Horror Noire

Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present

Robin R. Means Coleman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136942938
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

From King Kong to Candyman, the boundary-pushing genre of the horror film has always been a site for provocative explorations of race in American popular culture. In Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from 1890's to Present, Robin R. Means Coleman traces the history of notable characterizations of blackness in horror cinema, and examines key levels of black participation on screen and behind the camera. She argues that horror offers arepresentational space for black people to challenge the more negative, or racist, images seen in other media outlets, and to portray greater diversity within the concept of blackness itself.

Horror Noire presents a unique social history of blacks in America through changing images in horror films. Throughout the text, the reader is encouraged to unpack the genre's racialized imagery, as well as the narratives that make up popular culture's commentary on race.

Offering a comprehensive chronological survey of the genre, this book addresses a full range of black horror films, including mainstream Hollywood fare, as well as art-house films, Blaxploitation films, direct-to-DVD films, and the emerging U.S./hip-hop culture-inspired Nigerian "Nollywood" Black horror films. Horror Noire is, thus, essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how fears and anxieties about race and race relations are made manifest, and often challenged, on the silver screen.

1

The Birth of The Black Boogeyman

Pre-1930s

One only has to look up “black” in the Oxford English Dictionary to see the range of such associations as they were established by the sixteenth century; the word is used as a synonym for, among other things, malignant, sinister, foul, dismal, etc. Most tellingly, “black man” could mean either a Negro or the Devil.

—Lively (14)¹

Beginning in the mid-1800s, White men from occupations as diverse as scientist, eyeglass maker, and magician were beginning to explore film’s technological boundaries and to press its storytelling ability.² In Europe, filmmakers were proving that whatever came out of their imaginations, film could handle. This included giving birth to (presumably) the world’s first horror film proper— a two-minute, silent short entitled Le Manoir du Diable (The Haunted Castle), presented on Christmas Eve, 1896, at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris by French theater performer/magician Georges Méliès:

A large bat flies into a medieval castle. Circling slowly, it flaps its monstrous wings and suddenly changes into Mephistopheles. Conjuring up a cauldron, the demon produces skeletons, ghosts, and witches from its bubbling contents before one of the summoned underworld cavaliers holds up a crucifix and Satan vanishes in a puff of smoke.³

This was the era of the silent film (late 1800s to late 1920s), a period in which the moving image could not yet be coupled with synchronized sound for mass reproduction and theatrical playback. This was also a time when to be a filmmaker meant that one either had access to the (often experimental, self-invented) equipment necessary to capture a series of still images and make them move (e.g. “magic lantern” zoetropes), or possessed the capability to capture moving images using a film camera.⁴ The filmmakers created what were then called “photoplays,” with many of them initially only mere seconds or minutes long, thereby earning the moniker film “shorts.” Films were initially watched through viewing machines such as the Kinetoscope which accommodated one viewer at a time. However, advancements in film technology rapidly evolved and the projection of moving images for large, paying audiences was accomplished in 1893. Although the films of this period were silent, it was not uncommon for them to be accompanied by live orchestral music and sound effects. “Intertitles,” or stills of printed text or transcribed dialogue, were edited into the films to detail plot points while actors pantomimed their dialogue. In 1926 the first feature film with pre-recorded, synchronized sound was introduced.⁵ In 1927, The Jazz Singer included, music, sounds, and, importantly, dialogue. From that moment on, “talkies” were a mainstay.⁶

In the early years of film, Blacks were portrayed by Whites, performing racist stereotypes while in blackface. One of the earliest known treatments of Blacks in what might be considered a horror film proper (though the term “horror” was not widely used at that time) was in the French film Off to Bloomingdale Asylum (1901).⁷ The film was made by magician and illusionist Georges Méliès, known for his stage performances and approximately 500 short films which include themes of the supernatural and the macabre. Asylum is rife with ghostly figures as described in Méliès’ catalog:

An omnibus drawn by an extraordinary mechanical horse is drawn by four Negroes. The horse kicks and upsets the Negroes, who falling are changed into white clowns. They begin slapping each other’s faces and by blows become black again. Kicking each other, they become white once more. Suddenly they are all merged into one gigantic Negro. When he refuses to pay his car fare the conductor sets fire to the omnibus, and the Negro bursts into a thousand pieces.⁸

The film’s “Negroes” were performed by White actors in blackface, who were charged, seemingly, to depict the violence around crossing racial boundaries, the tensions around racial masquerade, and finally the brutish end to the metaphorical White man’s burden with the destruction of the Negro.

