Tag: urban horror
How Much Have Black Horror Roles Increased?
Tracking the number of modern horror movies per year with significant* Black roles. For details on specific movies, refer to:
1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s
*Admittedly, "significant" is a subjective term that varies by era.
To address the bitch-ass elephant in the room: yes, this movie is called Bitch Ass. It’s a title that’s likely to cause some conflicted feelings because it comes off as juvenile and borderline offensive, but on the other hand, it serves its purpose by grabbing your attention and wedging...
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...
Tales from the Hood was woke before woke was woke, addressing issues that are still central to the social justice conversation today, from police brutality to institutional racism to the socio-economic conditions of the inner city. As “hood cinema” fell out of favor by the turn of the century,...
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,...
No, Thriller isn't a Michael Jackson-themed horror movie (that would be Leaving Neverland); rather, it's mega-producer Jason Blum’s latest attempt to further the black horror cause. Unlike his hits Get Out, Us and the Purge films, however, Thriller headed straight to Netflix rather than playing in your local multiplex...and...
The original Tales from the Hood arrived in the midst of the "urban" cinema movement of the '90s, providing a genre spin on the racial and social consciousness of trailblazers like Spike Lee, John Singleton and Julie Dash. More than two decades later, as social consciousness has evolved into...
Today, the status of African Americans in horror films is tied intrinsically to the status of African Americans in cinema as a whole. That is, it has come a long way since the wild-eyed tribesmen of King Kong and has even seen notable advances just within the past decade,...
Snake Outta Compton is the type of movie about which it seems safe to assume the title came WAY before a single word of the actual script was written. It's a punny, grade-school-level concept that's indicative of the humor within, but thanks to its relentless, all-in goofiness, the film...
I know what you're thinking: not another zombie movie. Well, Not Another Zombie Movie beat you to the punch. Yes, it's another zombie movie, and more specifically, it's another zombie comedy ("zom com"). But here's a twist: it's an "urban" (read: black) zom com, which helps make it stand out...
