“You’re a black woman. You just made a horror film. How? Why?”
By R. Shanea Williams (@rshanea722)
This is me paraphrasing an audience member after a very well-received screening of my short psychological horror-thriller Paralysis at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia in early August. The audience member meant no harm. He was genuinely clueless. I wasn’t at all offended because let’s face it, it’s still a very a rare combination: a black woman directing a psychological horror film with a black female protagonist.
But his question felt a bit existential for me. I literally asked myself the same thing as the evening wore on. I was still on such a high from the incredible audience response but I kept thinking to myself: How did I end up making Paralysis? That question lingered for days. Primarily because, although I knew since I was about 13 that I wanted to be a filmmaker, I didn’t see myself making genre films, let alone horrors or thrillers. It’s been a peculiar journey but one I feel like needs to be discussed because if you don’t see yourself often represented in something, it’s hard to see yourself as a creator of that very thing.
Yet as I’ve assessed my journey into my love of horror films, I feel like those two films are symbolic for me, yes, but it’s not completely accurate as to why I love the genre or why I wanted to make a film like Paralysis. In my pre-teen and early teenage years, I started consuming the slasher flick genre with friends during sleepovers. My friends and I debated over who was scarier: Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees? The correct answer is always Michael Myers (but that’s another post for another time). I also remember every kid in my neighborhood loving Candyman because we were so hyped to see a black man starring in a horror film. (I still believe the first two Candyman films are really great and deserve more attention for being groundbreaking in many ways.) I soon started renting many of the classics and once I’d seen The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, I was absolutely blown away by just the scope of such a film. The sense of dread and uneasiness I felt watching that was unlike anything I’d ever experienced up until that point. It was here my love affair with horror officially began.
That same year, I also saw Eve’s Bayou, the incredible, supernatural gothic drama by Kasi Lemmons. That film made me question everything about myself as an artist. I’d never seen anything like that film in my life. I suddenly knew I wanted to make films like that—films that no one else was making about black people. But still, even though those were my thoughts, I continued to play it safe as a screenwriter. I wrote things I thought everyone wanted me to write. I did this for years.
Even upon graduating from NYU’s graduate screenwriting program, I still wasn’t quite sure what kind of films I wanted to make and I wasn’t sure of my voice. It wasn’t until I had a pretty difficult break up with an ex-boyfriend, that I started exploring darker material. I suddenly remembered my NYU professor telling the class, “Write what you’re afraid of.” In 2013, when I wrote and directed my second short film Contamination that’s exactly what I created—what I was afraid of. Contamination opened the floodgates for me as an artist. I truly discovered my voice at that moment. The film was moody, dark and confirmed my unique vision as a storyteller. There were many viewers who said that the film was really unsettling for them. That wasn’t even my intention but it stirred something in me. Could I possibly take this further? Did further mean, horror?
When my producer Anthony Davis asked me about my ideas for our next short-film project, I told him I’d been toying around with writing and directing a psychological horror-thriller. I knew that I was writing a story that hadn’t been seen on screen before, and also it suddenly felt like this was some kind of calling as memories of Scream 2 and Eve’s Bayou resurfaced. I told him I had real fears about making a film like Paralysis. First, could I even pull it off? Horror films are difficult. How do I scare people or at least make them uneasy? Then I said there’s so little respect people have for this genre. A lot of festivals may reject us. Anthony believed in me and told me to write the film anyway, if this is what I was truly passionate about. I’m glad he pushed me to not give up because despite how incredibly challenging it was to write Paralysis (11 drafts!), I’m glad I did it. Directing it was an amazing experience and solidified my voice as a filmmaker. Paralysis is about a mentally unstable photographer who suffers from a sleep disorder. She moves into a new apartment that she fears may be haunted.
Since making Paralysis and experiencing some disappointment about some of the rejections we’ve received from festivals, it really got me thinking about what is it that makes this genre so polarizing. I mean, I get it: a lot of people just don’t want to be scared. But there’s something bothersome about this idea that horror films can’t be or aren’t “prestigious” in any way. As if they’re “lesser” films. Aside from a few that have received acclaim (The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, Alien, Silence of the Lambs, etc), people really treat horror films as the ugly stepchild of cinema.
I’ve heard it argued that horror films are often bad and that there are only a few gems in a pretty rotten bunch. I don’t believe this. All genres have terrible films. What’s worse than sitting through a comedy and not laughing once? I’ve experienced this countless times. People often tend to see horror in very broad strokes, just torture porn or gore. Those are just two of the many subgenres of horror. I personally love psychological horror, supernatural horror and a good old-fashioned slasher flick. Whether it’s gore or a werewolf film, there can be excellence created in any of these subgenres. Truthfully, all of the horror subgenres have created really great films. Sometimes you actually have to do the work of seeking them out.
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Paralysis (2016) courtesy of R. Shanea Williams |
I’ve heard it argued that horror films are often bad and that there are only a few gems in a pretty rotten bunch. I don’t believe this. All genres have terrible films. What’s worse than sitting through a comedy and not laughing once? I’ve experienced this countless times. People often tend to see horror in very broad strokes, just torture porn or gore. Those are just two of the many subgenres of horror. I personally love psychological horror, supernatural horror and a good old-fashioned slasher flick. Whether it’s gore or a werewolf film, there can be excellence created in any of these subgenres. Truthfully, all of the horror subgenres have created really great films. Sometimes you actually have to do the work of seeking them out.
I think what makes the genre so polarizing is that horror taps into a place many people are afraid to go—it forces us to confront our darkness, the unknown, the monsters among us—real and imagined. Yet this is the very reason why I love the genre and think it’s so powerful. There’s so many profound ways to explore universal subject matter. (Examples—just look at the way grief is explored in The Invitation and The Babadook)
I also think people of color are often put in a box regarding what they should and shouldn’t like. There have been so few people of color centered in horror films and it’s really unfortunate. This summer I convinced my Mom to watch The Invitation and she was completely engrossed in the film. I asked her why she was so into it and she said, “I gotta see if the black girl is gonna survive!” That completely reaffirmed so much of what I’ve always felt about why representation matters in films. Why it’s so important to find someone to identify with on screen that looks like you. My Mom’s response made me think back to 1997 and that overwhelmingly black audience very excited and engaged in Scream 2. I sometimes think of how that audience might have reacted if Jada and Omar’s characters, or even Elise Neal’s character, were the protagonists of the film.
I don’t know where this journey as a filmmaker is going to lead me and what stories I’ll be telling in the future. But I do know for a fact that I’ll continue to explore the horror and thriller genres as this creative fire in me continues to burn. And soon I won’t have to imagine what a horror film will look like with Jada and Omar’s characters as protagonists because I’ll be somewhere on a set making that kind of feature film.

About the Author
R. Shanea Williams is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, script consultant and proud nerd, who resides in Queens, New York. She loves movies, music, and long romantic walks to the refrigerator. Follow her on Twitter (@rshanea722)