John Singleton, Mario Van Peebles, F. Gary Gray, Hughes Brothers, and Spike Lee are all directors who have created work typically classified as part of this genre.

[5][6][7][8] Characteristics include hip hop music (including gangsta rap), street gangs, racial discrimination, organized crime/gangster, gang affiliation scenes, drug use and trafficking, and the problems of young people coming of age or struggling amid the relative poverty and violent neighborhoods.

[3] Critic Murray Forman notes that the "spatial logic" of hip-hop culture, with heavy emphasis on place-based identity, locates "black youth urban experience within an environment of continual proximate danger," and this quality defines the hood film.

[1] In a 1992 essay in Cineaction, Canadian critic Rinaldo Walcott identified the hood film's primary concerns as issues of masculinity and "(re)gaining manhood for black men.

[15][16][17] The genre has also been parodied with such films as Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood[18] and Friday.

[6] Celeste A. Fisher credited this decline to general fatigue felt towards the genre, due to the lack of diversity in "images, settings, and themes".

Kidulthood, released in 2006, is credited with popularising the British hood film genre, leading to a swathe of imitators in the years following.