We Need Black Horror Now More Than Ever

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During the early years of the pandemic, I escaped into horror movies and books. There is something soothing about sitting at home alone in the dark, hiding from the outside world. There is a cool control to be found watching fictional evil on my computer screen, or falling asleep reading a well-worn horror paperback for a story whose ending I already knew. At the end of the day I can shut off the screen, close the book, push the horror away.

Fictional horror is often my escape from the horrors of the real world, a place to practice survival strategies and map out escape routes.

As a Black woman who loves horror, fictional horror is often my escape from the horrors of the real world, a place to practice survival strategies and map out escape routes. At moments when my life has felt out of control, I’ve outlined and started half a dozen horror novels. I’ve written my fears and anxieties into the plotlines of short stories. I’ve written about Black women and girls and Black families escaping monsters because sometimes it’s so hard to escape them in our real lives.

It felt necessary to write Black people surviving and winning against insurmountable evil during years filled with so much Black death. COVID-19 steamrolled through Black communities in the last four years, making us one of the hardest hit in terms of illness and death. Police violence against Black bodies continues to splash across our social media. All this while right-wing attacks against racial progress have resulted in the end of affirmative action, the pullback from DEI, the banning of Black books, and the exclusion of Black history in schools. When so much is out to erase your very existence, fear becomes a constant part of your life.

In horror I see my fear and terror at a world beyond my control reflected back at me. For Black people, horror can provide a safe environment to process the trauma from our daily lives. Horror can offer us a powerful space to imagine fighting back and making it out. To imagine survival.

The Monstrous Other Emerges

Horror is one of the oldest storytelling genres, with its roots in our oral storytelling traditions, myths, folktales, and fairytales, all of which have always contained elements of the unknown, the grotesque, and the supernatural. Most mainstream Western horror traces its roots to the Gothic tales of the late 18th century. In these Gothic novels, ghosts, soulless monsters, and unsettling terrains filled readers with feelings of foreboding, unease, terror, and fear, the defining characteristics of the modern horror genre.

What is specific to this time period in the birth of modern horror is its connection to European colonialism. Western horror has long been obsessed with otherness, because it sits at the juncture of Western imperialism and the creation of a racialized “Monstrous Other” as an integral feature of 18th and 19th century Western speculative fiction. Much of this fiction would become a site in which white European’s fears, desires, cultural anxieties, and fantasies played out. European colonialism and racism needed to create “monsters” out of the people being colonized so that Europe could justify destroying and enslaving those populations. When one is positioned as the “Monstrous Other” by the dominant culture one is considered completely unassimilable, making it easier for these groups to be marked for destruction and death. Equating Blackness with monstrosity, and darkness with evil in the popular imagination was one of the largest enactments of racialization in Western literature.

This racialization would continue into the 20th century, which meant Black characters would be mostly non-existent, or sidelined and marginalized in horror film and literature. Often we were the monsters, or the monsters were a stand-in for Black people and other people of color. And if we did exist beyond monsterdom, Black characters fulfilled stereotypical roles or tropes, never receiving the development or depth given to white characters.

Black characters often showed up as background or side characters in three specific ways: as the token Black sidekick or best friend to the white protagonist; as the “Magical Negro” with special wisdom or powers that can be used to assist the white protagonist; and as the notorious “First to Die” or Sacrificial Negro, where the Black character either died first, or existed only to save a white character and is killed off soon after. Horror reinforced the slave-era idea that Black bodies should only exist in service to whiteness, and that Black people were worth less than the white people who got to survive to the end.

Enter Black Horror

A decade ago the Black Lives Matter movement first spread across the country, spurring massive conversations about anti-Black racism in the United States and its institutions. As a social movement it inspired a renaissance in all Black artforms, including the literary world. For years the lack of diversity in publishing translated to a lack of Black authors being published across all genres. Fortunately, the push for greater diversity in publishing has brought more Black writers to our bookshelves over the past few years, seeding a Black literary renaissance.

In the realm of SFFH, two critical cinematic moments also helped to increase visibility. The success of Jordan Peele’s 2017 Oscar-winning directorial debut Get Out did for Black horror what Black Panther did for Black science fiction a year later, amplifying interest in the often under-resourced and overlooked work Black writers have been doing in these speculative genres. In the years since, Black horror storytellers have had more freedom to talk back to the genre, inserting Black characters front and center as heroes and survivors.

