Black horror
It often has social and political commentary and compares racism and other lived experiences of Black Americans to common horror themes and tropes.
Black horror novelists include Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia E. Butler, Linda Addison, Jewelle Gomez and Victor LaValle.
[18] 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".
[20] 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.
[3] For Refinery29, Ineye Komonibo wrote that Black horror films are "often ...imparting a moral lesson or highlighting some political struggle within our society".
[1] 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.
[18][29][30] 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.
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.
[5][8] For The Hollywood Reporter, Richard Newby wrote that Peele "changed the game" with Get Out, which "managed to encompass the horror blacks experience on a scale unlike any we'd seen before".
In 2023, Bethonie Butler of The Washington Post wrote that Get Out "upped the ante when it came to discourse about horror and race" and that "few films ... have come close to the social commentary that made Get Out a cultural phenomenon", while Nick Schager of The Daily Beast wrote that it "ushered in a wave of Black horror films and TV series that investigate and exploit modern and historical racial dynamics for monstrous thrills".
[8][15][17] After the release of Us, Chris Vognar of the Houston Chronicle opined that one "could argue [Peele] is the best" to bring "a distinctively black flavor to the horror-movie genre", while Due stated that Us was "not as directly about race as Get Out".
Peele also produced Lovecraft Country (2020), an HBO series created by Misha Green and based on a 2016 novel of the same name by Matt Ruff.
In it, a Black family living in the United States during the Jim Crow-era 1950s must fight monsters inspired by the works of H. P. Lovecraft, who held racist beliefs, and racism.
[47] According to critic Robert Daniels, "expectations for conversations about racism and structural inequities" led to "the advent of serious-minded Black horror" following the release of Get Out.
[17] In her book Imperiled Whiteness: How Hollywood and Media Make Race in "Postracial" America, Penelope Ingram wrote that the 2010s and the 2020s were a "renaissance of Black horror" spurred by the success of Peele's films, while Means Coleman and writers from CNN and Entertainment Weekly argued that Black horror had entered its Golden Age by 2020.
[12] For The Daily Beast, Nick Schager wrote that most Black horror post-Get Out, including Lovecraft Country, Them, Antebellum and Candyman, was "ho-hum at best and reductive at worst, failing to strike a successful balance between gory genre kicks and novel sociopolitical insights".
'"[49] Cate Young of The American Prospect wrote that Black horror films and television series released after Get Out—particularly Antebellum, Bad Hair and Lovecraft Country—"ultimately fail because they do not do the hard ideological work necessary to give them the cultural and political meaning to which they aspire" and because of their "reckless deployment of spectacle over substance".
"[52] In 2023, Nadira Goffe of Slate opined that "the same bag of tricks ... defined much of Black horror" in the years prior, such as "the dangers of whiteness" and "the protagonist's dawning realization that 'I got what I wanted, but it wasn't what I thought it would be'".
[19] For T, Gabrielle Bellot noted the influence of African-American folklore figures, namely Br'er Rabbit, and the 1899 short story collection The Conjure Woman by author Charles W. Chesnutt on Black horror.
