In 1726, an English woman named Mary Toft became the center of a rather peculiar medical controversy. The pregnant Mary was working in a field with other women when they disturbed a rabbit. It fled from them, and they pursued, but failed to catch it. The incident left such an impression upon Mary that it consumed her thoughts, eventually leading her to miscarry . . . but what emerged from her womb was not a human fetus, but a misshapen rabbit.

If you haven’t seen The Witch (2015) and Get Out (2017), you must have been living under a rock. The former was a breakout title for A24 Films, becoming the fifth highest grossing movie they’ve put out to date (with over $25 million dollars in earnings). And the latter was nominated for several Golden Globe and Academy Awards, winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Two very different films, they both took chances at the box office—with their stories, images, themes, settings, and overall experiences.

I imagine the filing cabinets of Sunnydale’s police department filled with missing persons cases, printouts of missing people tacked to every bulletin board. I imagine Sunnydale’s police are skilled at fielding calls and unexpected visits by alarmed citizens with strange accounts of monsters eating or murdering their children. Young people die a lot in Sunnydale. Life goes on. These things happen.

This is a story about two types of children: a Creepy Child and a Fast Girl. One is a trope found in horror. The other, a trope rooted in black culture. I have embodied both. The Creepy Child knows she’s not like other kids. Her otherness both strengthens and guides her, like a dusty amulet in an attic. Awaiting her. I lived up to the Creepy Child label as best I could since I lacked two crucial criteria: whiteness and innocence. No one informed me of that as I sat down to write my first obituary at age nine.

As a child, when something frightens you—a bad dream, or a monster under the bed—what do you do? You call for the ultimate protection: your mother. But what happens when mothers themselves are monstrous, and what makes them so? Mothers, like women in horror fiction generally, don’t tend to fare well. They suffer from the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” problem, becoming a source of terror for being too motherly, or not motherly enough.