Black storytellers are making a major impact on the horror genre in film.
In a time of sequels, remakes and a drought of original storytelling, somehow, they have broken that barrier in Hollywood to produce spine-chilling work that stands out for its piercing plotlines and stellar acting.
And even in films that aren’t completely original — like 2024’s A Quiet Place: Day One, led by Lupita Nyong’o into becoming the highest-grossing horror film of that year domestically — we’ve seen Black Hollywood continue to find new ways to give us nightmares year after year.
With all of the success Black innovators see in blood-curdling blockbusters, though, there are still questions about their continued lack of representation in theaters.
However, it seems like one thing is very clear: That isn’t stopping these immaculate storytellers from bringing unnerving work to the big screen for audiences to enjoy.
Black filmmakers who are keeping us up at night
Since the reported first time a Black person got to direct a horror film with Oscar Micheaux’s The Dungeon (1992) to the first time Hollywood cast a Black lead in a horror film in 1968’s Night of the Living Dead with Duane Jones, Black creatives in the field have accomplished incredible feats.
Since those pioneers, many stars have done incredible work keeping us petrified at the movies, but surely, Jordan Peele was a turning point.
The 2017 blockbuster Get Out was a juggernaut that became bigger than the big screen. To this day, it’s a cultural phenomenon. “The sunken place” is now a colloquialism all its own.
Even further, Get Out made Peele the first Black winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, showing exactly how impactful our voices can be in the genre. And Peele has reiterated that impact in his subsequent work, Us (2019) and Nope (2022), along with his countless film/TV collaborations.
Since then, Nia DaCosta also directed the 2021 Candyman reboot starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Her work made her the first Black woman director to debut at the No. 1 weekend spot in the domestic box office.
And of course, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, starring Michael B. Jordan and Miles Caton, was drowned in Oscar buzz from the moment it hit theaters, offering a thrilling, culturally rich iteration of horror that stuck with audiences well past the closing credits. Already a repeated record-breaker, Coogler’s Sinners was also named the biggest post-pandemic debut shortly after its release in April 2025.
The results are irrefutable. So, with a track record like this, there is definitely something about Black stories that resonates with audiences who appreciate a good fright. But what is it?
The nuances of Black horror
Well, when your past is already filled with the stuff nightmares are made of, adding that to a scary movie can only open up more creative, innovative and original ways to make the hair stand up on the audience’s neck.
Coogler’s Sinners may be the best example of how Black history can be extrapolated and sensationalized in the best ways to create a fearful box office hit.
Sinners is set in Mississippi in the early 1930s — a time where Jim Crow was king and the only constant in the country was raging racial tension.
Coogler drew on his own personal family lore, as well as traditions from the deep South, Hoodoo, as well as Irish and Asian Americans to contribute to the historical and cultural aspects of the film. And while Coogler wraps those aspects up in a supernatural vampire blockbuster, those truths from Black experiences are the heartbeat of the film. It’s what made the movie such a hit and eventually crowned it as the reported highest-grossing original film of the 2020s so far.
It’s also no coincidence that the scares in these flicks come with a few laughs; it’s the sugar that makes that historical pill go down easier.
Even from times of minstrel shows, America — albeit for racist reasons — has been most comfortable seeing Black people on screen through the lens of comedy. And as our likeness has progressed on the big and small screens, we’ve continued to dominate in comedy with giants like Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappelle and Kevin Hart.
Particularly when dealing with difficult parts of the past, we’ve seen through Academy Award-winning films like BlacKkKlansman that keeping the audience laughing can cushion even the most abrasive parts of history to provide insight into the Black experience.
And that truth makes Black successes in the genre even clearer, while also speaking to Black horror flicks. Because not only are directors like Peele able to find pockets of hilarity in disturbingly chilling scenes, but they still cling on to serious, recognizable issues.
“The best comedy and horror feel like they take place in reality,” Peele told the New York Times. “You have a rule or two you are bending or heightening, but the world around it is real.”
And with this level of intention, it’s difficult to imagine why, historically, Black storytellers haven’t been more prevalent in the movies that keep us up at night.
Why have Black voices been left out?
Hollywood has always struggled with diversity, especially in horror. Top dogs have a habit of keeping Black actors out completely or killing them off early on.
If you’re wondering how these issues persist, look to the executives making the big decisions.
