Women in Blaxploitation Horror

                                            

  

Sugar Hill (1974)

    Blaxploitation film was an ethnic subgenre of exploitation films that emerged in the early 1970s. Blaxploitation films focused on all Black casts and stories that commonly took place in urban locations. These films came in a variety of genres, including horror. Exploitation films commonly expressed ideas about modern Black life, involving civil and financial worries of the era. These worries included racism and the need to get out from under “the man”, a commonality through blaxploitation films of all genres.Junius Griffin, then president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP, is credited with coining the term Blaxploitation, as it is a combination of the words Black and exploitation. Griffin named this as a result of his idea that the films perpetuate harmful stereotypes about Black Americans. To focus on Blaxploitation horror, I point to the 1972 film Blacula starring William Marshall, Vonetta McGee and Thalmus Rasulala. The film is credited as one of the first Blaxploitation horror films, going on to gain popularity nationally and become one of the highest grossing films of 1972. The common stereotype of the Black woman in these films were the sex object, prostitute, street hustler and other unsavory depictions. 

For the first time since race films of the 50s and 60s, all Black casts were the subject of the film rather than the sidekicks or supporting characters. In films like Blacula or Blackenstairn, the protagonist is replaced with an explicitly Black male. The Black woman for the first time is a complex character, full of agency and individuality. This can be seen in the 1974 zombie horror film Sugar Hill, in which Diana “Sugar” Hill seeks revenge on gangsters after the murder of her boyfriend. With her horde of zombies brought from the dead using voodoo, she reigns terror on a group of mostly white men. 

Blaxploitation films like Blacula appealed to urban Black communities as studios sought to gain popularity. This is partly a result of white flight, as white families left the cities and fled to the suburbs. These films, including the horror genre, depicted racism and crime still prevalent at the time. Black women, as a result of exclusion from white feminist movements that focused on the issues of middle-class white women, rose to Black feminst thinkings. This can be seen as the women in these films, Blacula and Sugar Hill, have professional careers and are freely sexually active. With the rise of Black women as part of the workforce, they were no longer depicted as domestic workers of the past. 

With the idea of Blaxploitation taking off, studios worked to put out films that would make money back. The challenge in this was that all Black casts and subject matter was treated as a trend, as exploitation films do, rather than a movement of film. Black women were heroines of their own stories, depicted as strong individuals with personality and characterization. The use of offensive stereotypes and sexualization of the Black women’s body became a source of sustainability for the genre, harming the very communities that were supposed to be represented in them.  

As the Blaxploitation horror genre was short-lived, the push for Black women on and off the screen continues on. We watch as horror films with Black women as the strong complex, intelligent, resourceful heroine becomes nationally recognized, not just as a niche genre but as the epitome of horror the genre itself.

Candyman (2021)