The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film

Since the release of Jordan Peele’s Academy Award-winning horror hit Get Out (2017), interest in Black horror films has erupted. This renewed intrigue in stories about Black life, history, culture, or ＂Blackness＂ has taken two forms. First, the history and politics of race have been centered in the horror genre. Second, Black horror has become an increasingly visible topic in mainstream discourses with scholars, critics, and fans contending that Black horror is seeing its so-called renaissance. However, critical attention to Blackness in horror has primarily focused on the U.S. and western world, despite Black stories having featured prominently in the genre-as actors, screenwriters, directors, producers-globally and across cultures.

The essays in this handbook explore global Black horror cinema by interrogating Blackness and the ways in which it manifests in films across the diaspora and around the world. Chapters pose and answer questions including how taxonomies of race are presented; who is considered ＂Black?＂; how is Blackness constructed in the culture in which it is produced and/or distributed?; How is horror defined and represented globally and/or culturally?; and what textual role does Blackness play in horror?

Sophisticated, innovative, argument-driven research that brings to bear the most enlightened reflections upon Black horror’s place in the world drives this handbook. Significantly, The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film presents expansive scholarship about Blackness, expanding the ways in which researchers, critics, and fans see and make meaning of Black experiences. In this volume, leading scholars from around the world contribute provocative, worthy examinations of the popular genre of horror in all its rich and empowering possibility.

Robin R. Means Coleman is Vice President and Associate Provost of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion and the Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present, 2nd ed.; Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present and African-American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor. She is co-author of TheBlack Guy Dies First: Black Horror from Fodder to Oscar and Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life, editor of Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity, and co-editor of Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader.

Novotny Lawrence is the Director of the Black Film Center & Archive and Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Indiana University. He is the author of Blaxploitation Films of the 1970s: Blackness and Genre, the editor of Documenting the Black Experience: Essays on African-American History, Culture, and Identity in Non-Fiction Films, the co-editor of Beyond Blaxploitation, and the editor-in-chief of The Journal of Popular Culture.