The Short-Lived Glory Of The '90s Black Horror Movie

Peruse any streamer for Black horror films on Halloween (or any time of the year), and you might notice a good stretch of hit movies from the 1990s: “Vampire in Brooklyn,” “Tales From the Hood,” “Eve’s Bayou,” “Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight,” “Candyman” and so on.You might also realize that by the end of the decade, their success faded — until 2017’s “Get Out.” What led to the string of releases in the first place? A number of things, according to Mikal Gaines, an assistant professor of English at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.

Advertisement For one, by the end of the ’80s, the industry was looking for something a bit fresher and out of the scope of the three big villains in the genre at the time: Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers.“‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ and ‘Friday the 13th’ have all kind of gotten especially meta at that point,” Gaines said.

“So there’s just space for weird stuff to open up and for new mythologies to pop in.” In comes offerings like 1990’s “Def by Temptation,” directed by James Bond III, which follows a Black succubus (Cynthia Bond) who hunts lascivious Black men.Director Wes Craven, who had been entrenched in the genre long before the ’90s, with hits like the “Nightmare on Elm Street” movies beginning in 1984, centered a young Black hero (Brandon Quintin Adams) in 1991’s creepy “The People Under the Stairs.” Add to that, in 1992, “Candyman” ignited a whole new franchise with a titular Black villain (Tony Todd).

“We’re in a weird moment in the genre when people are prepared to kind of take a lot of chances that they might not necessarily have taken,” Gaines said, “since blaxploitation.” Advertisement That seems fair to say.Both eras of Black film also highlighted a social consciousness as well as an investment in more, say, autonomous Black filmmaking.

Black horror was an outgrowth of that.Gaines eve...