Monday, March 18, 2024

Tag: voodoo

Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out
Horror movies tend to be thought of as hollow entertainment, but horror has a long history of addressing heavy social issues, whether directly or through symbolic or allegorical means. Perhaps the heaviest of heavy social issues is race relations -- especially in the United States -- but these horror/suspense...
The Tale of the Voodoo Prostitute
The Tale of the Voodoo Prostitute is a Miley Cyrus type of horror movie. That is, it's awash in crude cultural appropriation, adopting a stereotypical vision of blackness for some perceived hipness factor without ever truly buying into black culture. As evidenced by the golden gun-toting gangsta on the...
Angel Heart
Remember when the most controversial thing about the cast of The Cosby Show was Lisa Bonet's sex scene in Angel Heart? Ah, the good ol' days. The year was 1987, and the Huxtables were America's family, but their facade of upper-middle-class sitcom perfection took a hit when word came that...
horror movie VooDoo
I tend to eye any movie about voodoo that has nary a person of color in it suspiciously. Has voodoo become gentrified now? Are white people conjuring Baron Samedi in between their twerking sessions and "This Is America" parody videos? Coming across the title VooDoo, I had two immediate thoughts....
Voodoo Dolls
The Canadian production Voodoo Dolls feels like a relic -- even more so than the nearly three-decades-old film already is. Its images of a shirtless black man clad in tribal paint and beaded necklaces, drumming in a trance-like state and menacing the white female protagonist seem like they're straight...
Yambao (AKA Cry of the Bewitched AKA Young and Evil)
The relatively obscure Mexican-Cuban production Yambaó seems to be lumped into the horror genre because of its elements of voodoo/Santeria and spirit possession, but frankly, it deals with those subjects in such a matter-of-fact manner (perhaps reflecting the level of cultural belief that these types of events are real...
Lord Shango movie poster
A couple of years after co-starring in the landmark black horror film Ganja & Hess, scream queen Marlene Clark headlined Lord Shango, and while Ganja & Hess has emerged from the shadows in recent years to gain some mainstream notoriety (and an ill-fated Spike Lee remake), Lord Shango remains...
The Legend of Black Annie horror movie
Although it was made in 2012, The Legend of Black Annie wasn’t released until 2015, just two months after that OTHER "black Annie" movie hit theaters. Coincidence? You be the judge. Regardless, anyone who rents this movie expecting to see a tap-dancing Quvenzhane Wallis will be sorely disappointed --...
The Ghost of Saint Aubin movie
Its title a bit of a misnomer, The Ghost of Saint Aubin doesn’t feature traditional, literal ghosts (depends on how you interpret it) so much as a supernatural storyline that channels the spirits of slavery, social injustice and economic iniquity in a smart, if somewhat jumbled, tale of love,...
LL Cool J in Deep Blue Sea
Originally published on eHow.com Introduction Being a black person in a horror movie isn't easy. You're rarely the hero, hardly ever the villain and more often than not you end up dead. But as they say, "When in Rome…die as a Roman," or something like that. At least there are steps...