Black horror is having a moment. All of a sudden the genre feels alive, feral, infinite. How delicious it tastes, too. Like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man biting into that ambrosial yam, savoring something like self-release, the genre has gone sweet and hot, enriched as anything we’ve witnessed, a divinely wicked nectar, a sustenance of arrant want. But even with all this chatter about black horror’s Hollywood renaissance, and how Hitchcock heir apparent Jordan Peele has masterminded a movement toward the macabre—with Get Out, Us, The Twilight Zone, and upcoming projects that include a Candyman remake—one point gets lost: Donald Glover got here first.

When I consider What Black Horror Means Today, with the thick of the present around me and its propensity to so swiftly crush the soul into ash, I think of Atlanta, Glover’s twisted theater of kinship and chaos and black pathos. For two seasons, the FX drama has plunged into the bizarre, an experiment so agile and esoteric in purpose, so sharply Ellisonian, it was, at times, hard to understand it as anything other than straight-up horror. Like the best of the genre, Atlanta is a wounded animal. Because hasn’t black life always been an open wound? From the moment slave blood soaked the shores of Jamestown, it was a gash that wouldn’t close shut, that refused to heal. (The decision, it should be said, was never ours to make. The radical act of healing—to be whole and free—is, for black people, near impossible in a land built on the rejection of racial equilibrium.)

Jason Parham covers the shifting landscapes of pop culture for WIRED.

That is how black life exists: in the open, unprotected, wedged in a loop of creeping peril. Round and round and round. In 1903, black pan-Africanist historian W. E. B. Du Bois coined the term double consciousness. It concerns the twinned state of being for black people living in a white world and how our social mutability remains tied to our survival. But rarely discussed is the terror of being psychologically trapped between those warring states of self- and social-authorship. That is the space Glover mines with such brilliance, fury, and curiosity.

Atlanta thrives in self-containment. A cosmos of veiled design, Glover’s landscape is threaded by suspense, hospitable to surrealist hijinks, and doesn’t dare bat an eye when all hell breaks loose. An invisible car stampeding through a parade of people in a parking lot (“The Club”) is par for the course, an example of how quickly life can veer into the horrific or the absurd or the horrifically absurd. Elsewhere, the city’s dense emerald backwoods function as a labyrinth of repressed memory and familial trauma (“The Woods”). From the genesis this seemed to be Glover’s mission; notice how he bookends Season 1 with two of the most psychologically scarring episodes, stylishly horrifying interpretations on mental imprisonment and physical surrender (“Streets on Lock,” “The Jacket”). To escape from the anguish, Glover stipulates, comes with violent cost.

Season 2, aptly styled Robbin’ Season, drills the point: Black people wade a deep ravine of terror. Not terror mapped upon the uncanny, a la Us or more classic genre fare like Nightmare on Elm Street, but the slow, tip-toeing terror of the everyday. Of, say, being a washed-up singer trapped by the cage of the past. With “Teddy Perkins,” Glover and director Hiro Murai unspool a tale of pure showbiz doom. The episode is Atlanta at its most carnivorous, its most unafraid—refusing, as always, to be made small by the limitations of the medium.

Not a believer? Come inside Glover’s dark wonderland. Take a gander. Survey his lush expanse. Get comfortable (but beware of booby traps). It won’t take long to notice that the questions Glover’s characters fuss over, and are made deliriously woozy by, are remarkably of the moment: What is the face of trauma? Can grief be overcome or does it rot inside, slowly withering the bones? How do people come to know themselves? Most of all, Atlanta asks an essential query of black horror, one not just informed by the genre but propelled by race and history: How might one find a way to survive?

Blackness in the American imagination was first conceived as a nightmare. Because blackness has tried to remove itself from this bad dream, has tried to wake up for so long, it is, in one sense, a story of survival. A story of not always making it out but of making it through.