The son of a preacher takes to the center of the makeshift stage at a juke joint, hastily converted from an abandoned cotton mill to a place of revelry. He strums the strings of a silver guitar and pours open his throat. The crowd, taking a night of reprieve from the labor of sharecropping, laundering, hustling, and survival, is mesmerized into movement. Sammy—who bears resemblance to Robert Johnson, real-life fabled blues man who claimed to receive his talent from a dark spirit at the crossroads—sings in a rich, husky voice syrupy with mingled mourning and pleasure. This music summons the gathered crowd’s deepest loves, sorrows, joys, desires. It invokes ancestors and those not yet born. It also lures something else, something lying in wait outside the burning, sweating walls for darkness to fall. Something old, crimson-eyed, fanged, and aching with longing and hunger. The release of music precedes a massive letting of blood.
Helmed by his muse Michael B. Jordan playing bootlegger twins in 1932 Mississippi, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners premiered in 2025 to rave audience and critical reviews. In a cinematic landscape replete with franchises, sequels, and reboots, Sinners had one of the two biggest openings for an original horror film of the last decade. The other: Jordan Peele’s 2022 alien western Nope. Coogler and Peele’s achievements shatter the commonsense narrative that Black helmed and casted projects cannot achieve mainstream success—and suggest that it is Black creatives who are leading the horror genre. The film has been largely lauded as one of the most successful examples of historically themed Black horror among several television and film releases over the last several years, but some have attributed its ability to depict rich portrayals of Black life, love, and art (amidst battles with vampires) to it “not being a horror film.” We (Black horror scholars Jalondra A. Davis and Jasmine Moore-Strickland) use the Sinners discourse as an entry point to respond to this idea that horror cannot portray fuller representations of Black humanity, or that Black horror is only ever preoccupied with replaying the racial past.
The visibility of Black horror in film and television is only made possible by the genre-defying experimentations in Black horror literature that came before it. Jalondra’s 2021 interview of Black speculative fiction writers and editors for the Science Fiction Research Association Review asserts that Black independent literature often advances, anticipates, and directly makes way for the themes and developments that we later see in mainstream publishing, and following that, television and film. Novels such as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country, and Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl have been adapted into series on major networks and streaming services. The 2021 anthology film collection Horror Noire features short films adapted from stories by Black horror writers such as Tananarive Due and Victor Lavalle. Because film and television projects face even higher barriers to production, fiction usually anticipates and surpasses what is possible onscreen. While much horror criticism focuses on film or moves fluidly back and forth across film and fiction, it is important to shift greater focus to fiction as a site of ongoing innovation of genre.
Through their ability to showcase a plurality of Black voices, stories, and experiences, anthologies of Black horror are important sites for the emerging traditions in the genre. Sheree Thomas’s edited collection Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004) is perhaps the first instantiation of a Black horror anthology which intersects horror tropes with folktales, mythologies, and distinctly African-derived and diasporic understandings of spirituality and haunting. Black horror anthologies have increased in production and popularity during the recent rise in Black horror films. These anthologies include Kinitra Brooks’s Sycorax’s Daughters, Dark Horse Comics’ Shook: A Black Horror Anthology, Circe Moskowitz’s All These Sunken Souls: A Black Horror Anthology, Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror, The Black Girl Survives in This One, and African Ghost Short Stories. The uptick in publishing Black horror anthologies shows an increased attention to and desire for these kinds of stories and demonstrates that Black speculative fiction authors write across genres and disciplines to expand the cultural capacity of the horror genre.
