Now things have come full circle with a new Candyman film. Meanwhile on TV, both HBO's Lovecraft Country, produced by Peele, and Amazon's Them, have featured black-led casts and explored racism through a horror prism. On film, the spectrum of black-led or black-starring horror projects has ranged from Peele's smash hit Get Out follow-up, Us, to indie horrors like Remi Weekes's powerful immigration-themed British chiller His House and Justin Simien's satire Bad Hair to more mainstream, popcorn movies like Octavia Spencer vehicle Ma, Gerard McMurray's The Last Purge and Spiral, the latest instalment in the Saw franchise, which was led by two of Hollywood's biggest black stars, Chris Rock and Samuel L Jackson. Suddenly, the horror genre has become an artistic space where black people have become a lot more prominent both in front of and behind the camera. – The horror that was 2020's most timely hitĪn Oscar winner and massive box-office hit, it both subverted the genre's long record of offensive racial tropes, and showed there was a will for Western horror to correct its overriding whiteness.įour years on, its legacy can be seen across film and TV. – The X-rated masterpiece still being censored Jordan Peele's 2017 directorial debut masterfully skewered racism in US society by satirising the prejudice a young black man faces in modern America, among white people of all political persuasions – but it was also a watershed moment for horror.

Occasionally a film arrives that is so compelling, so utterly thrilling, that its impact alters the future of cinema.

Race-Baiting In America by D. Lee