Popular films like “Tales From the Hood,” “Eve’s Bayou” and “Candyman” launched an exciting new era of the genre. But that was never set up to last.
Peruse any streamer for Black horror films on Halloween , and you might notice a good stretch of hit movies from the 1990s: “Vampire in Brooklyn,” “Tales From the Hood,” “Eve’s Bayou,” “Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight,” “Candyman” and so on. You might also realize that by the end of the decade, their success faded — until 2017’s “Get Out.”
Add to that, in 1992, “Candyman” ignited a whole new franchise with a titular Black villain . “We’re in a weird moment in the genre when people are prepared to kind of take a lot of chances that they might not necessarily have taken,” Gaines said, “since blaxploitation.”That seems fair to say. Both eras of Black film also highlighted a social consciousness as well as an investment in more, say,. Black horror was an outgrowth of that.
Gaines quickly added: “I think the vast majority of Black audiences are going to go see it because Eddie Murphy and Angela Bassett and Allen Payne are in it.” Savoy Pictures, the studio behind “Tales,” was that kind of company. But despite its interest in the film, it wanted to control some aspects of the story. That’s partly because the movie, which tells four separate stories, directly portrays issues such as police brutality, Black gang violence, the corrupt political system and domestic abuse in the Black home.
“They were afraid of all the issues,” Cundieff said. “They did not want to position the movie as something that dealt with any type of issue that affected anybody — Blacks or otherwise.” about recent films by Black filmmakers and noticed that he wasn’t mentioned at all. Discontented, he decided to contact the reporter about it, particularly since he saw that John Singleton’s “Higher Learning,” which opened in the spot just above his film’s at the box office, was also highlighted in the piece.
“The producers had somebody else entirely different in mind, who was not African American,” he continued. “I arranged a meeting with Jada, and I told her I wanted her to do this film. And she was gonna have to go in and sell herself to Joel Silver, who was one of the producers.”She did, obviously, which thrilled Dickerson because he, like many audiences, understood the dire circumstances of Black images in horror at the time.
“I was definitely trying to. It was always finding the right script. I think I got some slasher scripts, but I’m not into horror for the gore. Gore can be necessary, but it should not be the be all, end all. So I was having a really hard time finding stuff that I really wanted to do.”At one point, he was attached to the 1998 vampire movie “Blade,” starring Wesley Snipes, but that collaboration ended unceremoniously.
But Gaines questions whether that decline had anything to do with the social consciousness of a lot of Black horror at the time, in part because studios had no problem cashing in on other Black movies that dealt with similar themes on race, such as “Boyz n the Hood” in 1991 and “Menace II Society.”“The gatekeepers and the decision-makers at the executive levels in those periods — I’m skeptical of the idea that they care about anything other than what’s profitable,” he said.
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