Black horror scholarship has made leaps and bounds within the last fifteen years. Maisha Wester’s African American Gothic (2012) expands conversations around Gothic literature to what she defines as the “African American Gothic,” centering work that deals with Gothic themes in the wake of enslavement. Kinitra Brooks’s monograph Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Horror (2017) centers conjure as a way of knowing outside of Western constructs of knowledge and emphasizes Black Feminist writing in horror. Robin Means Coleman’s groundbreaking Horror Noire (2011), which provides a thorough history of depictions of Blackness and Black creative endeavors in horror films, was recently adapted into the documentary film Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror (2021). More recently, Jerry Rafiki Jenkins, author of The Paradox of Blackness in African American Vampire Fiction (2019) and Anti-Blackness and Human Monstrosity in Black American Horror Fiction (2024), has joined the growing list of scholars who provide fruitful interpretations and interventions into the field of Black horror. A recurrent theme in the theorization of Black horror—the criticism of which still tends to focus on film rather than literature—is a concept encapsulated by award-winning historical and speculative fiction writer Tananarive Due’s declaration in Horror Noire that “Black history is Black horror.” Chardonnay Madkins writes about the “Peele Effect,” arguing that “By creating an alternate perspective with dark skin Black people at the forefront, Peele has reintroduced ‘social thrillers’ as a viable film category.”
However, Black audiences and intellectuals have raised concerns about the ways in which Black historical horror sometimes perpetuates racial trauma. Cultural critics such as Angelica Bastién and Princess Weekes have published criticisms of the exploitative violence and overtly blunt social critique of recent Black horror projects. Film critic Yhara Zayd argues in her video essay, “We Have Get out at Home,” that “A lot of the copycats [of Get Out] weren’t so concerned with writing an engaging horror narrative but more concerned with laying heavy-handed themes on top of a banal template.” While Black horror fans can find catharsis in explicitly racially themed horror, we first and foremost crave good stories—both a wider range of horror scenarios and the everyday life, interests, and joys that characters experience while also being Black. Recent Black horror anthologies such as Out There Screaming and The Black Girl Survives This One broaden the possibilities for what kinds of stories Black horror tells. While the ever-presence of the racial past and white-supremacy-as-horror remain important ongoing traditions, these anthologies also reflect other ways of thinking and knowing that enlist the horror genre, making dynamic tales of culture, survival, triumph, and the ever-evolving speculation of “what if.” Jasmine’s own theorizations of a critical utopian-driven exploration of the complexities of Black Horror show up in her article on Missy Elliott’s videos (2023). We have Black theater kids, sea monsters, and evil MLMs. We have werelions and lab-designed people and simulated realities. Racism is not always at the center of the narrative, but the lessons and cultural specificities of Black life are resources for survival.
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In the foreword to Out There Screaming, Jordan Peele walks through his dark fascination with the French torture device known as the oubliette—a small dungeon-esque space that allows little mobility for the victim and is placed in an area where castle visitors ignore or cannot hear the victim’s screams. Peele intimates that this became the inspiration for the “Sunken Place” in Get Out where the character Chris becomes trapped inside his own consciousness, forgotten, as his body is manned by a white outsider. The stories found in this anthology participate with the central theme in which the metaphor of the oubliette drives narratives around Blackness, history, personhood, love, regret, technology, and the apocalypse. The oubliette, rather than just serving as a metaphor for the horrors of anti-Blackness, demonstrates the resourcefulness of Black life to be lived on its own terms. Since many of the stories in Out There Screaming contemplate the lost and the forgotten, memory and recollection are prime focal points when thinking about the struggles of the Afrodiaspora. While “white-supremacy-as-monster” is not the scope of every tale, the echoes of systemic violence add depth to each one; Black traditions, knowledge, spiritual practices, and methods of survival are what keep the oubliette from being all-encompassing.
Backed by the popularity of what cultural critic Chardonnay Madkins calls the “Peele Effect,” Out There Screaming gives Black writers the power to create without boundaries. Authors like Lesley Nneka Arimah, Nalo Hopkinson, Rebecca Roanhorse, P. Djèli Clark, Tananarive Due, and so many others who appear in this anthology have award-winning careers in Afrofuturism and fantasy as well as horror, showcasing the fluidity of Black speculative fiction. In an interview with NPR, Peele notes that “after Get Out, I was approached by so many people that said, oh, my gosh. I’ve had some stories that I’ve wanted to tell, but I just didn’t think they’d ever let me do something like that.” For Peele, a project like Out There Screaming acknowledges that although his voice has become a leader in Black horror, it is not singular and adds to a long tradition of powerful work earlier established by many of the authors in this collection. With tales that range from an inability to heal from a past relationship (“The Other One” by Violet Allen) to an impending environmental catastrophe that showcases a racially divided family (“Pressure” by Ezra Clayton Daniels), the range that Black horror provides is both profound and deeply necessary.
