For Colored Girls Who Love Horror Movies/When Wut We Get Ain’t Enough
By RJ Joseph
The inimitable Toni Morrison told us to write the stories we want to see. I’ve seen a whole, whole lot of horror films in my half-century on this side of existence. While there’s nothing new under the sun, there’s definitely a plethora of lenses through which we could offer horror to provide fresh takes on tropes that are growing stale from the overkill of homogenous viewpoints. Alas, my beloved genre loves its same old sameness…
Photo credit: KnowYourMeme.com
To be given the chance to unleash the pent-up horror creativity fed for years by some excellent—most, mediocre (and a few, downright shameful)—horror filmmaking in the past four decades…what a fantasy! Please, indulge a colored girl in this play-pretending, and let’s go to the movies to imagine:
- An anthology format, feature film with a Black, female emcee of an ambiguous religious background who ushers characters from four short stories into various interpretations of the afterlife. Tales from The Hood meets This Is Where You Fuc**ed Up.
- A feature film where a middle-aged Black woman collects ghosts in the furniture she uses to decorate her huge, fancy house. She traps the spirits to protect them from fading into forgotten oblivion and if she stops, she will face the same malevolent entity, The Voider, she protects them from. [Insert any one of the various haunted museums in The Universe here] meets Decorating in the ‘Hood and Protecting the Ancestors.
- A children’s animated series where a Black girl with cerebral palsy can see and command ghosts and teams up with them to solve mysteries. Scooby-Doo meets Black Girls Are Magic (phrase coined by Cashawn Thompson).
- A coming-of-age feature film about a group of five, inner city pre-teens who wonder about the story the mysterious Whistling Woman who lives in a lavish home outside the city center but visits the homes in their ‘hood for meals and entertainment. She is treated with reverence by their families, in hopes that she doesn’t begin to whistle inside their homes and ring in the death of a loved one. The truth they discover is more terrifying than her mere domestic visitations. It meets Let Black Kids Be Kids and Have Coming-of-Age Stories.
- A television series centered on the experiences of a Black, lesbian vampire couple that describes their origins in antebellum United States, their fight against slavery during the Civil War, the strategies they used to work towards eliminating Jim Crow, and how they continue to advance civil rights in current times. Interview with a Vampire meets Let Black Folks Be Vampires before Y’all Decide to Cancel the Bloodsuckers.
Photo credit: Keep Calm O’matic
See how fun those would be from perspectives we don’t often get to see on screen in fully developed lives and stories? And they’re just on the fly, right off the top of my head. I’m full of horror movie stories and scripts (I saved the REALLY stellar ones in my portfolio—can’t give away all my good-good in public!).
Industry professionals, holler at your girl. Let’s make some movies!
R.J. Joseph is a Texas-based Bram Stoker Award™ nominated writer who writes academically about and creatively within the horror genre. You can most often find her on Twitter, @rjacksonjoseph, and (after November 1, 2021) on her newly minted, teenager-created website at www.rhondajacksonjoseph.com.
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