In a world where George Floyd’s death has sparked a social movement that addresses the nation’s long and brutal racial history, the Lost Cause has gained renewed currency as activists wrestle with statues and flags that testify to the bitter struggle over national identity. The cultural clash over the Confederacy is taking place as we redefine the racial landscape and argue about what makes us uniquely American. Beyond that, the prominence of the New York Times’ 1619 Project forces us to turn once again to America’s original sin.

Slavery still ignites heated debates about how the past affects the present, and how bitter disagreement over enslaved Black people led kinfolk to take up arms against one another on bloody battlefields in the Civil War. That “Late Unpleasantness,” as southern historians took to calling the Civil War, has so deeply stained the American consciousness that thousands of folks each year participate in reenactments of its most notable conflicts. White Southerners who lost the war but won the battle to interpret the war’s meaning can’t seem to let go of that war, or the Confederacy, or for that matter, the idea of slavery that backed it all.

But what if they didn’t have to surrender slavery? What if they could find a way to get us back to the old days where Black folk were shackled and had to obey the ruthless will of white overseers and owners? That sounds like a horror film, and that’s just what Antebellum is — a brilliant, disturbing piece of visual magic and historical imagination wrapped inside of a highly charged thriller that keeps us on the edge of our seats precisely because it yanks us from the present and transports us into a dark, foreboding and hateful racial past. Or does it?

“Look, obviously we don’t want to finger wag,” says Gerard Bush, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Christopher Renz. “We want people to go in and get the thrill of the movie. However, we would be gutted as artists if we felt, or if it ended up happening, that that’s all people got was the thrill. The point is to [also] give you this medicine.”

The medicine hardly tastes bitter and goes down smoothly. That’s because the acting is superb, the storyline intensely intriguing, if downright scary, and the conceit of the movie altogether plausible. I won’t give it away here, but suffice it to say that it makes sense because white supremacy has reared its ugly head again as we teeter on the edge of social tumult and neo-fascist politics in a racially divided society. Let’s just say when certain folk get nostalgic for the past, the virtue of their nostalgia depends on exactly what past they have in mind.

The nation is presently torn between a vision of national thriving that borrows from the demented and twisted mindset encouraged by neo-Nazis and assorted bigots, and one that owes a debt to confronting our worst instincts and communing with the better angles of our nature. Antebellum forces us to confront the fact that in the midst of such epic seizures of social discontent, the choice to revert back to a racist past without hopping in a time machine to get there is a truly horrifying thought — and according to this film, a realistic prospect. “We think it’s plausible,” Bush says. “That’s what is most scary about it.”

A great deal of thought clearly went into grappling with our present racial malaise, one that exploded on the neck of George Floyd but was centuries in the making. “We’re fascinated by the collective psychopathy that is so pernicious and stubborn and durable within civilizations,” Bush says. “The Nazis actually got so many of their ideas from coming over to America and seeing what the South was doing in the Jim Crow era.”

By drawing the line from Berlin to Birmingham, Bush and Renz insist that the deformities of racism unite a confederation of bigots the world over. Moreover, the fantasy of snatching Black folk from their creature comforts as they enjoy enormous Black progress and fixing them in their natural habitat of total subordination to superior white folk is a fantasy that just won’t die. But in order for the fantasy to become real, some Black bodies just well might have to perish. That’s a prospect that plays out on the screen as Antebellum offers a glimpse of the horrors of slavery in the bodies of some of its memorable male characters like Eli, played by the sublime Tongayi Chirisa.

Bush and Renz aim to take us back in time to move us forward in vision by effecting a shift in perception. “When you’re in what you think is the antebellum South, everything looks and feels the way it would have then, “Bush says. “It’s impossible to take your mind out of that and to imagine that it could for even a second be modern.”

But the shift in perception isn’t simply about chronology and era; it is also about gender and womanhood. Bush is especially sensitive to the portrayals of Black women in media and film because he watched his grandmother, among other women, embody extraordinary grace and abounding dignity.

“[Her dignity] was impossible to smother and to extinguish,” Bush says. “And we hope that within this film our depiction of the Black woman is turned on its ear from what is normally on offer.” Of course, the theme of dignity threads through the exquisite performance of Janelle Monae as the highly successful author Veronica, in the radiant presence of Kiersey Clemons as Julia, and in the grit and determination of Gabourey Sidibe as Dawn. The way Black women are presented, the way they are seen, is a microcosm of the film’s broader project of refiguring how Black bodies intended for the auction block and the sun-drenched plantation are created for more noble purposes than the white supremacist imagination can abide. And yet, the horrors of racism and slavery are most clearly seen when lives otherwise meant for excellence and greatness and freedom are subject to subservience, oppression and humiliation. The white supremacist imagination has featured Black bodies in its fantasies as stuck perpetually in slavery, and if there was any way that such an imagination could have its way, Black folk in 2020 would be somehow transported back in time when the rawhide whip of the malevolent overseer lashed bodies with a message of brutal domination.

It is the yen for such authenticity of representation, for seeing how Black bodies were distorted through the lens of a white worldview, that led Bush and Renz to make a decisive choice. “We actually insisted on shooting the movie with the lenses from Gone with the Wind,” Bush says. “We wanted to take the same weaponry that was used to shoot propaganda, and to misinform, to correct the record.” Even as the great poet and critic Audre Lorde insisted that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Bush and Renz believe that the master’s lens may indeed help correct the master’s distortions.

It is crucial to correct such distortions lest our discomfort with the truth leads to a historical void filled by harmful fantasy and lies. “As soon as we don’t amplify the stories, that’s when the erasure slips in,” Bush says. “When suddenly the textbooks in Texas are saying that Africans were servants brought over to cultivate the land when, in fact, that’s completely false.” Even though Bush never thought he’d do a slave narrative, he was drawn to it precisely because he wanted to turn the usual arc of slavery on its ear and make us listen acutely to different dimensions of being stolen away from our destinies. But if this nifty and riveting horror mystery of a thriller comes off as a nightmare, that’s because it began in Bush’s dreams.

“I wish that I could take credit for the story and the way that it was laid out,” Bush says. “We didn’t. My father passed away about a year before we moved to LA. I was really traumatized by that. My brother died shortly thereafter, here in LA. And I had this terrible nightmare, and in that nightmare, I was not the star of my dream, and I’m normally the star of my own dream. It was this woman Veronica. And the dream that happened is essentially what you see in Antebellum.”

If Antebellum is not quite a fever dream, it is a film born of a nightmare — in the mind of its creator, and in the national imagination from which we scarcely seem able to awaken. It is to the filmmakers’ credit that we feel the trauma and thrill, the horror and catastrophe, of the racial nightmare of slavery. With this remarkable film, they have managed to throw fresh light on an ancient malady in a way that is both scary and compelling.

Michael Eric Dyson

Writing since February 2022 · 1 story contributed