Several of the stories in Out There Screaming depict the racial past and contemporary racial injustice, inviting the reader to interrogate the modern Civil Rights Era, World War I, the Great Migrations, and the Black Power and Black Lives Matter movements. Tananarive Due’s “The Rider” blends the struggles of freedom-making with folkloric horror in the Jim Crow South during the Freedom Rides in Alabama. Due’s story references the experiences of her own mother in the character Patricia, who suffers from partial blindness as a result of a gas canister thrown at her face. On the journey to meet with the Freedom Riders, the Houston sisters’ bus driver takes an unexpected detour meant to make the sisters disappear for good. Terrifyingly, the grim journey is interrupted by a mysterious rider. This story is a great example of both the horror and real dangers of activism set alongside an unexpected agent of history, wherein the monster is not always the one with a gruesome appearance. Similarly, Chesya Burke’s “An American Fable” follows the story of a Black soldier who encounters the virulent racism that World War I soldiers faced upon returning home. While the setting is in Ohio, the story demonstrates that much of the Midwest carried the same sentiment against Black people as the Jim Crow South; the soldier, upon speaking up on a train, is pulled out of a segregated car and beaten by an angry white mob who intends to lynch him. However, it is a discovery of a mysterious little girl that saves him, changing the tale from a scary ghostly encounter to one of spiritual deliverance and kinship.
Pieces addressing more current racial justice issues include N. K. Jemisin’s “Reckless Eyeballing.” As the first story of the collection, it sets much of the tone for the anthology’s concern with the horror of surveillance and entrapment. Tapping into a genre staple, the trope of body horror is uniquely deployed in the tale of a Black cop who repeatedly sees literal eyes on the vehicles of citizens he believes to be capable of wrongdoing. The deeply problematic protagonist Carl (a subversive nod to the titular Black dad, Carl Winslow, in the nineties television show Family Matters, who was also a police officer) references a beloved figure from Black media in an allegorical reckoning with white-supremacist indoctrination, misogynoir, toxic masculinity, and police brutality. Together, these stories etch a picture of the rootedness of anti-Black legacies that the community must challenge again and again.
More than a few of the stories found in Out There Screaming offer readers other avenues of horror that go beyond haunting and slasher tales to the insidious potentialities of technology and planetary dystopia, with the looming presence of prejudice and racialized/species division steering the wheel. Posing the question of “what if,” these science fiction–esque stories portray horror in ways that feel closer to our expanding virtual/digital reality as we become more reliant on technological innovation. In this vein, Justin C. Key’s “The Aesthete” follows a complex interweaving of the near future of AI, robotics, and streaming/social media dependency. The narrator relates a world where living beings fall into two distinct categories: Humans and Pieces of Art. POA, reminiscent of the acronym POC, refers to genetically engineered and enhanced humanoid beings that are “created” by and subservient to naturally born human beings. The story follows the struggles of the quest for civil rights of POAs to secure reproductive futurity. Aligned with shows that border on the edge of horror like Westworld (2016–19) and Ex Machina (2014), “The Aesthete” offers a chilling reflection of systemic violence, racial prejudice, rights to bodily autonomy, and the very real dangers of social media stalking. L. D. Lewis’s “Flicker” makes Jasmine rethink her long love of life simulation gaming! The short story paces quickly through an apocalyptic setting where the protagonist, Kam, loses loved ones and much of the world population in a literal “flicker” of an eye. Everyone is left to fear the potential of another occurring. However, through speculation with friends, Kam realizes that these world catastrophes are akin to the graphic dysregulation of digital game projects abandoned by negligent developers. This story crosses into the uncanny valley in which the simulacrum is indistinguishable from perceived reality, giving weight to the idea of “what if we’re living in a game?”
