­light the violence.

The pair are aware they are tread­ing fraught ter­rain. “We had a lot of con­ver­sa­tions about (the open­ing),” Renz says. “I think the fact that no one would ever think to throw a wed­ding at Auschwitz, yet they think it’s per­fect­ly fine to do so at a plan­ta­tion means that much of the pop­u­la­tion of Amer­i­ca has not received the mes­sage and does not under­stand it. We want­ed to make sure we weren’t being com­plic­it in that revi­sion­ist history.”

“What we were not going to do was serve as co-con­spir­a­tors in the era­sure of the actu­al his­to­ry of this coun­try” adds Bush. “We’re already deal­ing with that. And I under­stand about trau­ma, I under­stand what that means for the Black com­mu­ni­ty, for us as a peo­ple. But look at our beau­ti­ful Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty and how they are incred­i­bly vig­i­lant in the art. ‘This hap­pened. Look at it. It’s dif­fi­cult to look at but look at it.’ Let it be a reminder of how far down we can go, of how his­to­ry can eas­i­ly repeat itself. We need to engage in con­ver­sa­tions about how a col­lec­tive psy­chopa­thy can metas­ta­size so quick­ly before you even know it.”

Since Jor­dan Peele’s “Get Out” smart­ly teased the hor­ror of racism, there’s been a fine upsurge of Black film­mak­ers and their col­lab­o­ra­tors bend­ing the hor­ror genre (fan­ta­sy/s­ci-fi, too) to cul­ture-cri­tiquing effect. (Con­sid­er “Love­craft Coun­try” and “Watch­men” on HBO, as well as “Under­ground Rail­road,” set for Ama­zon, part of the revi­tal­iza­tion.) “If you look up the def­i­n­i­tion of the word ‘hor­ror,’ It is some­thing that gives you fright, scares you and is dis­gust­ing. There’s noth­ing more hor­rif­ic that slav­ery.” says Bush.

It makes savvy sense that Col­or of Con­ver­sa­tion founders Stephanie and Floyd Rance reached out to local influ­encers for the “Ante­bel­lum” pre­view — mak­ing the screen­ing part of its social-jus­tice one-offs. Among the masked and phys­i­cal­ly dis­tant audi­ence mem­bers there to see the movie and stay for a Q&A were State Rep. Leslie Herod; Women’s Foun­da­tion pres­i­dent and CEO Lau­ren Cas­teel; Cleo Park­er Robin­son Dance exec­u­tive direc­tor Malik Robin­son; and Black Cham­ber of Com­merce head Lee Gash-Maxey.

A day lat­er, the event’s hosts received an email from a white attendee. “I don’t even real­ly know how to thank you for last night,” it began. “It was pro­found. The movie was amaz­ing. I am def­i­nite­ly going to it again giv­en all that I learned dur­ing Q&A. I’m also plan­ning to email our entire com­pa­ny rec­om­mend­ing this film and an oppor­tu­ni­ty to think about the rela­tion­ship between our his­to­ry and our present — not to men­tion all the exam­ples of microag­gres­sions, etc., in the film. What a rich and mean­ing­ful night. …”

“For me, that’s what we’re try­ing to do,” says Stephanie Rance about the goals they’ve set for their still-young Den­ver-based Col­or of Con­ver­sa­tion fest. (The pair co-found­ed the Martha’s Vine­yard African Amer­i­can Film Fes­ti­val, now in its sec­ond decade). “Peo­ple here in Den­ver are open to the con­ver­sa­tions in a mean­ing­ful way. Every time we do a screen­ing about race, I’m always sur­prised by the num­ber of non-peo­ple-of-col­or in the room. I know no race of peo­ple is mono­lith­ic, but it’s amaz­ing to me the lev­el of open­ness and will­ing­ness to learn, to lis­ten and to ask real­ly impor­tant and engag­ing questions.”

The film­mak­ers — who were head­ed to Wash­ing­ton, D.C., after their stop in Den­ver — are like­ly to be back some­day. Dur­ing spring’s lock­down, when they should have been embark­ing on their first pub­lic­i­ty tour, the two were hun­kered in Los Ange­les, where they live. “If there was any sil­ver lin­ing for us per­son­al­ly … with the quar­an­tine, it’s that we wrote our next movie (“Rap­ture”) and sold it,” says Bush  with a smile. ” And then we wrote a tele­vi­sion show.”

“At least we could write, and that made us feel grounded.”

All the bet­ter to rat­tle the ground on which we all stand, perhaps.

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