Member-only story
Black Horror: Dawn of a New Era
What scares us most on film
To say that the horror genre is having a moment would be an understatement. Gone are the slasher films of the 80s, and thoughtful movies like Hereditary, Babadook, and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night are taking center stage. Within this larger horror revival lives a renaissance of Black Horror. From Get Out to The First Purge, Black writers, producers and directors have illustrated the magic that unfolds when black people have full control of their own art. This moment owes its existence to a movement that for decades shifted the landscape of horror by increasing the visibility of Blackness in within the genre.
In 1968, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead came to life on the silver screen. It wasn’t the only thing to come to life, for this was a zombie film — and a momentous one at that. It was not the first zombie film — filmmakers appropriated and capitalized Haitian folklore in the decades before. No, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was iconic because it erected the modern zombies that form the foundation of today’s corpse-laden thrillers: The Walking Dead, Dawn of the Dead, etc. Romero’s film was special in another way — it marked one of the first occasions on which a Black actor (Duane Jones) starred as the lead in a Hollywood horror movie.
