Let’s say you’re a horror fan- or someone who just really loved Get Out- and maybe you’ve recently watched the award-winning Shudder documentary, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror and loved that too. So where to go from here? Like all pathways to someplace new, it can be challenging to know where to start, particularly once you discover Get Out and Candyman are part of a broader tradition going back way further than 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, or even the 1930’s when Zora Neale Hurston was studying zombie myths in Haiti …

There’s a school of thought (or, non-thought, as it were) that says you should just turn your brain off and enjoy movies. If it’s not “high-brow” entertainment, then it’s not worthy of exploration. Certainly, horror films, with their low production values and cheap thrills meant for teenagers aren’t worthy of serious study. But as seen in Xavier Burgin’s excellent documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, analyzing the horror genre is perhaps most worthy of study because of how it shows us how black people are depicted in American popular cinema. Although …