Lastly, Terence Taylor’s “Your Happy Place” follows Martin, who works as a maintenance person for a prison facility, who begins to notice something amiss as he escorts prisoners to and from various points in the prison under the direction of an experimental program known as “The Process.” The story explores the morally corrupt acceptance of chattel slavery in incarceration that is upheld via the Thirteenth Amendment, which—as Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th (2016) shows—is a direct reinstatement of race-based slavery. Taylor’s story reaches into the underbelly of what many deem acceptable for the state of prisons and those who profit.
Many of the stories in Out There Screaming can be described as folkloric horror, a term that Kinitra Brooks uses to describe the interweaving of “African-influenced folklore with the Westernized genres of horror, fantasy, and science fiction” in Searching for Sycorax: Contemporary Hauntings of Black Women’s Horror. These stories bring together different paths of knowledge across the African diaspora such as African jujuism (as coined by Nnedi Okorafor), Obeah, and other Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions. The theme of modern technology’s inefficiency in the wake of metaphysical power promotes many of these stories to the category of folklore and urban legend reimagined for the twenty-first century. For example, Cadwell Turnbull’s “Wandering Devil” feels very much like the classic tragedy of Oedipus Rex combined with the folktale of meeting the “man at the crossroads.” The “Wandering Devil” in this case is Freddy, a man who has inherited the wandering spirit from several members of his family. While attempting to finally put down roots in a relationship, the recollection of a past encounter with a stranger while on the road foreshadows the haunting end. In this case, Freddy’s oubliette becomes his inability to trade in generational trauma for life, love, and security.
Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Most Strongest Obeah Woman” is absolutely stunning in a blend of body horror, folklore, Caribbean spiritualism, and science fiction. The story opens with the protagonist Yenderil jumping into a blue water hole found in the middle of her village in Jamaica. She intends to find and kill a “devil fish” that killed her parents three years previously and has terrorized other villagers for years. However, her journey into the water to face the beast leaves her with an unintended consequence: bringing the devil back with her. Likewise, Nnedi Okorafor’s “Dark Home” details an inability to let go, which allows other forces to lay claim to the living. The character Nwokolo, a grieving forty-year-old Nigerian American woman, is confronted by the Igbo spirit Ajofia in Isiekenesi, Nigeria, for refusing to give back her father’s mysterious, but spiritually significant, ring after his funeral. Armed with security cameras in Arizona, Nwokolo learns that technological devices offer little protection against a spirit seeking a debt.
Out There Screaming is a foundational work to add to the collection of Black horror. Including nineteen stories from a wide cadre of authors, the selection and curation shows care in honoring Black creativity in horror. Ultimately, this anthology offers a variety of texts that deal with the historical continuity of anti-Black violence coupled with other systems of oppression that look both backward and forward in time. Equally, many stories take race-as-horror out of the question to think about the interiority of Black people and ways of dealing with the supernatural without the social commentary of the Black/white binary. The scale of the anthology provides a satisfying blend of critique and entertainment that contains a story for many readers, both fan and newcomer.
At times, because of the wide array of offerings, we found ourselves lost in the dizzying multitude and wondered at times what the connective tissue was between each piece. However, as we reread the foreword and remembered the ominous construction of the oubliette, each vignette’s theme became clear: the fear of forgetting is palpable. While the stories varied in length from fourteen to twenty-eight pages, the fullness and depth of each one emphasizes each author’s mastery of their particular work. Some stories seemed more grim thought-experiment than the kind of horror that keeps one awake at night. Yet and still, the premise on which many of the stories are built is chilling or downright disturbing—all hallmarks of good horror. The protagonists, in all their variety, face unspeakable situations that reinforce the power of storytelling in the face of great trials.
