Towards a Definition of Black Cinematic Horror

Whittaker, Nicholas

doi:10.5840/filmphil2021111812

Film and Philosophy

ONLINE FIRST

published on December 4, 2021

Nicholas Whittaker

https://doi.org/10.5840/filmphil2021111812

Towards a Definition of Black Cinematic Horror

In this essay, I sketch a preliminary, phenomenological definition of black horror cinema. I argue that black horror films are films in which blackness and antiblackness are depicted as unintelligible. I build this definition first by arguing that horror films generally evoke a mood of Heideggerian uncanniness, by which I mean that they create a global affective state in which the world is experienced as unintelligible. I then turn to the Afropessimist theorizing of Frank B. Wilderson, who proposes both that blackness and antiblackness are phenomenologically graspable as unintelligible, and that cinema resists this unintelligibility by warping blackness and antiblackness. However, I thus contend that black horror is an exception to this rule. Black horror films take advantage of horror’s uncanny mood to craft a filmic world in which blackness and anti blackness are unintelligible.

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