Did you hear that?
Perhaps just the residual flutters of presbycusis.
First, we are shown a couple eerie production title cards reminding us, the audience, that we have bought tickets for what is indeed a horror film. Raucous, then silence. Then to blackness. A hard cut into a cold open. The suburbs. A man wonders through the all-too-normal neighbourhood. He is lost. He is also black. He shuffles in fright. This is a contrasted mirror of the innocent white person lost in the rundown ‘hood,’ a jungle of low income urban decay, haunted by the ever suspicious other. In place of the abandoned shell, green lawns, cookie-cutter family homes, the inviting glow of illuminated street lights.
Adding to our black hero’s terror, a car passes playing loudly from its radio a nostalgic classic. The song is Flanagan and Allen’s Run Rabbit Run. The song is that upbeat barbershop quartet style foot tapping music that provided the soundtrack to a simpler time, the good old times, of course before the troubles of desegregation, homosexuality, and drugs. After a little game of stalker, the car stops, its door opening as the music roars louder, run rabbit, run, run, run…
And then a masked man, our hero subdued, and the slamming of the boot as the cue to cut to:
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