Tag: stereotypes
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...
Horror movies tend to be thought of as hollow entertainment, but horror has a long history of addressing heavy social issues, whether directly or through symbolic or allegorical means. Perhaps the heaviest of heavy social issues is race relations -- especially in the United States -- but these horror/suspense...
Boo 2! A Madea Halloween for me is kind of like a visit to the dentist you’ve been putting off for years. I’ve been meaning to get to it because I know I SHOULD (with Boo 2, for the sake of cultural literacy; with my teeth, for the sake...
The Tale of the Voodoo Prostitute is a Miley Cyrus type of horror movie. That is, it's awash in crude cultural appropriation, adopting a stereotypical vision of blackness for some perceived hipness factor without ever truly buying into black culture. As evidenced by the golden gun-toting gangsta on the...
Remember when the most controversial thing about the cast of The Cosby Show was Lisa Bonet's sex scene in Angel Heart? Ah, the good ol' days.
The year was 1987, and the Huxtables were America's family, but their facade of upper-middle-class sitcom perfection took a hit when word came that...
Today, the status of African Americans in horror films is tied intrinsically to the status of African Americans in cinema as a whole. That is, it has come a long way since the wild-eyed tribesmen of King Kong and has even seen notable advances just within the past decade,...
I tend to eye any movie about voodoo that has nary a person of color in it suspiciously. Has voodoo become gentrified now? Are white people conjuring Baron Samedi in between their twerking sessions and "This Is America" parody videos?
Coming across the title VooDoo, I had two immediate thoughts....
The Canadian production Voodoo Dolls feels like a relic -- even more so than the nearly three-decades-old film already is. Its images of a shirtless black man clad in tribal paint and beaded necklaces, drumming in a trance-like state and menacing the white female protagonist seem like they're straight...
I'm no expert on UK culture, but it seems that for the first decade or so of the 21st century, there was a (real or perceived) increase in adolescent crime attributed to youths dressed in hoodies who seemingly adopted what they saw as the dangerous elements of hip-hop culture,...
Boo! A Madea Halloween is a movie that shouldn't exist. It was conceived as a joke by Chris Rock for his movie Top Five, and Tyler Perry, apparently unfamiliar with the concept of parody, took it as a challenge. Thus, less than two years after Top Five opened, Tyler...