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  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 the horror genre. As landmark of a film as Get Out...

Most actors and actresses have to pay their dues before they become famous, and one genre well versed in due-paying is horror. Popular with producers out to make a quick buck yet reviled by critics, horror movies are both high in number and low in esteem, making them perfect entry-level fare for aspiring thespians. In fact, some of the...

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.

Historically, black people's contributions to horror cinema have been hailed about as much as Donald Trump's contributions to racial unity, but there are some noteworthy figures of color from the past and present who deserve some recognition within the genre, so I've taken it upon myself to create the Black Horror Movie Hall of Fame. Feel free to tip the...

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 you can take to make your inevitable demise run as...

Originally published on PopMatters.com I have a secret passion; the less addicted of you might call it an addiction. I like to watch. I rent base, filthy movies and slip them into brown paper bags so no one can tell. I sit alone in seedy, near-empty theaters, pleasuring myself with this trash. I'm too embarrassed to tell anyone about my...

Originally published on MadAtoms.com You've seen him in every horror movie since 1984: the black guy who hangs out with a group of white people he has nothing in common with, whose only purpose, it seems, is to die first. He's been sliced into pieces in Resident Evil, de-armed in Predator, and he had his head punched off in Friday...

Everyone knows that the "black guy" (or gal) usually dies in horror movies -- so much so, in some instances, the characters themselves seem to be aware of their inevitable fate. Thus, we have the phenomenon of black "heroic death," in which black characters (usually peripheral) voluntarily sacrifice themselves -- or at least, volunteer for tasks that mean certain...

Representations of Africa in Horror Movies When Toto sang about Africa back in the day, it sounded so much more inviting than what we see coming out of Hollywood. Horror movies in particular have been guilty of perpetuating the image of “darkest Africa”, filled with ravenous animals and wild-eyed natives who wouldn’t even shake your hand before biting it off....

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, things have changed in both quantity and quality over the...