151 Search results for "horror"

by Andrew Keahey Comedy is not an easy gig. Your career is forged in the fire of public opinion in clubs full of drunk people who will eat you alive if you show one iota of fear or doubt. Maybe you carry around a little notebook where you write down disconnected ideas that exist nebulously […]

by Andrew Keahey I can remember the exact moment that hip-hop and the horror genre intersected for me. I was spending the night with a friend. We had played some games and listened to the local chart-topper radio station, then he suggested we watch The Fly (1986). I recall telling him that I wasn’t sure […]

by Andrew Keahey This essay contains some spoilers for The First Purge. Catharsis is important. As marginalized people, every day that we’re alive and drawing breath in this country, we are bombarded with things that infuriate and sadden us. The news not only traumatizes us by showing us the seemingly incessant violence perpetrated against us, […]

by Andrew Keahey Black horror films have a consistent combination of factors that make them successful in the public eye: relatability and catharsis. The elements in our horror movies meant to frighten and upset are often familiar to us, and are scary because the fear is something we have felt before, and often. When the […]

by Andrew Keahey Jordan Peele is really killing it lately. First, there was the unprecedented success of his horror opus Get Out, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Now, he’s been announced as the showrunner for a new, updated Twilight Zone. His next horror project, Us, will star Winston Duke and […]

In the years between Victor Halerpin’s White Zombie (1932) and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), Blackness in the horror genre has largely been a myriad of hidden slavery narratives featuring gendered anti-Black violence and racist dehumanization. Excepting the stories that include Black characters as tokens or magical negroes who ensure the survival of white characters—usually […]

Jordan Peele, a comedian most notably known for his half of the famous sketch show, Key and Peele, has apparently always had an interest in horror films. So he went ahead and shocked us all by making one and it looks really, really good. 

by Vanessa Anyanso I don’t know what it’s like to be a therapist during “normal times.” I, a Nigerian American born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, moved to Minneapolis in Fall 2019 to start my doctoral program in Counseling Psychology. The world shut down for the pandemic in March 2020. In May 2020, […]

by Michael J. Ivory, Jr. The day I told my Pentecostal preacher parents I didn’t want to attend church with them anymore, I remember feeling a profound freedom. For once, I chose my Black queer body’s peace over witnessing my existence being raked over hellfire coals. No more shallowed breath at the altar. No more […]

by Juahl Ganaway In a scene ripped from The Sugar Shack, the character Pearline (played by the stunning Jayme Lawson) stalks across the stage purring the lyrics to “Pale, Pale, Moon,” the Brittany Howard-penned song that feels more like an invocation than a performance.  “I wanna sing Like I hear the crickets do I wanna […]

In the United States, police kill over 1,000 and injure more than 51,000 people each year, with evidence suggesting that these figures could be underreported by as much as 55%. In addition to these numbers being substantially higher than other developed nations, unfortunately, they are also plagued by biases and systematic failures which disproportionately affect […]

Editor’s Note: This essay contains descriptions of anti-Black and anti-queer violence. Sometimes, I give white people the wrong directions when they get lost. For awhile, this was on accident. I am horrible with directions, and so I wouldn’t even know I was pointing them the wrong way. But mostly when I do this today, it […]