American audiences were hardly left out of the early film experience. An early reference to Blacks in association with a spooky theme was in 1897 when the American film company Biograph offered a short, very likely a comedy, with the offensive title Hallowe’en in Coontown, thereby linking Blacks to the frightful holiday.⁹ Hallowe’en joined the ranks of dozens of “coon” films, such as the Wooing and Wedding of a Coon (1907) or Coontown Suffragettes (1914), in which Blacks, portrayed by Whites in blackface, were comically ridiculed. The short film Minstrels Battling in a Room (circa 1897–1900) was narratively on the complex side. Here, Black men and women (portrayed by White men in blackface) are in what may be a nightclub, where they turn rowdy. The “Blacks” even go so far as to turn on a White man.¹⁰ The fate of the Blacks in the film for “battling” a White man is unknown—but in fiction of the period there are dire consequences for Blacks assaulting Whites. The film’s deteriorated state makes a firm conclusion impossible.¹¹ Indeed, many films of the pre-1950s period have been irreparably damaged or lost. The deterioration of film can be attributed to the manner in which the film itself was made—using highly flammable nitrate. G. William Jones, in Black Cinema Treasures: Lost and Found details the problem:

Nitrate was used universally for 35-millimeter theatrical films until World War II. Nitrate’s chemical composition is very close to the composition of gunpowder, and this sped up a transition to non-flammable acetate stock so that nitrate could go to war. … because nitrate stock has a tendency to destroy itself. First, such films become covered with a fine, yellow-brown dust as the backing begins to break down. Then, the images begin to stick to the next turn, so that unreeling the film does further damage … Finally, the film becomes a mixture of sticky, semi-solid masses awash in a puddle of dust. Estimates are that almost fifty percent of the world’s pre-1950 film heritage is now gone forever—most of it due to nitrate decomposition.¹²

Some films did survive. For example, in 1898 directors Edwin S. Porter and George S. Fleming, working under the auspices of the Edison Manufacturing Company, filmed Shooting Captured Insurgents. This was real footage of four White soldiers executing four Black men. In doing so, Edison’s company may have produced one of two of America’s earliest, grisly horrifying shorts. The second is the 1898 short documentary An Execution by Hanging. The film company, Biograph, hailed Execution, which documented the hanging death of a Black man in a Jacksonville, Florida jail, as the only live hanging ever captured on film. Butters describes the scenes as “explicit” and “ghastly”:

the executioner adjusts a black cap over the prisoner’s head. The noose is placed over his neck. After the man is hung, his body quivers and shakes from the tension. The nostalgic claim of the innocence of early silent cinema is clearly broken by this film. The death of an African-American man is clearly on the screen. His crime is never announced; his punishment is all the spectator understands.¹³

“Real” Blacks, not Whites in blackface, were frequently seen in silent, ethnographic films which were defined by scenes of people going about their daily lives while a White, male “adventurer”/filmmaker documented their activities. These representations were hardly “real,” however, as they served the function of casting Blacks as Others—curiosities and oddities so markedly different from Whites that their most mundane habits must be documented and exhibited as if Blacks were animals in a zoo. The footage appears, at times, to be surreptitiously shot, unbeknownst to its Black “star,” or at other times the films’ subjects seem to go about their business conscious of, but in spite of, the camera trained upon them. In 1895, shorts such as Native Woman Coaling a Ship at St. Thomas, Native Woman Washing a Negro Baby in Nassau, and Native Woman Washing Clothes at St. Vincent all present Blacks going about routines, as selected by the filmmaker. Musser warns that these images did not present “a kind of primitive, nonracist innocence,” as they are far from benign documentaries.¹⁴ These perspectives of Blacks as odd and primitive would become a mainstay in horror over the next century, particularly in films which depict Blacks as savage, deadly natives (e.g. Black Moon [1934]).

