Black horror
Black horror is a horror subgenre that focuses on African-American characters and narratives. It often involves the use of social and political commentary to compare themes of racism and other lived experiences of Black Americans to common horror themes and tropes. Early entries in the genre include the Spencer Williams Jr. film Son of Ingagi, and George A. Romero's film Night of the Living Dead, which is considered one of the first Black horror films because its lead role is played by a Black actor, Duane Jones. Blaxploitation horror films of the 1970s, namely Blacula and the vampire film Ganja & Hess, became prominent examples of the genre. Other examples appeared during the 1990s, including the Bernard Rose film Candyman and Tales from the Hood, an anthology film directed by Rusty Cundieff which has been described as the "godfather of Black horror".
Black horror became especially popular after Get Out, a horror film about racism and the 2017 directorial debut of comedian Jordan Peele, became an international box office success, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Peele went on to direct the Black horror films Us and Nope. He also produced the HBO Black horror television series Lovecraft Country, and the film Candyman directed by Nia DaCosta, a sequel to the 1992 film of the same name. Some critics argued that, by 2020, Black horror had entered its Golden Age, while others criticized many of the Black horror projects that followed Get Out—including Lovecraft Country, the Amazon series Them, and the film Antebellum —as unsubtle and exploitative of Black trauma.
Black horror novels include Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson, Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler, The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, and The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle.
Definition
Black horror is typically defined as horror created by Black people, featuring Black protagonists or other prominent characters, and centered around Black culture. Robin R. Means Coleman, a professor at Texas A&M University and the author of the 2011 book Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present, wrote in 2019 for The Conversation that Black horror films were "created by blacks, star blacks or focus on black life and culture". Tananarive Due, a Black horror author and professor at University of California, Los Angeles who has been called the "queen of Black horror" and, as of 2019, teaches classes on Black horror, stated that Black horror "doesn't necessarily have to be made by Black creators" but that it typically "is made by Black filmmakers and does star black protagonists to tell a Black story". She added, "Sometimes it is enough just to have a Black character in a film for it to be considered Black horror." She also defined Black characters in Black horror films as "actually hav agency in the film and maybe even surviv" while exceeding the stereotypical roles of Black characters in horror films "who were just sidelined or monster bait". Black horror is also sometimes referred to as racial horror or horror noir.Commentators have described Black horror as being largely informed and inspired by Black history, particularly through its common theme of perseverance. In the 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, Due stated, "Black history is Black horror." Ryan Poll, for the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, wrote, "For African Americans, horror is not a genre, but a structuring paradigm," adding that horror works "because White people fundamentally imagine the world without horror". Due has stated that a more common theme than race in Black horror is "the will to fight back and survive against overwhelming force". Means Coleman and author Mark Harris, owner of the website Black Horror Movies, similarly wrote in their book The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar that "the Black presence in horror, as in America, has always been about resilience".
Black horror films often compare the lived experiences of Black people to horror narratives, depicting them through themes of racism and its effects, such as police brutality, the Atlantic slave trade, lynching, discrimination and transgenerational trauma. Jenna Benchretrit of CBC wrote that Black horror was "an expansive subgenre that reclaims the Black community's place in a film tradition where they have often been the first to die or are depicted as the monster". Mark Harris compared the horror film trope of killing off Black characters first to marginalization, stating, "It epitomises how black characters in these movies and then other genres tend to be kind of second fiddle, thus expendable and so they get bumped off." For Vulture, Robert Daniels defined Black horror films as horror films "directed by and starring Black folks". Stephanie Holland of The Root also described Black horror films as horror films "that feature prominent Black stories and heroes" despite horror not having "always been the most welcoming for Black characters". Jason Parham of Wired wrote that Black horror filmmakers "let loose arguments about class conflict or policing or the psychological terror of race, and how whiteness eats at the mind".
Black horror also frequently imparts messages about social, political, or moral issues. Tonja Renée Stidhum of The Root wrote that racial and social commentary were "basically the core of the genre, historically". Laura Bradley of The Daily Beast noted that Black horror films often focus on "the fear of moral corruption, particularly by proximity to white people and institutions" and frequently include references to Christianity. For Refinery29, Ineye Komonibo wrote that Black horror films are "often...imparting a moral lesson or highlighting some political struggle within our society".
