Black Horror: Race & Panic from Vampires to Boogeymen

This course will explore the ways Black horror exploits and harnesses our most engrained and troublesome racial prejudices through the lens of some of the most iconic Black horror films from the 1970s up until the present. However, it also considers the space the horror genre lends to Black filmmakers looking to contend with the horrors of Whiteness as they inform the legacy of Blackness. 

We’ll begin with the Blaxploitation-classic Blacula (1972) considering both the subversive and destructive potentials of the Blaxploitation genre as it relates to fears of urbanity and the Black “other”. As a contrast, we’ll turn to Ganja and Hess (1973) for an entrance into the Black horror arthouse which strategically distances itself from conventions of Blaxploitation. From here we’ll shift into the psychic and phantasmic with Eve’s Bayou (1997), interrogating the tropes of voodoo lore and conjure which stick particularly to Black women, and conclude with an examination of ‘unwilling martyrs’ in Candyman (1992).

Kyéra Sterling is an independent academic whose work explores intersections between Gender, African Diaspora, and critical race theory in film and literature. She completed her master’s at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and was awarded the Crossley T. Prize for her work entitled Exorcising Demons: Bush Mama and the Possessed Body. Kyéra currently serves as Chief of Staff in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.

The $60 registration fee gets you access to all four 90-minute live Zoom discussion sessions, all four pre-recorded lectures, as well as recordings of the discussions if you have to miss a week.

However, the registration fee does not include access to any of the films being covered in the class—you should budget in anywhere from $15-30 to spend on film rentals, varying based on film availability and which streaming services you subscribe to.