[TV Review] Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror

Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2019) is the most incredibly robust and thought-provoking documentary to date about the relationship with the horror genre from a Black American perspective.

Based on the book of the same name entitled, Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011) by Robin Means Coleman, the documentary goes even further by examining the Black presence in horror from the very inception of celluloid itself and beyond. The quote from featured guest, writer, and educator Tananarive Due starts the film with a universal truth, “we’ve always loved horror…it’s just that horror hasn’t always loved us”.

There have always existed various horror tales within the Black diaspora that functioned as tools to titillate and teach. It’s only within the past few hundred years that we’ve incorporated white supremacy into the equation of our nightmares. There are particular ways we understand Black people the documentary asserts, especially those from a white gaze, and there exists valiant to pithy attempts to fully engage with or unpack the Black experience and the nuances and complexities of Black lives. Despite what history books would try to purport, Black life has never been stagnant and our history is deep, rich, and complex. The presence of film highlights the ways in which history from certain perspectives reflects or distorts the image you may receive about your own humanity. There are a myriad of intersections and excoriations of society within film whether it’s apparent at first glance or not.

For example, the film starts at the beginning of this dichotomy where Birth of a Nation first debuted in 1915 where an actor in ‘blackface’ makeup is depicted as the brute and the terror. Conversely, the white women are seen as docile beauties to be protected, and the white Ku Klux Klan is championed as hero and saviour riding in to save the day and the world from the threat and existence of the ‘black menace’. This starting point in the documentary is very important as it relates to film and history because it shows the ways in which society, the government, the media industry, and other powers can be complicit in the degradation, humiliation, and othering of Black life and Black people. The documentary is extremely thorough in its explorations of the fear induced by Black self-determination, our religious practices, beauty standards, and things of the like which are reflected in the roles that Black persons would oftentimes play in various horror films such as the mystical negro, quiet servile characters, primitive tribespeople, buffoons or comic reliefs, token ‘friends’ to the white character(s), red shirts that are targeted for a gruesome demise, and lastly sacrificial lambs—often interchangeable with a Mammy figure—whose sole purpose is to protect the white characters oftentimes with their bodies and lives.

The Black presence in horror, films or no, can often be two-fold where the Black person is on a sliding scale of invisibility to hyper-visibility by means of the characterizations and roles previously described. Black people have existed in variants of being non-existent in science fiction or horror films to being all the monsters and aliens or an exported character for the monsters and aliens; e.g., Creature from the Black Lagoon, King Kong. The documentary continues by moving into the Blacksploitation genre and its highs and lows within horror as a period of cheap investment, increased sex and sexualization (the highest cinematic period of pimps and prostitutes), and in some unique roundabout ways showing the burgeoning presence of empowering Black images.

The thing about media is that it is regularly a double-edged sword where there is a particular service or disservice in having Blackness seen at all. The stereotypes that can be introduced through the medium can be more disparaging and impactful than the good-well nuanced characters that reside on the periphery. As stereotypes are wont to do, they create an image that sticks and becomes broadly labeled across an entire community. Thus, in one decade you can have the intriguing story of Blacula (1972), corrective promotion of Black Women as heroes or independent agents in films like Sugar Hill (1974) or Scream Blacula Scream (1973), while also being saddled with the damage of Black men as villainous pimps and drug dealers, and Black women as prostitutes and victims, in stereotyping films like The Mack (1973) and Superfly (1972).

Horror Noire also shows how time can be self-reflective and redemptive. A prime example of this is comparing and contrasting two Black heroic horror icons such as Duane Jones in Night of the Living Dead (1968) which concludes in his grisly death from a white mob, filtered through the lens of 1960s Jim Crow imagery, versus the latter Get Out (2017) where the hero survives in the 2010s and most of the racism is micro-aggressive and covert to make white supremacy doubly insidious.

For some real-world documented horror education in regards to Black lives and history I would highly recommend the following books: Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington (2006), 100 Years of Lynching by Ralph Ginzburg (1962), Dr. Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (2005), and lastly Nell Irvin Painter’s The History of White People (2010) which discusses how racial whiteness came to be through art, history, science, ideology, and global power structure. The documentary Horror Noire is a historic and layered perspective on where we’ve been and where we’re going in media as a nation and society. Beyond the documentary, the increased surveillance of Black people and the heightened attention to racialized violence is indeed prescient and highlights that there is a lot of cognitive dissonance afoot and that people are going out kicking and screaming to uphold white privilege and the status quo.

I applaud the creators Robin Means Coleman, Director Xavier Burgin, Ashlee Blackwell, Danielle Burrows, Phil Noble Jr., and the legendary actors and collaborators that made Horror Noire possible. I’m one of many Black children that knew we had carved out a monumental space and a significant historical place in horror and history that had yet to be curated in a documentary format such as this. Horror Noire also exists as a series of podcast episodes and I would love to see the documentary live on via webinars, or have its own platform akin to the Turner Classic Movies channel.

There’s such a depth of information in this single documentary and I’d love to see more commentary in another instalment from the persons that are still alive to share their personal experiences with making these films and all of the content post-documentary. I know that they ran out of time but I’d love to hear the entire panel’s thoughts on Michael Jackson’s Thriller. It’s still one of the greatest short film/music videos of all time and their commentary on it so many years after its release would be invaluable. Lastly, for an additional perspective on my own thoughts surrounding Black people and their relation to horror — real and imagined — be sure to read my essay entitled: The Quagmire of Race and Horror in Cinema.

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