Atlanta: The Most Subtle Horror Movie of All Time
It’s a mood.
Atlanta, the brainchild of Donald Glover, is a terrific TV series that somehow debuted in 2016. How on Earth this is possible is a mystery of time and space, as surely it can’t have been six fucking years since this show launched1? That’s absolutely unbelievable.
The show is incredibly well-written and always thoughtfully directed, and its one of those shows that never forgets to tell a story and offer you interesting, well-shaded characters even when it’s making a point2. Atlanta makes a lot of points—about the Black experience in America and elsewhere, about the music business, and about the modern world in general3. But it never sacrifices story or good writing just to score a point, something that many other commentary-minded shows forget more often than not4.
Watching Atlanta is more entertaining then it should be, and it should be wildly entertaining. On the surface, it’s a well-written show with a cast of insanely charismatic and talented actors, but the humor is often low-key and the stakes are not exactly huge. Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry) seems to be blowing up as a rapper without much effort5, and his cousin (and manager) Earn (Glover) is slowly clawing back his dignity and a purpose in life after hitting an all-time low at the beginning of the series6. This is solid storytelling, but it’s not exactly compelling stuff on paper.
What makes Atlanta so incredible is the vibe. Because this show combines that good writing, great performances, and smart observations about the modern world with something unexpected: A low-key horror movie atmosphere.
Sounds Like Santa’s Slave
Everyone on Atlanta exists in a kind of permanent state of unease. This is most obvious with Earn, who Glover plays as a smart but stupid Job of sorts—Earn is brilliant in his way, but incompetent about so many things it’s no surprise that he winds up standing with his pants around his ankles at airport security because he’s lost his belt. And underwear7. But Earn also walks around Atlanta (and Atlanta) with a constant expression of mild alarm and confusion, as if he can feel a vibration under his feet portending disaster, but can’t seem to see what’s coming.
Alfred, aka Paper Boi, is Earn’s opposite in that he’s incredibly comfortable in his skin and confident (and also demonstrably very good doing at least one thing8, making music, while Earn so far has demonstrated exactly zero competencies). He only notices the weird vibe around him when it intrudes on his personal space. And Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) is so raw to the weird darkness around every corner he remains as high as possible at all times, and is very, very attuned to the weirdness. By season three, Darius appears to be cracking under the stress of knowing the world is out to drive him crazy or possibly murder him.
The key is, the show warps reality at will. One of the great things about Atlanta is a kind of fearlessness. This is a show that isn’t afraid to set an episode at a club filled with secret doors, or introduce the concept of an invisible car and then actually have an invisible car. These moments of surreal weirdness just happen, aren’t harped on, and are there just because they make the universe interesting9.
Interesting, but also unreliable. When strange things can happen at any time, you can’t trust reality any more, and that’s the space where Atlanta lives. Earn knows that at any moment everything can go to shit, and the show plays on this by filming most of each episode like the opening scenes of a horror movie. You know those early sequences when the characters can feel something is off, but can’t quite figure it out? That’s the vibe of every episode of Atlanta10.
When Earn and Paper Boi are in Amsterdam in Season Three, Episode Two, they start to catch glimpses of white people in blackface, and no one seems embarrassed or worried about it. A sense of grim anxiety pervades these scenes even if you know about Zwarte Piet and Sinterklaas, because it’s so close to a horror setup: Man starts to see people in blackface, no one believes him, he begins to investigate, discovers something horrible. The climax of the episode when Paper Boi and Earn look out on a concert crowd to see hundreds and hundreds of blackface-wearing Dutch people would be the penny-drop moment in a horror movie, the moment when the heroes realize they’re about to die.
Slippery Reality
Of course, it’s meaningful that most of the time the weird, off-putting stuff that Earn and crew have to deal with is perpetuated by White folk. It mirrors what many Black Americans have to deal with on a constant basis—normal, everyday events infused with dread, because you never know when the person you’re dealing with has a hood in their closet at home11. I don’t know what that’s like, of course, but the show presents it as a constant burn of background horror. Are the white folks in blackface for weird cultural reasons, or are you about to be murdered12? No one on Atlanta can ever be 100% certain, and that adds a sense of menace and tension to every episode.