Film and television
Precursors
Before the first Black horror films were created, American horror films scarcely featured Black actors. Those that did often did so mockingly or depicted them as primitive in the vein of D.W. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. Black actors occasionally appeared in lead roles in horror films, such as Joel Fluellen's role of Arobi in the 1957 film Monster from Green Hell or Georgette Harvey's role of Mandy in the 1934 film Chloe, Love Is Calling You, or in voodoo films like Ouanga, which starred Fredi Washington as the mistress of a plantation owner, but even those roles were largely in the service of helping white characters. Black actors Willie Best and Eddie "Rochester" Anderson became well known in the 1930s for their servant roles in monster movies, in which they typically exaggeratedly bulged their eyes in shock before running away, but they often fed into racial stereotypes. According to Due, Black characters in horror films were often relegated to tropes such as the Magical Negro, Sacrificial Negro, or the Spiritual Guide. The 1922 Oscar Micheaux horror race film The Dungeon and the Spencer Williams Jr. films Son of Ingagi, which was written about a mad scientist who brings a primate creature to life and was the first science fiction horror film to have an all-Black cast, and The Blood of Jesus are considered some of the earliest Black horror films. Ashlee Blackwell, a cowriter of Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, stated that Son of Ingagi "fully flesh out its black characters" was "revolutionary"; Tabie Germain of BET called Son of Ingagi "a trailblazer for its time and a major milestone in Black film history". Jon O'Brien of Inverse called it "the first true Black horror" and wrote that its portrayal of its all-Black cast in "a positive light" was "a revolutionary move for the time".1960s to 2000s: Blaxsploitation and 1990s resurgence
The George A. Romero film Night of the Living Dead is considered one of the first Black horror films and highly influential on the genre of Black horror overall for its casting of Duane Jones, a Black actor, in its lead role of Ben. In contrast to previous depictions of Black people in horror films as ineffectual, he was written to be smart, resourceful and heroic, and was also one of horror's first Black protagonists. The film also ends with Ben being shot and killed by a group of white vigilantes, who proceed to burn him in a manner comparable to lynching. Due framed the scene in the context of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which took place earlier that year.The Blaxploitation genre of the 1970s, which also featured predominantly Black casts and creators and was targeted towards Black audiences, also produced numerous Black horror films. Blacula was directed by Black director William Crain and starred William Marshall, who altered the script in order to make it more socially conscious, as Prince Mamuwalde, the first Black vampire portrayed on screen. In it, Prince Mamuwalde begs for Count Dracula not to support the Atlantic slave trade before being bitten by him and turned into a vampire, later waking up in 1972 after his coffin is opened by antique dealers. Its box office success led to the creation of more Black horror films. Its 1973 sequel, Scream Blacula Scream, starred Pam Grier as the voodoo high priestess and African spirituality historian Lisa. The Bill Gunn–directed Black horror film Ganja & Hess also starred Jones and won the Critics' Choice award at the Cannes Film Festival upon its release. According to Polygons Max Deering, it was a cult classic of Black horror by 2025. Other Blaxploitation horror films of the 1970s included Blackenstein, Abby, Sugar Hill , Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde and J. D.'s Revenge, all of which gained popularity and became early examples of Black horror.
File:Tony Todd.jpg|thumb|upright|Tony Todd has been referred to as the "king of Black horror" for his portrayal of the eponymous villain in the 1992 Black horror film Candyman
The 1990s saw a resurgence of Black horror films, which, according to educator Mikal Gaines, was a result of and concurrent with a boom in hood films, such as New Jack City and Juice, during the decade. It was partly fueled by the release of the Bernard Rose film Candyman, which cast Tony Todd, a Black actor, as the film's titular villain, while also addressing lynching and housing inequality, particularly in the Cabrini–Green housing projects in Chicago. Sonaiya Kelley of the Los Angeles Times called it "inarguably one of the most seminal black horror films" and described Todd's character as "the first black supernatural killer depicted onscreen". Todd has been referred to as the "king of Black horror" for his role therein. The success of the 1989 urban film Do the Right Thing was also partly responsible for the uptick in Black horror films which followed. including the Troma Entertainment films Def by Temptation, directed by James Baldwin III, and Bugged!, directed by Roland K. Armstrong; the Wes Craven films The Serpent and the Rainbow, The People Under the Stairs and Vampire in Brooklyn ; Demon Knight, which starred Jada Pinkett Smith as Jeryline, who became one of the first Black final girls in horror, and Bones, both directed by Ernest Dickerson, who Means Coleman has described as a "stalwart of the genre" of Black horror; and Reginald Hudlin's short film The Space Traders,, adapted from the short story of the same name by Derrick Bell. The Kasi Lemmons film Eve's Bayou, the Jonathan Demme film Beloved, an adaptation of Toni Morrison's novel of the same name, and the films Leprechaun in the Hood, Queen of the Damned, and Blade are also considered Black horror films.
The politically conscious anthology horror film Tales from the Hood, directed by Rusty Cundieff and executive produced by Spike Lee, features four Black horror stories about issues impacting Black Americans: police corruption, domestic violence, white supremacy and gang violence, respectively. Cundieff described it as "deal with problems in the African-American community and showing how the scariest things that happen to you are the human things that happen to you" while using "the supernatural as a redemptive element". It became a cult classic and Isaura Barbé-Brown of the British Film Institute wrote that it was "important to the history of horror and to Black horror in particular" for being "laced unabashedly with inside jokes specifically aimed at a Black audience". It has been described as the "godfather of Black horror" by Camilo Hanninbal Smith of the Houston Chronicle and director Bomani J. Story.
Following the poor box office performance of Bones in 2001, Black horror largely died down until 2017, with the exception of the 2014 Spike Lee film Da Sweet Blood of Jesus, which was a reimagining of the film Ganja & Hess.