During February 2015, I had the privilege of providing for horror webiste, Shock Till You Drop 10 Essential Black Horror Films. This wasn't a list of my favorites, well-known's, or even fairly excepted films in general. I really wanted to educate myself and expose to readers different ways of understanding how the horror genre has been utilized by African American filmmakers over the history of the medium. I owe a deep debt to Dr. Robin Means Coleman's identification of what a Black horror film is: By theorizing Blacks’ participation in horror this way, I am trying to make clear that though Blacks have been part and parcel to the genre since its beginning, how they are represented varies. It is easier to understand if we can think about films such as Nigger in a Woodpile (1904) or The Birth of a Nation (1915) as horror films, or more obvious horror films such as The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) or Candyman (1992). In these films, Blacks and Blackness--their hi
purging the black female horror fan from the margins