Thursday, March 28, 2024

Tag: ghosts

Horror movies starring African-American actors involving ghosts, hauntings and haunted houses, occult, paranormal and supernatural themes.

Eloise
Eloise is pretty standard ghosts-of-mental-patients-and-staff-haunting-an-abandoned-asylum fare, but for the purposes of this site, it stands out for the role of Dell (Brandon T. Jackson), a character that's such a crudely drawn throwback, he should've been thrown away before filming began. Dell single-handedly embodies at least four tired black horror...
The Innocents (Los Inocentes)
As an American, I'm fairly comfortable relating the portrayal of black characters in horror movies to the racial dynamics in the US as a whole, but it's always interesting to see how black characters in foreign films come across. The Argentine movie The Innocents (not to be confused with...
Blair Witch poster
As I watched 2016's Blair Witch, I couldn't put my finger on why I found the presence of two black characters in the main cast so striking. I mean, there have been other horror movies with multiple black cast members amongst the primary cast -- typically, a "black guy/black...
White Fright; Or, Why Are There No Black People in Haunted House Movies?
Ever since 2009's Paranormal Activity wrested the horror crown away from the Saw franchise, fright films featuring ghosts or demonic entities have ruled the genre, churning out hit after hit -- from the Paranormal Activity films to The Haunting in Connecticut, The Devil Inside, Mama, The Last Exorcism and...
The Devil Lives Here
It's a well-known running gag that black characters in American horror movies tend to be human fodder, but at least they exist, unlike films from other countries, where they're largely invisible because of a dearth of A) horror movies and/or B) black people. Even in countries with a decent...
Death Spa horror movie
Revolving around a series of deaths in a health club and featuring lines like "I'm Beta, and you're VHS," Death Spa is a movie that's so '80s, it's got Drakkar Noir seeping from its pores -- which is odd, because according to IMDb, it actually wasn't released until 1990...
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 --...
Death's Door The Trap Door horror movie
According to IMDb, African-American writer-director Kennedy Goldsby has five feature films to his credit, but in reality, he has four. You see, 2011's The Trap Door and 2015's Death's Door are in fact the same movie. Having suffered through both, I know. This isn't some kind of Exorcist: The...
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,...
The Inheritance horror movie
Watching The Inheritance, it’s hard not to think of it as an Afro-centric spin on the classic British thriller The Wicker Man, with their similarly constructed story lines about people lured to a remote locale by hosts who have dark, ulterior motives. Luckily, writer-director Robert O’Hara resisted the urge...