The ‘90s. It was the decade of transgression in more ways than one. Grunge was taking a hold in the mainstream. People were drinking more, smoking more, buying more – all while they worked more to pay for it all. Socially, shows like MTV’s The Real World brought previously taboo topics such as sexuality, substance abuse, and abortion more clearly into the public discourse. After decades of race issues being pushed aside, the videotaped beating of Rodney King by police officers in Los Angeles — and the subsequent trial where those officers were found ‘innocent’ — ignited not just riots in L.A. but the world over. It felt like revolution was in the air, and nowhere was the decade’s character of extremity and contradiction more obvious than in Hollywood.
Because groundbreaking films like Malcolm X, Trainspotting, The Doom Generation, The Matrix, and My Own Private Idaho came out in the 90s, we tend to romanticise the entire decade as its most fearless. One where Hollywood took big swings to match the massive socio-political changes at play outside the studio doors. And to an extent, it was. A wave of exciting young filmmakers were breaking out, writing and directing some of the sharpest, weirdest films Hollywood had ever seen. But, like with most movements of freedom, Black filmmakers and talent were left out by an industry still set on limiting the perspectives of Blackness seen on-screen. Picture a young Black actress, tired of the very little work available despite her immense talents, restricted to playing the victim or best friend in an industry set on typecasting her.
Kasi Lemmons began her career as an actress, playing second fiddle to talents such as Jodie Foster and Nicolas Cage in acclaimed films like The Silence of the Lambs and Vampire’s Kiss. Out of the frustration that was born from this constant sidelining, she wrote and directed Eve’s Bayou in 1997, birthing a movement of Black creative resistance through the lens of horror.
Yes, horror films that featured Black people existed before Eve’s Bayou: The Lucky Ghost (1942), Blacula (1972), and even another film that Lemmons was in, Candyman (1992). It’s a well-known trope for you to struggle to survive if you’re Black in a horror film. If you’re not trying to last beyond the first 30 minutes, then you were the “Magical Negro”: a rarefied, mystical Black person capable of the supernatural, yet written by a white hand incapable of rendering you fully human. The above films all play into these tropes.
Eve’s Bayou was different, though.
With her debut, Lemmons found a way to go beyond the boxed-in expectations of a Black film. A melodramatic, beautiful Southern horror movie, the film explores with unrelenting focus the weight of trauma, the stifling nature of rigid gender roles and shame, all through the eyes of a young girl who watches her family unravel. It is a drama as much as it is a supernatural genre piece, and that is what makes it the start of a key cinematic movement. It set a precedent where Black lives were explored unflinchingly the way they might be in a drama without sacrificing the classic horror tropes and themes that entertain audiences. Here was a new vehicle for having difficult discussions about things like racism and sexism, a new way of centring Black talent without it having to be another slave story, and you could do all of that while making something narratively captivating too.
The most famous modern practitioner of horror as a social exercise is, of course, none other than Jordan Peele. With Get Out, the entire premise of the film is for us to watch as a Black man is exoticised by the very white people from whom he seeks acceptance. The classic markers of what makes a horror film a horror film play so perfectly into Peele’s mission statement in Get Out: there is an unfriendly entity that poses danger to our protagonist, an isolated suburban home that holds eerie secrets, and countless unsettling encounters. The only difference is that these tropes are weaponized to not only thrill but to illuminate a very true evil: white supremacy.
Form and content go hand in hand here. The film’s suspense builds as the microaggressions build, forcing even a white audience to acknowledge the bizarre social rhythms of racism that Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) encounters from his girlfriend’s family and friends. The everyday interactions that Black people have been told for decades to ignore, have been gaslit into believing were false, end up being the dramatic catalyst that drives the entire story. The film’s genius? The fact that by the time the police car shows up at the end of the film, there is collective trepidation from the audience as opposed to relief. We have been operating consciously of race: we know that there is no world in which a police officer sees a Black man surrounded by dead white bodies and a live weapon and it ends well for our protagonist. The social implications in a then Trumpian America are beyond clear.
We do not expect Chris to survive an encounter with a police officer, because we have been so attuned to Black discomfort and reality for so long in the film that this story of racialised horror can only have one outcome. With Get Out, the movement shifts from one where the horror genre coexists in fascinating ways with the realities of Blackness, to racism being the personified ‘monster’ we want our protagonist to survive.
This movement was brought even further into the mainstream with the greenlighting of The First Purge (directed by Gerard McMurray), the fourth film in the horror series The Purge. It served as a contextualising film, helping the audience understand how the Purge (an annual 12-hour period in which crime is legal) became socially acceptable in this cinematic world. It was also the first one of the series directed by a Black filmmaker.
In the movie, the Purge is enforced by a ruling right-wing political party called the “New Founding Fathers,” with their Chief of Staff Arlo Sabian (Patch Darragh) utilising a pre-existing trial as a sanctioned evening of ethnic cleansing. The experiment is confined to New York’s Staten Island, chosen because of its largely Black and Latino demographic. Here, in Peele-ian terms, the horror is a clear one: the motivation of evil here is racism. The First Purge gave Black storytellers the capacity to further explore the animalisation of marginalised people, but in a more accessible and direct way. Here, there is very little need to infer or investigate the symbols. The point is clear, and the hope is for your experience in theatres to drive you to recognise the patterns and institutions that Black people have to deal with in their day-to-day lives after the credits start rolling.
Another fascinating facet of this Black horror/Black consciousness movement is that there are so many ways to approach it, so many sub-identities within Blackness to explore. Films like Remi Weekes’s His House, and more recently Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny, engage with an even scarcer perspective often lacking onscreen: that of the Black immigrant. With protagonists hailing from Sudan and Senegal, respectively, these new additions to this wave of horror shine a glaring spotlight on the realities of non-African-American Blackness. Power, the weighty reality of displacement, and what you would tolerate for the sake of belonging all play heavily into the themes of anxiety that drive the suspense of both films. In the previously mentioned films, the sociological focus is never one that undermines the artistry and entertainment to be gained, with His House and Nanny being stunningly shot, acted, and scored. Form is not forgotten in favour of content, but is rather elevated by it.
With Wendell and Wild, we get a taste of what the future of horror (and animation) can look like. Following a rebellious, Afro-punk thirteen-year-old named Kat (Lyric Ross) as she battles demons, her own trauma, and the prison industrial complex, this collaboration between Henry Selick and Jordan Peele brought us one of the few Black characters centred in a film of its type. The film manages to balance the fun gothic self-indulgence of stop-motion animation with a grounded assessment of the damaged social constructs of juvenile detention in the US. It has a core rooted in social justice (it wouldn’t be a Jordan Peele piece if it didn’t), but you could just as easily let yourself be swept up in what is a beautifully twisted, carnivalesque gothic delight. It is a small marker of the future that we hope to enjoy as Black creatives; one where we can be just as self-indulgent as our white counterparts, writing all sorts of stories removed from racial trauma without sidelining our identity.
In a world where Black people are often alienated, the importance of this movement that started Eve’s Bayou to de-centre us as villains or disposable plot devices cannot be overstated. With their work, filmmakers like Kasi Lemmons, Nikyatu Jusu, and Jordan Peele are proving that we too are deserving of human understanding, of exercising compassion for. Striving to reframe our relationship to the horror genre and creating Black empathetic protagonists is a vital ideal to fight for. Even if it means causing a few frights to get there.
