Monday, March 18, 2024

Tag: miscegenation

Best Black Horror Movies of 2023
Cinema in 2023 boasted a slew of surprise hits and surprise flops, but one constant was the Black presence in horror. Not necessarily a year of earth-shattering accomplishments, 2023 was for Black horror more about consistency and variety, broadening the typical Black roles into period pieces, ghost stories, mad...
Bones and All
No, Bones and All isn’t a sequel to Bones in which Snoop Dogg teams with laundry detergent to “clean up” the streets© (all rights reserved), nor is it some sort of intricate, erection-centric orgy positioning. Rather, Bones and All is a romance about…cannibals. That’s right; those sexy vampires have...
The Invitation
Not to be confused with Karyn Kusama’s 2015 “guess who’s culting to dinner” chiller The Invitation, the 2022 The Invitation—which plays more like an aborted Vampire Diaries spin-off—does share some similarities with Kusama’s superior film: both center around a black woman and a white man in an interracial relationship...
Blackstock Boneyard
I feel like at one point, Blackstock Boneyard’s intention was to be taken seriously. Marketed as being "in the tradition of Candyman," it was originally titled Rightful, which sounds like either a Civil Rights Movement period drama or a Kirk Cameron right-to-life wet dream. It’s based on the true...
The Summoned
The Summoned is well-made but by-the-numbers horror fare that relies on well-worn genre tropes -- the isolated location, the mysterious and most likely malevolent host, the creepy stranger who holds all the secrets, the foreboding dreams, the token black guy -- but for once, the black guy here is...
Night’s End
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...
Night of the Strangler
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...
Kindred
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...
The Clearing
It wasn’t too long ago (2013, to be exact) that a Cheerios commercial entitled “Just Checking” made national headlines for sparking a torrent of racial hatred online over its portrayal of an interracial (READ: BLACK AND WHITE) couple and their daughter. While it would be tough to say that...
Head Count
It’s sad that in 2019, it’s still rare enough for a black woman to be the primary love interest in a “non-black” horror movie that when it happens, it’s noteworthy. Leading black male love interests aren’t particularly common either, but black guys at least seem to get more supporting...