That this vibe explodes out into the open occasionally is a bonus—the Teddy Perkins episode, “Three Slaps,” and “Big Payback” are more or less divorced from the main story and play as self-contained horror shorts. In fact, while Season Two’s “Teddy Perkins” had a real Get Out feel to it, “Three Slaps” has the show’s first truly horror moment in its opening scene, which is a self-contained horror story that starts with two men doing some night fishing and beer drinking and ends with one of them being pulled into the lake by dozens of arms. It’s the first time the low-key horror vibe of Atlanta became an up-front horror vibe.
And the show brilliantly follows that up with the fourth episode of season three, “Big Payback,” which posits a world where lawsuits against people whose ancestors once owned slaves are successful, suddenly putting a whole lot of White people on edge. This episode is also a full-on horror vibe—but it’s a nice twist to have the poles reversed, with the White folks suddenly the ones who see danger around every corner.
Aside from being excellent, by being outside the usual narrative these stories can add commentary and detail to the universe Atlanta is building that would be awkward in another episode. The exploration of a particular form of White Privilege in “Three Slaps” would have been more difficult to dig into in a standard outing. By breaking it out, the show can dig deeper into the ideas. And by essentially making a short horror film, the show underscores the menace of its fictional universe, elevating the rest of the stories.
As far as we know, there’s one more season to go after Season Three of Atlanta, so it remains to be seen whether this “early scenes of a horror movie13” vibe coalesces into a real horror movie. Part of me kind of hopes it does. In the meantime, I will nurse my powerful jealousy of Donald Glover, a man so much more talented and better-looking than me it’s kind of insulting14.
Next week: The Lazy Writer’s Guide to Vaguely-Defined Evil International Organizations
This is nothing compared to flipping channels at 1AM only to be slapped in the face that The Heat was made in 2013, making it NINE YEARS OLD and me a very, very old man.
Atlanta effortlessly creates side characters that feel like they have a world within them. Honestly, if you write short stories you could learn something from this show’s handling of minor, transitory characters who sometimes have almost no dialog, yet feel very fleshed out.
Three things, it should be noted, that I know almost nothing about. Not that has ever stopped me from writing 1,000 words on a subject.
They may not use the phrase any more, but plenty of shows out there still make egregious Very Special Episodes. This Is Us, I am looking at you.
The one quibble I might have is that Paper Boi appears to be rocketing to stardom despite having the jankiest management team in history around him. Maybe I just don’t understand the music business.
Making Earn a kind of doofus was a smart move. If Earn was a Marty Sue of sorts, the combination of the character’s awesomeness and Donald Glover’s attractiveness would have ended civilization. Do I have a Man Crush? Shut up.
Who hasn’t? Though my favorite pants-related incident from my own life occurred on my honeymoon when I dared enter a swanky restaurant wearing shorts. The manager cam running over in terror and insisted a place a large napkin over my bare legs. To spare the staff from terminal lust? That’s what I choose to believe.
The other smart thing Atlanta does is almost never let us hear Alfred actually perform. Just like monsters in horror movies, fictional artistic talent is always best left to the imagintion.
If you were a pretentious asshole, you could write an entire essay about that club scene in Atlanta as a metaphor for navigating a world you aren’t very familiar with, making the rules, traditions, and red lines seem confusing and often arbitrary. Making that subtext into text by literally having the club owner vanish into secret doorways is kind of great.
This is also the vibe I experience every time I step into a social situation.
Hat tip to HBO’s Watchmen, which literally had a hood in a closet as a key plot point.
To be fair, any time anyone finds themselves surrounded by people in blackface, murder is on the table.
Of course, I recognize this vibe because it’s what I feel every morning when I wake up and I still haven’t portaled back to my prime reality where I’m a handsome movie star billionaire.
Is this the funniest line reading of all time? My whole brain is crying indeed.
I read that Rita Hayworth gave good face.