When Tananarive Due was growing up, one of her favorite authors was horror maestro Stephen King. When she would share this fact to her creative writing classes at Northwestern and the University of Leeds, she would earn herself a fair share of side glances.
"When I mentioned to my class that my favorite writers were Toni Morrison and Stephen King, when I mentioned Stephen King's name, I could just see from the looks on their faces that maybe I shouldn't say that," Due recalls.
It wasn't until years later while working as a reporter for the Miami Herald that she would find the inspiration to return to her passion for writing horror. Due was assigned to interview Anne Rice, author of the famed "Lestat" series of vampire novels.
Due tells WPR's "BETA" that in her research for the interview, she stumbled across a lot of criticism lambasting Rice for wasting her writing talents on low brow fare. Tananarive posed this question to Rice herself to get her thoughts.
"She literally just laughed, and she said, 'That used to bother me, but my books are taught in universities.' And she went on to explain how when you write about the supernatural, you can write about these big themes like love and death and life," said Due.
Almost literally after the interview, Due said she set out to write her first novel, "The Between," which she would finish about nine months later.
"I would get up early and write. I would stay up late writing, sometimes scaring myself because the book has a lot of nightmares and dream sequences, and it's very preoccupied with death, as was I," she said. "So, you know, I was scaring myself, but that was the idea. Just this the idea of waking up between different realities."
Inspired by the drastic wreckage of her hometown Miami by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, "The Between" finds the protagonist Hilton having his reality blurred into something unrecognizable.
"Mile after mile after mile, my hometown of Miami, where I grew up, it's almost unrecognizable, especially where my parents lived, where my grandmother lived, my aunt lived," Due said. "It was the most horrific experience. So, that was sort of the idea of the alternate reality. What if you wake up in a world that's very different from the one you went to sleep in?"
Due said she primarily wrote "The Between" for herself and used an outside screenwriting contest as a deadline. She said she followed the old adage of writing what you know, so the novel focuses on a Black family in the suburbs, something she said was unique to horror.
"I embraced a Black protagonist because I had started writing white male characters primarily. And so 'The Between' was let me write what you know, like what people say. And it was a Black family in the suburbs. I had never read that book before," Due said.
"There must have been some sort of way I wanted to address an African-American experience in the story, not just because the characters were Black, but because the antagonist is taking the form of a white supremacist. And even though I don't think it was entirely conscious, there must have been, I think, something about the state of being in alternate realities that spoke to a Black American experience in my mind," Due continued.
"The Between" was released in 1995 and became a pioneering text in the budding genre of Black horror. Even though the concept of Black horror dates as far back as W.E.B. Du Bois' short story "The Comet," Due said that the genre mainly toiled in the background when she released the book.
It wasn't until Jordan Peele's 2017 Oscar-winning horror film "Get Out" was released where the genre transcended into the mainstream.
"Black horror, to me, is horror that has a Black protagonist with agency in this story," said Due. "Someone you would recognize is making decisions rather than being just a trope, which is what you find in a lot of, say, cinematic horror, where Black characters were relegated to these very trope roles as just the sacrificial Negro. We call it the spiritual guide, the magical Negro. It's moving beyond tropes to show Black characters and their full humanity."
Like Rice before her, Due's work is now the basis for a university setting. She teaches the incredibly popular course, "Sunken Place: Racism, Survival, and Black Horror Aesthetic" at the University of California, Los Angeles. As the course title indicates, much of her curriculum centers around Peele's "Get Out." The director himself often makes cameos in her class.
"I'll say I did a little sketch with Jordan Peele," Due laughed as she recounted the story of distracting her class with the film while Peele snuck into the last row of the lecture hall.
"I said, 'OK, what do you think the director is trying to say about the coveting of Black bodies?' Jordan Peele raise his hand and stood up and said, 'Oh, I have a question.' And then he started walking slowly to the front of the class, and as realization grew, let me tell you, that class went wild," Due said.
Due's work extends beyond her classroom. She was the executive producer for the groundbreaking documentary "Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror," and "The Between" itself is in talks for an upcoming adaptation. More of her work is being optioned as well.
"I've never had so many projects in development at the same time, and I think that speaks to how finally, it looks like Hollywood is open to diversifying its storytelling and inviting new people to the table," said Due.
Due said that as long as horror is craved, Black horror will continue to have a foothold in the genre because she argues that the one thing all horror fans crave is an original idea of terror.
"I'm a big believer in finding the universal through the specific. I think the specific social, political family histories of African-Americans, even if racism isn't the monster, can inform the story in a way that will just feel different. So, a horror reader who's read like a whole bunch of traditional Eurocentric horror can pick up a Black horror novel and find a new way to be scared," she said.