Nia DaCosta’s reimagined Candyman broke pandemic-box office records in 2021. HBO’s 2020 hit series from showrunner Misha Green, Lovecraft Country, still remains a talked about series despite its contentious cancellation. Black horror anthology TV series such as Amazon Prime’s Them and Shudder’s Horror Noire, offered Black writers and directors a chance to see their stories come to life on screen.

At long last, we’re beginning to get Black horror book adaptations. In 2022 the long-awaited television adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s genre-blending time travel classic Kindred premiered. This past year saw the adaptation of Zakiya Dalila Harris’s social horror The Other Black Girl and Victor LaValle’s dark fairy-tale The Changeling.

During this Black horror renaissance, Black actors were cast as leads in several horror movies, including Master, Nanny, His House, The Invitation, Bad Hair, Antebellum, Vampires vs. The Bronx, The Blackening, Talk to Me, and The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster. Black actors also landed lead roles in several horror TV series. Among my favorite performances include Saniyya Sidney in The Passage; Harold Perrineau in From; Dominique Fishback in Swarm; André Holland in Castle Rock; Leslie Odom Jr. in The Exorcist: Believer; and Mamoudou Athie in Archive 81. We also saw Black and interracial families leading horror shows like Netflix’ The October Faction, and in movies like Disney’s 2023 Haunted Mansion and Netflix’ We Have a Ghost.

For Generation Xers and Millenials who gorged our love of horror via 90’s pulp teen horror paperbacks, we were treated to diverse castings in recent television adaptations. We saw Black leads in Netflix’ 2022 The Midnight Club, based on the book by Christopher Pike, and Black leads in two series set in the worlds of R.L. Stine — 2021’s Fear Street Trilogy and 2023’s Goosebumps series.

We’ve seen more Black Final Girls in the past few years as well. Some of my recent favorites include Georgina Campbell’s Tess in Barbarian, Kiersey Clemons’ Jenn in Sweetheart, Taylor Russel’s Zoey in Escape Room, and Keke Palmer’s Emerald in Nope.

We’ve Always Loved Horror

Even before Peele, Black horror had a rich literary lineage going back to the folklore of Africa and its Diaspora. Stories of haints, witches, curses, and magic of all kinds can be found in the folktales collected by author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston and in the folktales retold by acclaimed children’s book author Virginia Hamilton. One of my earliest childhood literary memories is being entranced by Hamilton’s The House of Dies Drear and Patricia McKissack’s children’s book classic The Dark-Thirty: Southern Tales of the Supernatural, both examples of the ways Black authors have tapped into Black history along with our rich ghostlore.

I’ve taught Black Speculative Fiction at the university level, and I always include a section on Black horror. This past year I taught short stories like Eden Royce’s “The Choking Kind,” P. Djèlí Clark’s “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington,” Nalo Hopkinson’s “Greedy Choke Puppy,” Kai Ashante Wilson’s “The Devil in America,” and Tananarive Due’s “Free Jim’s Mine.” I try to introduce students to a range of what Black SFFH can do in the hands of Black writers writing from our own cultural folklore and specific histories, from our own traumas and realities. Our lens on the world is unique, and our horror writing speaks to that.

Even before Peele, Black horror had a rich literary lineage going back to the folklore of Africa and its Diaspora.

Black horror can be clever and subversive, allowing Black writers to move against racist tropes, to reconfigure who stands at the center of a story, and to shift the focus from the dominant narrative to that which is hidden, submerged. To ask: what happens when the group that was Othered, gets to tell their side of the story?

Black horror allows us to ask questions about the unique role Blackness plays in allowing us to rethink almost every piece of speculative worldbuilding—how does the meaning of vampirism and immortality shift as it intersects with race in books such as Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler, The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez, the African Immortals series by Tananarive Due, and the Vampire Huntress Legend series by the late L.A. Banks? Yes, I do love vampire fiction.

