Buried within an avalanche of horror offerings featuring black folks during the Halloween 2020 season (including Antebellum, Bad Hair, His House, Spell, Vampires vs. the Bronx, Don’t Look Back, Synchronic and Kindred, plus family offerings The Witches and A Babysitter's Guide to Monster Hunting and the ubiquitous TV series...
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...
With his remarkable feature debut His House, British writer-director Remi Weekes achieves what seasoned horror filmmakers struggle to pull off: tackling social issues like immigration, xenophobia, genocide and gender roles, alongside weighty themes like psychological trauma and grief, all while delivering throat-clenching scares. It’s one of the rare movies...
A year or so after Attack the Block was released, another British sci-fi horror film with a black protagonist fighting an alien invasion came out -- with less spectacular results. Noel Clarke stars in Storage 24 as Londoner Charlie, who’s down in the dumps after his girlfriend Shelley (Antonia...
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner meets Rosemary’s Baby in Kindred, a polished, well-acted British thriller whose intriguing potential ultimately devolves into a ball of toothless frustration. The story revolves around Charlotte (Tamara Lawrance), a black woman whose white live-in boyfriend Ben’s (Edward Holcroft) family is a bit...clingy. When he...
Somewhere within the flaming garbage heap that was 2020, there have been reasons to celebrate: your birthday, for one, and if you’re reading this, the fact that you’re still alive -- and functionally literate. Congratulations! But for the purposes of this site, the ever-growing diversity within the horror genre...
Having been balls deep in black horror for a number of years, it’s always fascinating to come across a film of significance that’s been hidden in plain sight for so long. Nothing about the generically titled Night of the Strangler and its lily white poster screams blackness (and what...
We all heard about the strife that COVID-19 caused for Broadway performers who had to put their dreams on hold and find ways to eke out a living that didn’t include in-person song and dance numbers, but less publicized thespian victims during the COVID era were film actors who...
Say what you will about The Asylum -- the poor quality of their films, their willingness to coast off the notoriety of bigger, better movies with “mockbusters” like Snakes on a Train and Independents' Day, the fact that their Sharknado films opened the floodgates for every Tom, Dick and...
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...