Gatekeepers have often claimed to prioritize their bottom line. But even that doesn’t always add up to the lack of Black faces we see on the big screen.
In 1996, PEOPLE Magazine conducted a “Special Report on the Exclusion of African Americans” in Hollywood.
They spoke to producer Warrington Hudlin, who put forward a classic hit led by Black co-leads with House Party in 1990, but still struggled to see an increase in budget as he produced more projects.
Hudlin reported that a part of executives’ justifications for racial exclusion was that “Black’s don’t sell overseas.”
However, that stands contrary to the numbers. Boomerang, with an almost all-Black cast led by Murphy, was reportedly made for $42 million but grossed $131 million internationally back in 1988. And Coogler’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever made $150 million overseas, according to Deadline.
So, what else could justify the racial gap?
Well, traditionally, before it was common to have Black people in film at all, people behind the camera were also somewhat reliant on a version of horror that started with a “normal,” quintessential, white protagonist whose life was as baseline as possible.
The protagonist would be a point of relatability. Executives believed that white audiences needed to see themselves in a main character to get as many ticket sales as possible. And to a certain extent, they were right.
The Atlantic published an article exploring the lack of representation on screen, citing a 2014 study that found “White audiences were less likely to buy tickets for movies with predominantly Black casts.”
And specifically for horror movies, the effect of having a “relatable” white lead meant there was more room for the plot to take audiences, and the characters they related to so much, as far away from the quintessential baseline as possible.
So, from a content and marketing perspective, gatekeepers of the past didn’t have an incentive to push for Black leads.
The Atlantic article compares this built-in lack of diversity to what we sometimes see in discriminatory hiring practices, saying the movie industry can often follow the same trend out of fear that “their traditionally white customer base might be put off by too many minority employees and take their business elsewhere.”
Even with Get Out, Peele knew that he had to make it a point to bridge gaps with non-Black audiences to help them understand the depths of the Black experience and the stakes in front of the protagonist of the film, Chris. And that’s what influenced the decision to open the movie with a Black man being kidnapped.
Peele told the Guardian, “I felt it was important first and foremost to get the entire audience on board with the inherent fears that a Black man has.”
Peele, along with other Black voices, has been purposeful in these tactics to get audiences to understand Black experiences, or — at best — see themselves in those experiences.
Although these hoops some creatives have to jump through to connect with white viewers are not fair, they are effective. And the ticket sales support that.
The problem then becomes Hollywood’s continued and blatant oversight and underestimation of just how relatable and insightful Black storytelling can be.
What is Hollywood missing?
It seems like Hollywood is unaware of how ubiquitous Black culture is.
What films like Sinners, Get Out or even Candyman have in common is that they are Black stories told in the way that Black life happens — in the midst of any other culture that surrounds it. Because Black culture has always influenced the world so heavily, it is constantly in conversation with so many other groups.
So, when audiences saw a film like Sinners, they weren’t just seeing the twins and Sammie. They were also seeing the stories of Grace Chow and her Asian American family, as well as Remmick, along with his Irish American traditions. In fact, Coogler was intentional about using Blues music — born and bred in Black culture — to make those connections.
Coogler told NPR, “The film is about Blues music, right? Which is storytelling... Irish folks got to have a place in that... They were there.”
We often see pockets of culture like these, where Black writers, directors and actors are trying to highlight the bridges that already exist between our history and the other cultures that may be floating in the audience.
And the impact of these efforts stands as a testament to what can happen when Hollywood allows creatives to make films that look the way the world does.
What’s in store for future generations of horror filmmakers?
Looking forward to the future of horror filmmakers, what’s clear is that the more Black voices included, the better.
As Black professionals in film continue to offer their stories and likeness to the genre, the viewership is speaking for itself. Diversity and inclusion may be taking a hit in Hollywood, but it’s not because of ticket sales, and it’s surely not due to a lack of cultural impact from these films.
With Black visionaries driving the innovation in storytelling and depth of impact that viewers are looking for, gatekeepers should be making more room for these stories. And executives should be giving fair funding and marketing to them if they want to build the best library of culturally relevant, terrifyingly unforgettable films possible.
But until then, Black filmmakers will surely continue to make their own waves on whatever platforms they can, still offering honest, creative and undeniably disturbing work that continues to push the genre forward and provide more avenues for Black filmmakers in horror.