After the 2020 murder of George Floyd by white police, a long-crumbling dam on American civil unrest broke. What followed grew into a national reckoning as many white Americans faced head-on for the first time the nation’s oldest sin: racism.
It’s no surprise this decade has birthed a wave of films exploring racism and its historical roots. Since the dawn of cinema, the United States has had a proud tradition of exorcizing its demons onto the pages of horror movie scripts. Two of the latest examples are so allegorically similar, though, I couldn’t resist drawing a comparison. I present for your consideration Kepa and White’s Trinket Box (2023) and Eggers and Eggers’s The Front Room (2024). Before we dive in, let me give a quick summary of each.
Warning: Extensive spoilers ahead.
Trinket Box | Written and directed by Patrycja Kępa and Acoryé White
The Davis family home in fictional Clayton, Alabama, sits on the site of witch burnings. In 1936, an evil force feeds off the family’s racism. After daughter Judith is caught in bed with black lover Abe, her brothers and father perform a lynching. In an effort to escape, beaten but alive, Abe slits the patriarch’s throat. Later, Judith’s sister, Mary Ann, finds a trinket box engraved with occult symbols in the basement. When Mary Ann puts on the necklace inside, a malevolent spirit possesses her and drives her to slice the throats of every member of her family.
Fast-forward 77 years, and Mrs. Mary Ann Davis proudly carries on her family’s racist legacy. Together with her adult son, Mary Ann operates Davis Real Estate, a small-business front for their racist murder scheme. Their MO is simple: rent the house to an interracial couple, gift the cursed necklace to the white spouse, watch from a distance as the wearer turns into a bloodthirsty fiend and kills their partner, then clean up the mess and prepare the house for its next victims. In a hidden panel of the trinket box, the Davises store an ever-growing collection of photo of their victims. Although the film follows protagonists Ava and Mike—white and black, respectively—as their pregnancy excitement gives way to ectoplasm and bloodshed after the kindly old Mrs. Davis gifts Ava the trinket box, the couple is simply the latest in a long line to die on the Davis property.
The Front Room | Written and directed by Sam and Max Eggers, based on a short story by English author Dame Susan Hill
Anxiously pregnant for the first time since the stillbirth of her son Wallace, black professor Belinda quits her job after a pattern of disrespect by the Anthropology Department head. Belinda and her white public defender husband, Norman, are now more financially unstable than ever. When Norman’s estranged father, Lawrence, dies of stomach cancer, Norman’s religiously and emotionally abusive stepmother, Solange makes the couple an offer: In accordance with Lawrence’s will, they’ll receive the full inheritance if they move the feeble Solange into their home to live out the rest of her days. Norman is torn, but Belinda convinces him it’s the financially and morally right choice.
After Solange moves in, she quickly dominates every corner of the household, using her old age and limited mobility as an excuse to coerce Norman and especially Belinda to adapt their home and lives around her. It begins with her claiming the front room already designed for the nursery. Belinda finds a United Daughters of the Confederacy membership certificate in Solange’s belongings. As the weeks pass, Belinda becomes certain that Solange is not only a racist but a liar. Belinda learns that Solange doesn’t need canes to walk and that her incontinence she refuses to wear diapers for—forcing Belinda to quite literally deal with her shit—is just an act. Solange is also evangelically spiritual. She speaks in tongues to name the baby Laurie after the late Lawrence, replaces Belinda’s artifacts with Christian imagery, and hoss a laying-of-hands ceremony against Belinda’s wishes. Norman makes countless apologies and excuses for Solange’s behavior, but he’s ultimately spineless in the face of his stepmother’s rampant misogynoir. At times, he’s even complicit in Belinda’s mistreatment, like when he accepts Solange’s offer to replace the home’s furniture with Victorian-era pieces. Solange even feigns elder abuse by Belinda in an attempt to turn Norman against Belinda.
The situation continues to worsen after the baby is born. It’s not until Belinda finds a bite mark on Laurie and can prove to Norman that it was Solange’s, though, that he begins to realize the severity of Solange’s deranged dominion over the household. Emotionally tired by her husband’s weak reassurances that Solange will be dead soon enough and psychically tired from bizarre nightmares, sleepwalking, and round-the-clock caretaking, Belinda secretly smothers Solange with a pillow one night. Immediately, all the couple’s fortunes take a turn for the best. In a flash-forward that sees Belinda pregnant with twins after a successful job interview, she sings along to Edith Piaf’s “No Regrets.”
It’s impossible to miss the allegorical similarities between the two films, even though one centers the white experience and the other the black. Both stories begin with black people’s homes being replaced—the unconsenting diaspora from Africa to the New World. Elderly white mother figures, the new motherlands, pass down the legacy of racism to younger white generations through socialization. The elders knowingly misrepresent this inheritance as a privilege, but in reality, it’s a seductive curse: Even white allies can never be fully trusted to protect their black loved ones. Furniture in the home that “never leaves” or is returned to an old-fashioned style represents systemic racism. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The surrogate mothers are friendly to white liberals only when they’re deferential to the living legacy of slavery’s racism, and they’re openly hostile toward the black spouses. Pregnancies that represent a bright future for black America are endangered by white liberals’ inaction and resentment. Ultimately, microaggressions escalate into macroaggressions, and it falls to black Americans to break the American curse through direct and violent action. The message is clear: There is no indirect or kind end to racism, and attempts to destroy it often result in tragedy.