Thriller movie ‘Karen’ is stirring controversy across the internet

The trailer for the BET thriller movie Karen has recently been released and it’s causing a stir of controversy across the internet

Karen the movie stars Orange Is the New Black cast member Taryn Manning, Cory Hardrict and Jasmine Burke. The movie is about the very real struggle and hostility African Americans face when moving to a prominently white neighbourhood. The movie focuses on a particular racist trope coined ‘ Karen’.A name that is now being used to describe an entitled white woman who uses her white privilege to terrorise black people and complain about everything. Often ‘Karen’s will demand to speak to the manager or call the police in unnecessary circumstances.
The movie trailer is receiving backlash due to its perceived similarity to Jordan Peele’s 2017 thriller Get Out.

The movie followers a young African American man ( Daniel Kaluuya) and his white girlfriend on a trip to meet her family for the first time. Soon things get weird and it’s clear there’s a terrifying truth behind the seemingly normal family.

The movie trailer is receiving backlash due to its perceived similarity to Jordan Peele’s 2017 thriller Get Out.

The movie followers a young African American man ( Daniel Kaluuya) and his white girlfriend on a trip to meet her family for the first time. Soon things get weird and it’s clear there’s a terrifying truth behind the seemingly normal family. 

“Racism is real and it’s not really represented in the horror genre, which is a genre that traditionally takes on social horrors and human demons.”

Jordan Peele

Jordan Peele took the terror of racism and its sad reality to the horror genre scene and it certainly caught all of our attention. Unfortunately for Coke Daniels the director and writer of Karen, people aren’t convinced by the storyline or the acting finding it cringey and a little too similar to Jordan Peele’s Get Out. After Karen memes have been circulating across the internet, it’s hard to take the movie name seriously and see it as a full production with depth and meaning rather than a knock off version of a Jordan Peele movie.

One twitter user had particularly strong feelings towards the movie heres what they tweeted: 

“Its unbelievably cringe! It’s like someone took every woke stereotype and fear mongering about race relations and put it into a blender without nuance or subtlety. No surprise it’s from BET.”

 Although Peele may have raised racism as a topic worth exploring in the horror genre he’s not the only one doing it. 

This year we’ve seen the release of Them the Amazon prime series that tells the story of a black families move from the south to an all-white Los Angeles neighbourhood where they are extremely ostracised by their neighbours along with malevolent forces taunting them. In this series, we see another ‘Karen’ in the form of a white housewife who is enraged at the families presents and does everything to get them out.

We can also see this similar storyline being played out in HBO’s Lovecroft County.This storyline is not uncommon and Peele was certainly not the first to write about it nor will he be the last. With the topic of race in horror movies still not being entirely mainstream there is room for other directors and writers to also explore the topic hopefully in a more sophisticated way than Karen. 

A release date is yet to be set but after a bad reception who knows when the movie will come out