To Be Young, Gory and Black: A Black Horror Lover's Manifesto

I’ve always loved horror. Ghouls and goblins, ghosts and demons—they’ve fascinated me ever since I first accidentally stumbled across ‘Nightmare of Elm Street’, some gory and terrifying scene that gave me nightmares for a week. I eventually told my mom about the nightmares (not the cause, though), and I was ushered to the prayer room at the church, soothed by promises of angels watching over me even as I sleep.

Still, despite my host of seraphim keeping guard, I wanted to be scared. Goosebumps was spooky, but not enough, and I thrilled at every edition of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. The stories, the art pieces! I remember the gut-churning terror I felt looking into the eyes of Harold, the golem-like scarecrow with a bone (or skin, more accurately) to pick with the farmers who made them. I remember reading stories of poltergeists, and dogs who were actually rats, and men in parking lots eager to sell knives, murderous old men intent on seeing out of non-existent windows. To this day, I’m nervous of having my blinds and curtains open at night, lest I catch sight of bright eyes watching me.

I craved it, lived off it. Every scary movie, every scary book, I had to consume it. I can’t even begin to tell you how much time I sat on my mom’s bed, TV remote in hand as I scanned Comcast’s On Demand collection of horror. And when I discovered pirating! Gosh, the world of movies and books afforded to me, things my parents would’ve never allowed me to check out from the library! Excision, American Mary, Midnight Meat Train…Not to mention the books: Flowers in the Attic, Carrie, and countless other books that are lost to bad memory but stain my perception of horror even now.

Fear’s a funny thing. I’d like to control it as I like to control everything, but it’s such a huge, nebulous thing. I suppose, with horror, there’s a sense of comfort. Speaking as a Black autistic person suffering from C-PTSD and severe anxiety, there’s something very soothing to have a genre where the frights (though often an external reflection and deconstruction of our innate) fears are more easily managed than say, living in America as a visibly Black person. Freddie scares me, Jason unnerves me, but not so much as a police officer. In horror there are aliens, killer clowns, serial killers, monsters and cannibals and creeps, and yet they’re not nearly as terrifying as going out at night, going out among white people, wondering if any one of your choices might end your life. What a relief! Monsters are real! Let’s go inside and watch Leatherface chainsaw some teenagers to death!

Of course, I don’t imagine that I can separate art and reality. Some say that truth is stranger than fiction, but I’ve found that they’re pretty much the same thing, fiction only slightly distorted by hyperbole. Interview with a Vampire is fun until you remember that Louis was a slave owner. You enjoy stories of hillbilly cannibals and backwoods creeps, and then you think of the demonization of the poor, how these tropes only serve to harm those struggling in poverty. Transmisogyny spoils Silence of the Lambs, and every quip about a villain shambling, twitching and being “crazy” is much less fun when one’s forced to consider neurological disorders and neurodivergency. And the racism, God! How is somebody supposed to gush over the works of Stephen King and H.P. Lovecraft when you count up all the times King’s brandished the n-slur like a bludgeon or considered for a moment just why Lovecraft feared the “chattering horde”?

And, sure, you can say that every genre is suffused with these things. We live in an imperfect society that punishes anyone who isn’t rich, white, able-bodied and thin. Romance is guilty of this, comedy is guilty of this, every genre is guilty of this, but horror feels especially egregious because it paints itself as the genre of underdogs. Looking at the state of horror, I wonder who these so-called underdogs are. It’s not the white people making bags off of society’s fear of Blackness, and it’s not the able-bodied making monsters out of the disabled, nor is it the cishet people casting trans women as deceitful killers.

“So, what is a spook looking to be spooked to do?”

Burn the table, of course. I don’t want a seat at it, I don’t want to build another one in the same shape and size. I want to sit on the floor with the works of Nalo Hopkin and Tananarive Due, Toni Morrison for gothic flare, Octavia Butler for her sci-fi sensibilities. I want to build a prayer room, the walls textured with stories of Black people by Black people and for Black people. I want to crack open a book, and see myself reflected in it, the pages like a mirror for my experiences. I want every Black person in love with horror to find books and movies that reflect them. I want to stop being vampires, I want to look into the media, to art and cinema and literature, and see myself, Black and beautiful and bloody.

Picture me standing on the ashes of aforementioned table, a glass raised in the air. A toast, if you will, to the true underdogs. A toast to the disabled people who are not frightening for their scars and amputations, but for the chainsaws they wield. A toast to the trans women who don’t need your cis skin to be a woman, who are dazzling femme fatales in their own right. A toast and hurrah for the Black people that make it to the end of the movies, the Black final girls and boys, to Beloved and Candyman, to Adelaide/Red, to Chris from Get Out, to those of us who kill and are not killed.

To the spooks looking to the spooked, to niggas with knives, and coons with chainsaws. This one’s for us—our Black horror manifesto.