Tag: classics
Stepping outside of the horror genre for a second, I wrote a guest post on Shepherd.com about my choices for the five best books about Black film history. If you're looking to learn about the history of Black cinema, horror or otherwise, these books are a great place to...
Black Is Boo-Tiful
When Jordan Peeele’s Get Out became a breakout success in 2017, earning him the first Original Screenplay Oscar awarded to an African-American, "black horror movies" suddenly became the new hot property in Hollywood, with many people seeming to believe that this was an entirely new subset of...
Originally written for Salem Horror Fest
One of my earliest memories of genuine horror fandom came in the mid-'80s when I popped a VHS tape of George Romero's Night of the Living Dead into my family's VCR and watched as the character Ben (Duane Jones) led a ragtag group of...
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a harrowing horror classic that has no doubt been dissected (no pun intended) a million times since its release, but there's one aspect that doesn't seem to get discussed very much: A FREAKIN’ BLACK GUY SAVES THE DAY. For a black person to be...
Midnight Menace is a 24-minute all-black musical showcase for Lollypop Jones, who apparently was a vaudeville singer and dancer back in the '40s. Unfortunately for us, he wasn't an actor. Jones stars as himself, a performer who shows up for a gig and goes to his dressing room (he...
White Zombie is often acknowledged as the first zombie movie. Like Plague of the Zombies some three decades later, there are no major black roles (surprising, given the plot takes place in Haiti, although not so surprising given the title). Most of the black people appear in the opening...
This relatively tame made-for-TV anthology has achieved cult status amongst even the most hardcore horror fans for three simple words: Zuni...fetish...doll. The little African bugger (I say African because although the Zuni are a Native American tribe, the doll was confirmed in the sequel to be African.) has become...
I recall the unexpected joy I felt when I first sat down to watch Sisters and saw that it seemed to star (or at least co-star) a black man. And not your typical 1970s Hollywood black man either -- struttin', jive talkin', ho slappin' -- but rather, an honest-to-goodness...
Like Meeting at Midnight, this is a Charlie Chan mystery that's marginally horrific, with its masked killer plot line (not to mention the Caucasian Asian speaking pidgin English and his bug-eyed, scaredy-cat black manservant). Somehow, I find Mantan's being scared of a tangible killer here more acceptable than his...
The movie that changed zombie lore forever, Night of the Living Dead is a classic not only of horror in general, but of black horror in particular. Supposedly, the racial commentary that can be read into the film was never intended, as the role of Ben wasn't written for a...
