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This chapter argues that the supernatural detective thriller The Skeleton Key (Iain Softley, 2005) serves as a riposte to Jordan Peele’s more critically successful Get Out (2017), in that its villains use Afro-Caribbean mystical techniques to steal the corpora of the film’s White characters, rather than vice versa. Their rituals enable them to cheat death, as well as to invalidate the racist epistemologies that favor Western science over “superstitious” forms of medical understanding and intervention. However, these rituals also recall the symptomology of mycobacterial tuberculosis in their debilitating, age-accelerating effects on the victims in the film.

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“Sometimes It’s More of a Trade”: Blackness, Bacterial Infection, and Iain Softley’s The Skeleton Key

  • 章节

  • 发表日期：

    2025年

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  • Larrie Dudenhoeffer

摘要

This chapter argues that the supernatural detective thriller The Skeleton Key (Iain Softley, 2005) serves as a riposte to Jordan Peele’s more critically successful Get Out (2017), in that its villains use Afro-Caribbean mystical techniques to steal the corpora of the film’s White characters, rather than vice versa. Their rituals enable them to cheat death, as well as to invalidate the racist epistemologies that favor Western science over “superstitious” forms of medical understanding and intervention. However, these rituals also recall the symptomology of mycobacterial tuberculosis in their debilitating, age-accelerating effects on the victims in the film.