Review: Horror Noire
The beautiful thing about being a part of the horror fan community is the feeling of inclusivity. Among the myriad of pop culture microcosms, no other fandom is as welcoming and friendly with each other than the horror-hounds I've met in my life time. Horror unites us all with its overtly expressive imagery, commenting on the universal fears that plague us all. We're all under that fearful umbrella together so the genre pushes us to express and talk about our fears, our society as a whole and what part we play in it.
Though horror has helped us reconcile ourselves with our innate trepidation about existence, for one community the genre has also helped bridge the gap between misrepresentation and genuine empowerment. Shudder Original, HORROR NOIRE: A HISTORY OF BLACK HORROR, is the chronicling of the black community's history on the scary silver screen.
Working as a timeline of black representation in horror cinema, Horror Noire begins with a brief touch on Jordan Peele's recent masterpiece, GET OUT, and how fellow black artists received the film before zipping all the way back to D.W. Griffith's monstrous epic of racism, THE BIRTH OF A NATION. The history of these films is pieced together from black horror experts such as Ernest Dickerson, Rusty Cundieff, Rachel True, Tananarive Due, Ken Foree, William Crane, etc. Their depth of knowledge and personal memories of cinema are immediately striking, as each artists relays their own experiences with horror growing up and how they began to notice the inadequacy of black voices in cinema. The frustration of William Craine getting turned down for a high-speed camera for his film BLACULA because the studio didn't care to spend more money. The disappointment felt by Rachel True as she learned her characters anguish in THE CRAFT was her race. These are just some of the stories relayed by black artists throughout HORROR NOIRE that point towards the enormous apathy Hollywood felt towards the black community for the first ninety or so years of film-making as a medium.
Beyond its examination of marginalization, HORROR NOIRE works as a wonderfully entertaining look back at the truly great black artists of cinema. Recalling problematic (but highly entertaining) trash like ABBY and BLACKENSTEIN all the way to genuinely excellent horror entries like GET OUT, TALES FROM THE HOOD and, of course, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the documentary is a veritable whose who of awesome black cinema. Any horror fan could find months of recommended viewing here and have their minds blown time and time again.
Ending on the poignant interaction from William Craine's 1972 BLACULA wherein William Marshall's vampire explains why a character can't see himself in the mirror, "I'm afraid that is one of the misfortunes of the cursed", HORROR NOIRE's deep dive into the black community's role in our beloved genre is powerful, informative and, like the quote above explains, a reflection we must see in cinema.