I am beside myself with relief, joy and optimism because my life as a black woman horror fan has been validated. When I watched horror films as a young person, I cringed when a black character appeared, certain they were going to be ridiculed, portrayed as a caricature, or something bad was going to happen to them. This was an internalized knowledge I didn’t have to think about, a feeling I had catalogued in my emotional bank because of my own experiences of trying not to be noticed lest someone started to ridicule or bully me, to the point where sometimes I was relieved there weren’t any black characters in a horror film so I could watch without the added anxiety as a person of colour. The origins of this programmed terror of misrepresentation has been vindicated and explained in the documentary, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror based on Robin R. Means Coleman’s extensive tome on blacks in American horror films.
From the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation to the current day Get Out, horror films featuring black characters and actors have an historical significance in how we are seen in society at large. Means Coleman puts all of this in a book entitled Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. It’s an excellent read outlining decades of misrepresentation of blacks and different tropes (like the magical negro and the myth of blacks dying first in horror), up to the shift in the 90s with urban horror and how we reclaim our stories and representation. Directed by Xavier Burgin, Horror Noire encapsulates the subject matter presented by three film scholars and producers of the documentary: the author herself, Means Coleman, author and teacher Tananarive Due, and Ashlee Blackwell, writer and founder of graveyardshiftsisters.com. Actors like Tony Todd (Candyman), Ken Foree (Dawn of the Dead), Keith David (The Thing), Kelly Jo Minter (The People Under the Stairs); and directors like Jordan Peele (Get Out), Rusty Cundieff (Tales from the Hood 1 & 2) and Ernest K. Dickerson (Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight) explore the impact of their films and other classic horrors featuring blacks had, like Night of the Living Dead and Ganja and Hess, on themselves and American culture.
The inclusion of actors listed above as well as Miguel A. Núñez Jr. (The Return of the Living Dead) and Rachel True (The Craft) bring an honest behind-the-scenes account of how they viewed participating in the horror genre and what it meant to them as individuals. I especially loved True’s candid nature, and her appearance in the documentary is important given the recent controversy of her history of exclusion at conventions. If you think there’s a lot of information to take in, you’re right, but the pacing of the documentary is fantastic. The viewer can absorb information covered in the seven chapters of the book without feeling like you’ve missed something, and the discussions, commentary and visuals all complement each other so everything is easily digested.
For this Black History and Women in Horror Month, the fact that there are three black female scholars guiding the documentary is so empowering. They know what it truly means to be “the other” as they move through spaces that may not readily accept them which is key in their examination of blacks in horror. As black women, we are an unconsidered entity; our intelligence is often challenged, and worse yet, we aren’t normally thought of as the go-to for horror. This time, black women are center stage here, scholars who have made it a priority to explore the history of what blackness is in horror films. What’s also important is the expansion of the discussion to include films up to the here and now, and the hopefulness as we see young female directors Meosha Bean and Monica Suriyage talk about persevering and collaborating to make films that represent themselves properly.
Horror Noire (as both a documentary and book) needs to be added to every film studies syllabus. It’s a vital testament to how a society driven by white supremacy can destroy a people with perception and how we can take it back by reclaiming our representation. If that doesn’t work, as Núñez Jr. says, “Black is the new green”, and money talks, so here’s to more black horror making bank and history.
Watch it now on Shudder.com, and if you haven’t seen some of the films referenced in the documentary, they’re also available on Shudder (hooray!). There’s also a code for a 30-day free trial for the month of February (wihmx), so get your popcorn, tone those eye muscles and get to watching!
*Apologies-I’ve taken the troll bait. Horror Noire is also important addition to the education of those who insist on exclusionary tactics; masking their discomfort of including people of colour by saying horror is getting too political. Horror is and always has been political, and whether these folks want to learn from a discussion that addresses the mistakes of blindly accepting misrepresentation is up to them. I encourage viewers to challenge these archaic views in the review section of Horror Noire on Shudder to set the record straight. And for those who are whining about other people of colour not being included, here are some bullet points:
- This is about blacks in horror, based on a book about blacks in horror films and black history.
- There is an insidious and defensive behaviour of denial exhibited by some white (and a handful of non-white) people who tries to diminish anything involving blacks and black people calling out misrepresentation, and it needs to stop, like right now because it’s boring, stale, and pointless.
- If you want documentaries on misrepresentation of other people of colour in film, they are out there. I shouldn’t have to spell it out for these folks, because there is a thing called Google, but try The Bronze Screen and The Slanted Screen for starters.
View From the Dark 