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In the afterword to their young-adult anthology The Black Girl Survives in This One, lifelong horror fans and co-editors Desiree S. Evans and Saraciea J. Fennell pose the questions that their collection seeks to answer, “Who gets to tell scary stories? Who gets to be the hero, the monster, the villain, and the savior in these stories? Where are the Black Final Girls?” The Final Girl refers to a well-known trope first theorized in Carol J. Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). The Final Girl is the young woman who survives, often the last left standing, after a grueling and traumatic battle with the monster or serial killer. Often a virginal, conventionally attractive but not hyper-feminine white teen or young woman, the Final Girl, particularly in slasher films, is positioned against the less socially sanctioned femininities of “those other girls” (sexual girls, girls of color, shallow girlie girls) that die early, serving merely as the monster’s fodder.
In Horror Noire, Robin Means Coleman argues that Black audiences bring a “racial gaze” to horror, hoping to see themselves as fully human and as survivors rather than as tokenized “window dressing” or “human meat to up a bloody body count” (2011). While answering Coleman’s call for horror where Black characters are not simply “human meat,” The Black Girl Survives also feels like a spiritual younger sister to Kinitra Brooks’s literary showcase of Black women’s horror, the 2017 Sycorax’s Daughters. But The Black Girl Survives distinguishes itself through its focus on young adult protagonists and a suspension of the uneasy question of Black survival that usually permeates Black horror fans’ reading and viewing experiences.
The Black Girl Survives in This One expands the landscape of Black horror and the range of stories that it can tell. If the painful racial past has come to be overrepresented as a core theme and setting of the most popularized Black horror texts, the majority of the stories in The Black Girl Survives in This One focus on contemporary settings. Only one story is entirely set in a historical period, Justina Ireland’s “Black Pride.” “Black Pride” is similar to Ireland’s popular 2018 novel Dread Nation in its intersection of monster lore with liberation movements. While Ireland’s racial worldbuilding (what we call the merging of fantastical scenarios, creatures, and powers into otherwise unaltered Black histories) in Dread Nation incorporated zombies and the Civil War, “Black Pride” moves to more recent history, the Black Power Movement. It offers a clever innovation of werewolf lore and a compelling resolution that questions the automatic fear and disgust at the monster.
The Black Girl Survives is as interested in multidimensional Black girlhood as it is in fear, richly depicting the friendships, family relationships, ambitions, and interests of Black girls. Several stories center the work lives of young Black women: the labor they must perform for survival, the means through which they seek to reduce their dependence on labor, and their creative aspirations. The collection’s second story, Kortney Nash’s “Welcome to the Cosmos,” is both horror and space opera, metaphorizing the more dangerous labor conditions faced by people of color in a far-future setting. In the story a young woman named Danika works for a program that echoes and extrapolates AmeriCorps or the military in how it uses college grants to attract young people to work for a short-term period in space. While the story doesn’t center race or racial justice, Danika and her friends’ presence in space—as members of a sanitation team responsible for clearing the galaxy of debris so that the government can “reinvest in interplanetary colonies”—and their exposure to its unseen dangers, are inflected by capitalism and colonization. When she confronts a strange presence while scavenging aboard an abandoned vessel, Danika is forced to recall her mother’s warnings that “so many people disappear up there, and the ones that don’t are different when they come back to Earth.”
Brittney Morris’s delightful comic horror “Queeniums for Greemium” explores another form of economic exploitation that often targets marginalized people, the multi-level marketing company. The story, in which a skeptical Synthia accompanies her sister to a smoothie company retreat where havoc ensues, critiques the fanaticism of MLM culture, misinformation campaigns, fatphobia, and the futility of get-rich-quick fantasies. Zakiya Dalila Harris’s “TMI” and Vincent Tirado’s “The Black Strings” follow characters confronting extraordinary circumstances in their pursuit to create art for a living. The title of “The Black Strings” is a double entendre for protagonist Mal’s bass guitar and prophetic power to see people’s deaths before they happen, signified by black strings above their heads. While Mal—who offers expansive Black-girl representation by being both queer and autistic—knows that the deaths she foretells cannot be thwarted, she tries anyway to save herself and her band members in a thrilling one-location whodunnit at a recording contract competition. Harris’s “TMI” explores the moral quandaries of power when a young aspiring writer inherits a disturbing ability that offers her access to her biggest dreams.