Often, the films focused on a narrow range of Black activities, many of which were set up by the filmmaker. For example, there was The Watermelon Contest (1895), featuring a group of Black men prompted to race one another to finish a large piece of the fruit. Edison (1898) and German émigré Sigmund Lubin (1903) both produced films called Buck Dance. Lubin described his version as featuring “a number of smokes dancing for their favorite watermelon.”¹⁵ Oddly, the films of the early twentieth century spoke volumes about what White filmmakers obsessed over as it pertained to Blacks—watermelon and chicken (e.g. Watermelon Feast [1903]; Who Said Chicken? [circa 1910]). Over the coming decades horror would appropriate such stereotypes, with Blacks’ love for melon and chicken being depicted as a powerful distraction from the monsters chasing them. To illustrate, years later, in the comedy-horror film Boys of the City (1940), the Black character Scruno (Ernest “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison) would halt his quaking with fear over a ghost just long enough to sing the praises of, and to eat, watermelon.

The Black world, according to the early film shorts, was quite narrowly defined in class, status, and contribution. Blacks were often depicted outdoors rather than in homes. Their work, when they did it, was of a laboring kind. Intimate images of the Black family were elusive. Lubin offered In Zululand (1915), described as “cartoon humor,” in which Black women dress up as ghosts to frighten a relative from marrying a “good-for-nothing-nigger.”¹⁶ Lloyd Ingraham’s Hoodoo Ann (1916) also has a wedding theme. A woman, Ann (Mae Marsh), enlists her maid, Black Cindy (Madame Sul-Te-Wan), to help her rid herself of a curse so that on her wedding day “the wedding of Ann is the funeral of the hoodoo.”¹⁷ Viewers were given no hint that there were Black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson, and Nannie Helen Burroughs. In these shorts, there were no poets, politicians, journalists, Harvard Ph.D.s, college presidents, or human rights activists. Still, perhaps an absence of references to Blacks would have been preferable given the alternative, as evidenced by the representation of the Black clergy in 1904’s A Nigger in the Woodpile.

A Nigger in the Woodpile was not inscribed with the tropes of the horror genre. However, it can be interpreted as horrifying all the same. In the film, a Black church deacon (played by a White actor in blackface) is depicted as the frequent purloiner of a White farmer’s firewood. Hoping to put an end to the theft, the farmer replaces a cord of wood with sticks of dynamite. As expected, the deacon comes along to steal the wood, and unbeknownst to him, picks up the explosives as well. The deacon is shown returning home, stopping to greet his wife (also a White male actor in blackface for gender annihilation, as well) who is cooking in the kitchen, and then placing the “wood” into their fireplace. The home explodes around them, leaving the couple, charred from the fire, to stagger about the ruins of their home. Then, the White farmer arrives, joined by a White male helper. They take hold of the deacon, dragging him off. Perhaps the farmers plan to take the Deacon to the proper legal authorities for charges (as if the bombing of his home was not punishment enough); however, the real-life 1904 context of the film belies imagining such a conclusion. Rather, this was a period when lynchings were rampant and militant White supremacists terrorized Blacks.

For much of the early 1900s, the generic qualities of horror went uncharted. The concept of a “horror” film did not enter into the popular lexicon until the 1930s. However, the generic elements of horror are visible from film’s start, to include the fantastical, battles between good and evil, disruption of the everyday and rationality, and, of course, the invoking of fear. How Blacks secured their place in the genre and the nature of those representations requires an exploration into the early days of American film, during which the notion of Blackness-asmonstrous was introduced.

Though such representations of Blackness were first conceptualized outside of the horror genre, such images made a significant contribution to horror, and continue even today to figure prominently in American cinema’s notion of what is most horrific in our society. They function as key reminders of the little value placed on Black life, and could be interpreted as horrifying. Butters notes that the actions depicted in films such as A Nigger in the Woodpile can be easily dismissed by some: “one can argue that violent depictions of African Americans were simply part of the slapstick tradition of comedy that dominated early screen portrayals. Slapstick comedy … involves cruel humor and violence.”¹⁸ However, the film also exploits anxieties about Blacks and stereotypes of Black criminality to evoke fears among Whites about the unsettling presence of the “niggers” among them.¹⁹

The filmmaker Lubin, known for his stereotype-laden Sambo and Rastus film series introduced around 1909, united horror and slapstick with real Black actors as stars to offer one of the first “Black horror” films. The 1915 horror-comedy production The Undertaker’s Daughter, directed by Willard Louis, is a short, silent film starring John Edwards and Mattie Edwards. According to Lubin’s publicity material, Daughter told the following story:

Mattie Cook, the Under...