Tag: horror comedies
Cinema in 2023 boasted a slew of surprise hits and surprise flops, but one constant was the Black presence in horror. Not necessarily a year of earth-shattering accomplishments, 2023 was for Black horror more about consistency and variety, broadening the typical Black roles into period pieces, ghost stories, mad...
There was a time not too long ago that it would be difficult to create a “best of” list of horror movies featuring black leads in any given year, since there were so few of them, and the ones that did exist were of such dubious quality. But thankfully,...
I’ve never really contemplated the existence of black, non-indigenous people in Australia, especially those who didn’t recently emigrate from Africa, but if Sissy is any indication, there are at least two of them. One is Aisha Dee, who stars as the titular Sissy — or Cecilia, as she is...
I have selfish reasons for wanting to see Day Shift. Yeah, it’s a movie about a black vampire hunter and all, but it was also filmed in my stomping ground of the San Fernando Valley -- something I became acutely aware of months before its release when production shut...
It will be interesting to see if, in a decade or so, there will have been established a very specific, very limited subgenre of film known as “COVID cinema.” These are not movies about COVID-19, mind you, but rather movies shot in and around the COVID shutdown of 2020-21...
Dear White People’s Justin Simien lends his satirical eye to horror in Bad Hair, a blend of social commentary and pop culture nostalgia wrapped in a supernatural curse film disguised as a workplace dramedy. The end product lacks some of the racial nuances and character complexities of Dear White...
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...
Selling Vampires vs. the Bronx as “Attack the Block meets The Lost Boys” might be accurate, but it does a disservice to the film by setting an impossibly high standard that it can’t hope to reach. Judged on its own merits, however, Vampires vs. the Bronx is a rollicking,...
Remember all those slasher movies back in the '80s that featured a black "final girl" vanquishing the unstoppable psychopathic killer during the nail-biting, climactic finale? Me neither. Lucky for us, Black Holler is here to re-envision that era with a modern parody/homage that is single-handedly more inclusive than the...
Pooka! was the third entry in Hulu’s Into the Dark series of holiday-themed horror movies, and nearly 20 editions in, it remains the best IMO. It also features the most identifiable titular character in the franchise, so it’s not surprising that it would be the first to receive the...