Other stories center the complex family dynamics highlighted by hauntings of domestic space. In Monica Brashears’s chilling “The Skittering Thing” we witness these relationships from the outside, as two high school girls are invited to the slumber party from hell at the home of the new pastor’s daughter and must fight to survive the night. Daka Hermon’s “Screamers” offers a compelling conflict in a family dealing with both a haunted home and the aftermath of grief for a terrible loss that the protagonist Amaani feels responsible for. But the narrative lacks subtlety in its need to reveal and resolve that conflict within the quick escalation to a battle with suddenly appearing—and not particularly frightening—ghosts.
Similar to several stories in Out There Screaming, the other family-centered dramas in the collection are also folkloric horror. In The Black Girl Survives the local diasporic folklores that derive from African cosmologies energize and innovate the horror tropes of disturbing familial inheritances and unresolved mysteries. In co-editor Desiree S. Evans’s misty, Gothic tale, “The Brides of Devil’s Bayou,” a young woman named Aja returns to her grandmother’s home in the Louisiana swamplands. There, she must quickly learn the power of conjure—Black women’s divination and ritual—in order to break a literal generational curse. Eden Royce’s “Local Color” evokes the Gullah legend of the shapeshifting plat-eye in the story of a teenager named Veronne investigating the disappearance of her archeologist parents. Camara Aaron’s “Inheritance” is both compact and complex in its many-layered themes: consent, peer pressure, girlhood, and colonial exploitation. It skillfully blends familial legacies and the Caribbean legend of the soucouyant—a shapeshifting witch who can become a ball of fire and drain people’s blood—into a fateful game of spin the bottle. Maika and Maritza Moulite’s sister-authored “Black Girl Nature Group” evokes family mysteries, lineage, and ancestral magic in the midst of a camping trip gone very wrong.
Additionally, both “Inheritance” and “Black Girl Nature Group” depict Black girls navigating the social world of high school—also placing them in the final trope of urban legends in high school settings. These stories—horror versions of the lighthearted teen films and shows that are familiar in popular culture, yet where Black characters are often absent or relegated to the sidelines—are some of our favorites of the collection. The collection opener, L. L. McKinney’s “Harvesters,” is a fairly simple coming-of-age tale where two friends’ meetup with cute guys at a party takes a creepy turn when the teens have to walk home through an infamous cornfield. McKinney wisely avoids overcomplicating or explaining the mystery of a cornfield which somehow, with no farmhands in sight, gets harvested every year. She focuses instead on portraying the slow realization that something is truly wrong and people are not as they seem . . . a feeling of dread that echoes the dawning realization of the impending dissolution of first love.
As a theater kid who is hard-pressed to think of representations of the Black theater nerd in popular culture, Jalondra was engrossed in Erin E. Adams’s “Ghost Light.” “Ghost Light” centers the professional skill and competence of stage manager Janine, who has been selected as a sophomore to run her high school’s production of Macbeth. Enriched by a thorough and grounding knowledge of theater production and terminology, Adams’s careful storytelling brings as much tension into Janine’s experience of running the play—battling technical difficulties, missed cues, and the microaggressions of a jealous crew member—as she does to Janine’s battle with the entity that haunts the auditorium. Co-editor Saraciea J. Fennell’s rollicking “Cemetery Dance Party,” about a senior-prom-turned-zombie-battle, is both a great time and a metacommentary on the horror genre and the existence of Black horror fans.
Wisely, the collection closes with a disquieting bang on Charlotte Nicole Davis’s thriller “Foxhunt,” which, with remarkable pacing and tension, portrays the terrifying results of the protagonist Flex’s reluctant decision to join an annual ritual at her rural Southern high school. As Flex is one of few Black students at a predominantly white school where she finds herself in incredible danger from her classmates, this story seems to return to the white-supremacy-as-horror trope. But something feels distinctive in Flex’s struggle both for belonging and survival. She is singled out at her new school not only for her Blackness but for her gender nonconformity, which usefully varies the collection’s representations of Black girlhood.