Black horror gives Black writers the chance to talk back to and critique icons in the genre like H. P. Lovecraft, something we see in P. Djèlí Clark’s Ring Shout, Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom, and N. K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.

Black horror situates Toni Morrison’s Beloved as a classic work of Gothic horror that uses genre tropes to showcase the real-life horrors of slavery and racism. Some of the richest writing in Black horror follows this Black Gothic footprint, or what AfroSpeculative comic artist John Jennings calls an “ethnogothic” framework, where supernatural and gothic tropes are used to distill ideas around the horrors of racist oppression.

Black horror allows Black writers to claim our place as architects of the Southern Gothic as well, bringing attention to a distinctly Black Southern Gothic. No one better represents this subgenre today than two-time National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. Her last two novels, Sing, Unburied, Sing and Let Us Descend beautifully blend the supernatural and the real-world horrors of the rural Southern Black poor, while also showing how Black ancestral folkways and traditions can be tapped as resources for a character’s transformation and empowerment. Her work sits alongside Black women-helmed Southern Gothic classics such as Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou, and Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day.

In this rich Black Southern Gothic landscape, many amazing books have emerged, including Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory, LaTanya McQueen’s When the Reckoning Comes, Johnny Compton’s The Spite House, and Monica Brashears’ House of Cotton. Outside of the Southern setting, gothic tension winds cleverly through Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland, Alexis Henderson’s The Year of the Witching, and Elisabeth Thomas’s Catherine House. Horror-tinged thrillers like Jackal by Erin E. Adams and When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole have shown how real-world Black experiences can be powerful forces in building mystery and suspense.

The Black horror boom has traversed age categories as well, resulting in more Black horror in young-adult and middle-grade fiction. Justina Ireland is a predecessor in Black YA horror, and her books like Dread Nation stand out for their unique blending of historical settings with the fantastic. Black YA horror continues to span the horror subgenres, from ghostly hauntings to urban legends to zombies. Several examples include: The Taking of Jake Livingston by Ryan Douglass, The Weight Of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson, Burn Down, Rise Up by Vincent Tirado, The Getaway by Lamar Giles, The Undead Truth of Us by Britney Lewis, The Forest Demands Its Due by Kosoko Jackson, and Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury.

The Final Girl is Black

The YA Black horror anthology I co-edit with Saraciea J. Fennell, The Black Girl Survives in This One, came out this month, and it finds company with recent Black Horror anthologies like Jordan Peele’s Out There Screaming, Circe Moskowitz’ All These Sunken Souls, and Terry J. Benton-Walker’s forthcoming The White Guy Dies First. It also makes itself at home next to recent books featuring Black Final Girls, such as There’s No Way I’d Die First by Lisa Springer, Their Vicious Games by Joelle Wellington, You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight by Kalynn Bayron, and Dead Girls Walking by Sami Ellis.

In The Black Girl Survives in This One, we purposely subvert the idea of the Final Girl, which has typically been that of a virtuous white teen girl or white woman in her 20s who defeats the powerful villain and lives to tell the tale. We wanted to move Black teen girls from their conventional sidekick role of “sassy best friend” to the very center of the story. Doing so provides a healing moment for us as Black writers and Black readers. It is so vital to see narratives of Black women and girls surviving, in a world where anti-Black violence and violence against Black women and girls is still a true life horror story.

My story in the collection, The Brides of Devil’s Bayou, explores how trauma is passed down in Black families. Aja, my Final Girl, is caught in a powerful family curse. I was interested in the idea of the curses we inherit, and how the horrors of the past manifest in the present. I was also interested in the ways Black woman not only carry our own demons, but our mother’s demons, and our grandmother’s demons, without even knowing it. I wanted to use the supernatural to illustrate generational trauma made manifest.

Many of the stories in the anthology hint at the underlying terror of Black girlhood, the psychological trauma and the hyper-vigilance Black women and girls face on a daily basis, in just fighting to be heard, seen, or believed. There is a natural survival instinct underlying how Black women and girls already move through the world that gives depth to our roles as final girls. It’s powerful to see yourself survive in a world that has not always valued your life. In this way, Black final girls are revolutionary. Something poet Lucille Clifton once wrote about Black womanhood rings true here: “Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed.”

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