Black Horror Films Have Always Known Who the Real Monster Is – OkayPlayer

Damon “Coke” Daniels had reached his limit. The pandemic days of 2020 were a blur of loss, and he refused to sit idle. Names had become hashtags — George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor — and then rallying cries. With COVID-19 keeping many off the streets, Daniels found another outlet for protest. He decided to make a movie.
The result was Karen, a 2021 suburban nightmare pulled straight from news headlines and MAGA tropes. The BET Originals dark satire followed the titular white woman (played by Taryn Manning), who uses her privilege to torment her new Black neighbors. It wasn’t about undead ghouls or possessed dolls. The big, bad monster was bigotry itself.

Written and directed by Crystle Roberson Dorsey, the short film examines death and depression and how Black men cope.
“Racism in America is a real-life horror story for minorities,” Daniels told Okayplayer, before referencing former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s brutal murder of Floyd. “A man gets choked out in broad daylight in front of a crowd of people… That’s a horror story.”
There’s an unfortunate cliché that has haunted Hollywood productions for decades: in horror movies, Black characters are often underwritten tokens, best known for dying shortly after the opening credits. But there’s also a far more radical tradition of Black creators flipping the genre on its head, using horror to tell stories about racism, inequality, and the systems that sustain them. Their work channels suspense, satire, and fear not just to scare audiences but to hold up a mirror to the everyday terrors Black Americans know too well.
Robin R. Means Coleman, author of Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present, refers to Black horror as “our social syllabus” that exposes the ills Black people face on the regular.
“Black horror is set within a historical context where Black people’s boundaries have been disrupted,” Coleman said. “Black folks have to keep their heads on a swivel, always asking, ‘In what way are violations coming at me?’”
The lineage of films depicting those transgressions began long before President Donald Trump took office. You can rewind to the 1970s for Blacula and its sequel, Scream Blacula Scream, both of which repurposed European vampire lore for the Black Power era, infusing the monster’s curse with centuries of racial trauma. In 1974, Abby, a blaxploitation riff on The Exorcist, made demonic possession a metaphor for the ways Black women navigate systems that seek to control their bodies and agency.
entertainment home featured hollywood film and tv film tv film social commentary jordan peele black horror racism

Written and directed by Crystle Roberson Dorsey, the short film examines death and depression and how Black men cope.
Filmmakers continued to connect social critique with supernatural terror in the 1990s. Candyman, released in ’92, brought horror to Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, where an urban legend about a hook-handed killer reflected real fears of neglect and demonization of Black communities. You still won’t catch this writer saying his name five times.
Later films added humor to help make the messaging more palatable. The 1995 horror-comedy anthology Tales From the Hood became a cult classic by stitching together short stories about police brutality, gang violence, and systemic injustice. The Blackening (2022) served real talk about race while poking fun at slasher film tropes — most prominently, the one about Black characters dying first.
Upon its 2017 release, Get Out became the benchmark for making viewers laugh while delivering unsettling truths about overt and covert racism in America. Writer and director Jordan Peele didn’t spare white liberals, either. The surreal horror film touched on America’s dark history of exploitation, from auction blocks to medical experimentation to cultural appropriation.
“That was the power of Get Out and what made it so important — we were sitting uncomfortably on the edge of, ‘Yeah, we’re still doing this today,’” said Coleman. “White people were like, ‘I’m liberal enough to go see a Black horror movie and, ha, he got me. He’s critiquing me.’ Of course, that’s going to attract attention.”
When it comes to Hollywood, green is the color that matters most, and Get Out generated lots of it: more than $255 million worldwide against a $4.5 million budget. Daniels remembers film studios clamoring for similar “social thrillers.” You can see the movie’s DNA in the productions that have been greenlit in its wake, from 2018’s Sorry to Bother You to 2023’s They Cloned Tyrone to the Hulu series The Other Black Girl.
“Our show would not have existed if Get Out did not exist first,” said Jordan Reddout, co-showrunner of The Other Black Girl, which premiered in 2023. “Not just because of the topic that it dealt with — having race at the center of a horror movie was so brilliant — but also the tone of Get Out really paved the way because of how funny it was. It was a wild ride and such a smart way to put all of those elements together in a way that was digestible.”
Adapted from Zakiya Dalila Harris’ novel of the same name, Hulu’s discontinued series shines a fluorescent light on the horror of being the only Black woman working in an office full of white faces, where survival often means walking a tightrope between assimilation and authenticity. While the danger isn’t physical, microaggressions abound abundantly. “I don’t see color!” Check. “Can I touch your hair?” Check.
“If I sit and think about all of the microaggressions I’ve experienced, I’m going to shrivel up into a ball and absolutely disintegrate,” Reddout told Okayplayer. “Or I can just laugh and say, ‘Wasn’t that crazy?’… You have to survive in some way. Laughing some of the microaggressions off is an act of resilience.”
Yet sometimes the on-screen horrors are too intense to joke about. Critics have called movies like Antebellum (2020) and series like Them (2021) “trauma porn” for the way they depict gratuitous Black suffering with little emotional payoff or broader social commentary. Whereas Get Out and The Other Black Girl used discomfort to provoke reflection, these projects often left audiences simply exhausted.
“Trauma porn is where it feels exploitative, where we’re harming Black people just to harm them,” said Coleman. “That’s a tricky balance in horror. It’s both horrifying and it’s felt too much because you can’t remove the narrative from the social context.”
The latest great entry into the Black horror canon is the 2025 blockbuster Sinners, celebrated and praised for its storytelling depth and the nuance it brings to the vampire subgenre. Based in Clarksdale, Miss., in 1932, the film centers on culture, community, and love before any white supremacists or vampires bear arms or fangs. More than half of the movie is just Black folks living their Black lives. Still, writer-director Ryan Coogler depicts economic oppression, the lasting scars of enslavement, and the tension between blues artists and the Black church.
“One of the things that makes Sinners unique is the attention to Black communities and communities of color — Chinese-Americans in the Delta — standing up for a cultural moment that is for us, by us,” said Coleman. “They’re loving on each other. There’s humor, music. That’s incredible. You don’t have to deal with the specter of the Ku Klux Klan hovering as they try to pull this juke joint together. When they come back at the end you’re almost like, ‘Oh, right. I forgot about them.’”
The hope for substance-packed Black horror films is that they’re not forgotten once the end credits roll. The ultimate goal is to get people talking and thinking long after the theatre’s lights turn on. Daniels believes good films have that power.
“You’re going to laugh, you’re going to cry, get angry, yell at the screen,” he said. “Racism, social injustice, and police brutality unfortunately aren’t going anywhere… But [films] help start conversations.”

Quick links
News
Music
Film + TV
Video
Podcasts
Shop
Company
Contact us
Privacy policy
Submit a Song
Open Positions
Social
Okayplayer is a division of AREYA MEDIA Inc. Originally launched in 1999, Okayplayer is the original progressive music site and maintains its position as the premier digital destination for music and culture connoisseurs worldwide.