Content area
Full Text
The intersection of racial identity and narrative structure in blaxploitation horror films produced a potential critique of both social and generic racism, as well as a significant variation in how the genre classically figures normality and monstrosity.
This essay explores how the concept of African American agency historically negotiated the generic structure of the horror film during the years of the blaxploitation film craze (roughly 1969-76). This is an important topic, since the American horror film often hinges on filmically constructed fears of the Other-an Otherness both drawn from and constitutive of any given era's cultural history. As many theorists have pointed out, the generic pattern of the classical American horror film oscillates between the "normal," mostly represented by the white, middleclass heterosexuality of the films' heroes and heroines, and the "monstrous," frequently colored by racial, sexual, class, or other ideological markers.1 Since most of the horror films produced in America have been created by white filmmakers, it should not be surprising that the vast majority of those films use race as a marker of monstrosity in ways generically consistent with the larger social body's assumptions about white superiority.2
By way of contrast, I explore how the discourse of race plays out in blaxploitation horror films. How are the generic tenets of "normality" and "difference" refigured (if they are) when viewed through the lens of a marginalized racial collective? In what ways might these films have addressed the specific fantasy needs of the black social imaginary? Ultimately, for some viewers, blaxploitation horror films mounted a challenge to the Other-phobic assumptions of the genre s more common reception. However, while appearing to critique white racism in America, most of these films were unable to withstand the genre s more regular demonization of gender and sexuality, which are arguably more deeply embedded as monstrous within both the horror film and the culture at large.
The issue of African American agency is complicated by the fact that many of the films discussed below had white directors, editors, producers, and crews. Given the "leaky" or incomplete nature of traditional auteur (and genre) theory in light of poststructuralist reformulations and cultural studies, a provisional definition of the blaxploitation horror film should be proffered: a horror film made in the...