Dark Horror

I'm listening to an older episode of the Splattercast right now (43) and one of the guys just said the craziest thing. He was reading off the DVD releases (for September 2007) and came across the listing for Snoop Dogg's Hood of Horror. This sparked a smidge of discussion on 'urban horror.' For those who don't know, these are kind of the horror equivalent of Tyler Perry movies. They are (usually) straight-to-DVD horror movies with largely black casts set in black neighbhorhoods with similar themes to every other horror movie. They tend to be fairly low-budget and feature at least one rapper and a bunch of actors you've either never heard of or haven't heard from in a very long time. I haven't seen a lot of them. In fact, I think Snoop Dogg's Bones is the only one I've actually paid good damn money to see. I'm on a little horror kick (too many to watch, so little time), so perhaps I'll add some of these to my Netflix queue.

Aaaaaaanyway. The tripped out thing is that one of the guys said he didn't think black people watched a lot of horror movies. Whaaaaaaaaaaat? Now, I know I've never been a perfect representation of what black people like, but I do know that black folks like to get their scare on. They didn't set two Leprechaun movies in the Hood for nothin'.

Besides the numerous 'urban' horror films, black people are regular connoisseurs of all sorts of horror. I mean, my love for the genre had to start somewhere. Unlike kids today, there was no parental control on our cable box so I could watch all the Freddy, Michael, and Jason I wanted. Nobody checked IDs at the ticket counter to make sure you could see a film. It wouldn't have mattered much if they had because I didn't have to watch movies sneakily. My mother didn't give a crap. (Except that one time we wanted to watch this Richard Pryor special on cable and she wouldn't let us and I smart-mouthed that "we get to hear [the bad language] at home anyway" and.....I don't remember much else after that, but that might explain my split personality.)

Our family watched The Exorcist together for chrissakes! My mother owned Cannibal Holocaust (I did watch that one on the sly). We all went next door to our neighbor's house to watch Friday the 13th Pt. 2 when I was 11. That shit had me sleeping with my light on for a month!

There was a basis for the Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps characters in Scream 2. We are the ones who have a reputation for yelling at the screen and cussing out stupid bitches running up the stairs when things get too intense. Go to a horror movie on opening weekend and mixed in with the pimply faced suburban white kids are a good number of us baggy pantsed urban dwellers. You know who rents all those horror remakes and sequels and reimaginings? My sister and folks just like her!
Simply put, just because blacks aren't very well represented in horror films, doesn't mean they aren't watching them.