Tag: haunted houses
As I've pointed out previously, haunted house movies (especially major releases) rarely feature black families because, well, black families are rarely shown as embodying the suburban ideal that is inevitably shattered by a haunting. Home bucks that trend...to an extent. The family in question is half black -- that...
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 Skeleton Key is one of those movies that uses a white lead character to explore an aspect of black culture while most of the black characters remain peripheral -- sort of like a supernatural A Time to Kill, or Breakin' with hate crimes. Thus, I was a bit...
While the original remake (oxymoron?) of House on Haunted Hill was notable for having a black hero (Taye Diggs), this direct-to-video sequel is notable for NOT having a black hero. It basically steps over the fact that Diggs' character survived the first film, instead focusing on Ali Larter's character,...
Nailed is an impressive little urban horror flick that was filmed largely in, of all places, Ireland -- a country with so few black people that it's actually not considered a bad trait. It's sort of like finding someone from the lost city of Atlantis: neat! (Or so I...
An all-black horror comedy starring Mantan Moreland and sometimes partner (and straight man) F.E. Miller, Lucky Ghost is amusing low-brow fare that exploits the more base, stereotypical elements of old-time black life (chicken thievin', gamblin', runnin' from ghosteses) for laughs -- sort of like the BET of its day....
Boy, this ranks up there with Curse of the Voodoo in the "Most Likely to Be Boycotted by Al Sharpton" category. Lone black East Side Kid Scruno (Ernest "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison) is the butt of so many racial jokes, it's almost fascinating -- like a time capsule of how...
Sleepover at the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane? Count me in! House on Haunted Hill was one of the first in a glut of glossy remakes of horror classics that came out in the late '90s and into the 21st century, and it's still one of the...
Haunted Spooks is perhaps best known as the film that almost cost daredevil silent-film comedy legend Harold Lloyd his life -- a not-so-proppish bomb exploded in his hand, costing him a couple of fingers -- but it's also one of the earliest movies to feature the ol' "spook" stereotype...
Four decades before Ghostbusters, Bob Hope and his "boy" (as he's billed in the film's trailer) Willie Best were The Ghost Breakers, investigating a haunted house in Cuba in this remake of a lost 1922 Wallace Reid film called The Ghost Breaker. Hope, to his credit, isn't as demeaning...