The Black Girl Survives in This One is well-curated, concise, and quickly moving, the stories consistently brief. This strength, which makes the anthology a swift and engaging read, is a weakness as well, as some of the stories seem to end abruptly and too simply, their premises and possibilities too great for the space allotted. Brevity complicates the storytelling challenge presented by the collection’s central conceit; it takes exceptional craft to build tension and true fear into a short-form story where the survival of the character that you are rooting for is a given. The effect is that sometimes the stories, while always fun, are just not always that scary. But if the goal of the collection is not fear as much as a reframing of Black horror, the conceit works perfectly by directing the curiosity not to the whether of survival, but the how. Rather than horror tropes standing in as metaphors for the ongoing threats to Black life, Black culture, kinship, and collectivity are often the very resources through which these characters make it out alive.
The risk of the premise of The Black Girl Survives is ultimately worth it. This organizing rubric centers a love for Black girls and a sense of care for Black horror fans, who have often witnessed the reflection of ourselves being reduced to fodder, comforting helpmates, stereotypes, or time-frozen objects of racial suffering. Rather, Blackness saturates these stories in the everyday details of the characters living their lives and experiencing extraordinary situations while being Black. The cultural contextualization appears naturally and casually in naming practices, speech, aesthetics, and style. Girls are named Danika and Aja and Letricia. Guys are named Reggie and Buster and Tyrell. The girls wear box braids and locs and speak in African American Vernacular English as they talk shit with their friends. Black grandmothers have pet names such as Mee-Maw. The most historically located story, “Black Pride,” reminds us that many Black Power activists were teenagers and young adults with experiences and concerns other than racial struggle. Amidst youthful spurts of righteous political discourse, the girls pursue college plans, evade parental control, and deeply ponder which hot pants to wear to a day picnic with cute guys. The most far-future-located story, “Welcome to the Cosmos,” uses vivid details to naturalize Black people’s presence in space: Momma’s hologram wears her bonnet to bed, Danika’s locs float on the zero-gravity ship, “looping through a wayward string of pearls among the rest of the knick-knacks lingering in the air.” Black girls just get to be Black girls in a genre that we, too, have also always loved.
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As we have illustrated in this review, Black horror is moving toward fuller expressions of Blackness and being that are not always, or only, informed by histories of racist violence. These anthologies signal the power of the quotidian of Black existence and concerns around joy, longing, and worthwhile endeavors that can and should be protected. Equally, some stories take up observation of the shared existences between people and ecosystems that are in jeopardy, moving beyond social justice to environmental justice as the world approaches ever-rising dangers with climate change and unethical technological production. Both of these anthologies participate in the speculative “what-if” that encourages audiences to think about past, present, and future problems from the point of view of Black people. They also invoke a creative sojourn through mythologies and spiritual practices outside a Westernized worldview.
Out There Screaming and The Black Girl Survives in This One both provide generous offerings to scholars, fans, and students of horror. While seasoned fans will appreciate their roundup of some of the most accomplished writers in the genre, these texts can also act as introductory primers for readers new to the horror genre or to Black writers. Those who teach these anthologies can create diverse syllabi around interdisciplinary approaches to horror without having to assign several texts to achieve this aim. Immensely readable and accessible (The Black Girl Survives, as a YA title, more so), they can be appreciated by teens and adults. For those interested in horror and in Afrofuturism, science fiction, and other kinds of Black speculative culture, these anthologies are essential additions to their collections. These anthologies are rich sites for innovations in Black horror beyond the metaphorization of the Black-white boundary or the glow of the silver screen.
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*An essay-review of
Out There Screaming: An Anthology of New Black Horror. Edited by Jordan Peele and John Joseph Adams. New York: Random House, 2024. 400 pp. $20.00.
The Black Girl Survives in This One: Horror Stories. Edited by Desiree S. Evans and Saraciea J. Fennell. New York: Flatiron Books, 2024. 368 pp. $20.99.
