Monday, June 5, 2023

Tag: slashers

Horror movies featuring black actors from the slasher-film genre.

Writers Retreat movie poster
The British film Writers Retreat feels like a throwback -- somewhere between a more violent Agatha Christie murder mystery and a less stylized giallo -- but one progressive element it has going for it is the fact that the main protagonist is black. And gay. So, you know, two...
Party Day Massacre Stories
Party Day Massacre Stories is a movie in the same way that I would be a surgeon if I were to sneak into a hospital, steal some scrubs and haphazardly dig around a patient's chest cavity with a can opener. Yes, I'm technically performing an operation, but no one...
Phantom of the Grindhouse
Even though we're well into the 21st century, it's still disturbingly rare to find a black person playing the primary villain in a horror movie -- despite the fact that black is overwhelmingly the skin color of choice for anonymous gang members and thugs in any genre. Why would...
Machete Joe
Looking at its cover art, Machete Joe seems like just another cheapo slasher movie, but a couple of things set this film apart from the pack. First, the cast -- including the killer -- is primarily black (not that you can tell from the light-skinned victim and the shadowy...
Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!
It's hard to ignore a title like Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill!, but although I'd heard of it, it took me a few years to actually check it out. And when I did...lo and behold, it has black folks! More specifically, BOTH of the main protagonists are black -- which,...
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...
Holla II horror movie
Back in 2006, the slasher Holla was a refreshingly competent change of pace for all-black horror movies, which had become saturated with the likes of Zombiez, Vampiyaz, Bloodz vs. Wolvez and other similarly repugnant garbage. Holla was by no means a classic, but it helped raise the bar for...
Chain Letter horror movie poster
With its mostly white cast, you wouldn’t necessarily deduce that Chain Letter had a black director -- Black Horror Hall of Famer Deon Taylor (Nite Tales, Dead Tone, Meet the Blacks). Upon closer examination, though, you realize that it sneaks in one of the rarest of horror movie occurrences:...
Memorial Valley Massacre horror movie poster
This tame, forgettable slasher stands out for having not one, not two, but THREE black characters! With speaking parts! And names! Nipsey Russell would've been so proud. The roles are generic horror movie shells: a biker dude named...Morie? (Charles Douglass), his biker chick named Sara (Livingston Holmes) and an...
Zombie Island Massacre
You'd be hard-pressed to find a film containing the word "zombie" in the title that has less to do with zombies than this one. A zombie is raised by a voodoo ritual in the first 15 minutes, but it's promptly killed and never heard from again. The film then...