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Taking a wide-angle view of the current horror media landscape, it would not be an exaggeration to assert that we are in the midst of a [Black] horror boom.1 Bernice Murphy has examined some of the common threads shared between Get Out and a backwoods horror film such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), an association that disrupts narratives that try to categorize Peele's film as \"elevated horror.\"15 What happens, however, if we were to fill in the historiographical gap for Peele, reinserting Blaxploitation horror as both a thematic and an aesthetic precursor to Get Out and other more recent [Black] horror?It is with this alternative lineage in mind that I would like to reconsider Jamaa Fanaka's Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975).16

The 2010s were perhaps the most tumultuous decade since the 1960s. The effects of the Great Recession continued to be felt. The administration of Barack Obama, the first African-American president, encouraged many to think that America was now 'post-racial', an illusion broken by the election of Donald Trump. Polarisation reigned, communicated on social media. Netflix and Amazon jumped into production. By 2019, Netflix produced more feature films than the traditional studios combined. Cinema's move from film to digital, in production and in exhibition, was complete by mid-decade. `MeToo and `Oscarssowhite signaled a reckoning with gross gender and racial inequalities in the media, matched by that in the wider culture. The essays of this book explore the blockbusters, low-budget sleepers, and films in between.

Black spectators have maintained a deeply fraught relationship with the horror film going at least as far back as the 1950s, and this relationship persists even today. Yet, little research has been done that considers this audience, their various viewing positions and practices, or the historical and industrial forces that have shaped how they interact with the genre. That a substantial black audience has been drawn to the modern and postmodern horror film despite or perhaps even because of its notoriously negative treatment of blackness is a phenomenon that warrants closer attention; it is precisely these kinds of ambivalent and contested cultural negotiations that reveal how racial subjectivity informs ideas about the horrific and vice versa. More than just a genre of fright that anticipates and articulates cultural anxieties, horror operates as part of a larger ideological sphere that informs how Americans conceptualize intersectional relations of power. Building upon the work of scholars such as Linda Williams, Saidiya Hartman, and Carol J. Clover, this study asserts that narrative horror has assumed a dialectical relationship with American rights discourse. Both fields draw from a familiar gothic vocabulary that positions the abject human frame at their centers and both are bound by a similar transactional economy whereby persecution yields entitlement, suffering pleads for violent retribution, and injury demands vengeance. Horror's appeal for black audiences during the latter half of the twentieth century can therefore be traced not simply along axes of circumscribed representation, but more significantly, to its insistence upon coding otherwise nebulous antagonisms in the readily legible terms of monsters and victims, persecutors and oppressed. Ultimately, the horror film has allowed black spectators a means through which to interrogate issues that have remained central to black life in the wake of [legal] desegregation, namely questions of autonomy, mastery, mobility, ownership, vulnerability, and empowerment. Utilizing various interdisciplinary approaches across five thematic chapters, this study contributes to an ongoing conversation concerning how people make use of cultural products and how patterns of cultural production and consumption operate in relation their social, spiritual, psychological, and political lives.

The male protagonists that dominate the films of Spike Lee are often the targets or agents of brutal, debilitating, and sometimes fatal violence. Inextricably linked to these characters' subject position in cultural space, this violence is part of a larger \"blues ideology.\" Simply defined, blues ideology refers to the processes of abjection and given person's creative, expressive response to that abjection. Central to this formulation of the blues, is the body as a primary site of mediation that is, as the place where power relations are negotiated.The moments when bodily violence erupts in tandem with creative and performative expression can best be described as \"beating songs.\" They are meta-narratives within the larger texts that make explicit the ways in which violence informs the cultural order. While certainly akin to what many have recognized as blues ideology and methodology in the African American literary tradition, I argue that this filmic manifestation of the blues is different because of the medium's unique ability to display bodily violence. By forcing the viewer into identification with the blues subject and his abjection, the beating song presents a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the blues as one of the most powerful ways of being.To be clear, this specific case study of selected films from Lee's diverse body of work is by no means an attempt to engage still on-going debates about blues music and its appropriation (or misappropriation). Rather, it should be seen as a way of re-imagining blues culture beyond the strict boundaries of race, class, and regional identity markers. What the \"beating song\" suggests is that a person's connection to the blues is determined by subject position and in this instance, his response to what are frequently liminal, paradoxical, or contradictory circumstances.

Drawing on human kinetics-the study of the body in motion and the forces that act upon it-Sheppard deploys the term critical muscle memory to describe how representations of Black sporting bodies \"contain embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film's diegesis to index, circulate, reproduce, and/or counter broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society. \"4 5 This renewed emphasis on understanding how Blackness is continually conjured up and reconfigured within the particular aesthetic, political, and emotional registers demanded by the sports film feels in concert with Michael Boyce Gillespie's and Racquel Gates's recent calls for renewed focus on formal analysis in Black film and media studies.6 Sheppard demonstrates the reach of critical muscle memory as an investigative tool across four thoroughly researched chapters and varied case studies. Chapter 2, \"Racial Iconicity and the Transmedia Black Athlete,\" unquestionably serves as the book's best display of interdisciplinarity as Sheppard traces transmedia incarnations of former Texas high school football star James \"Boobie\" Miles. [...]for many readers, it is only upon reading chapter 3, \"Black Female Incommensurability and Athletic Genders,\" that some of Sheppard's earlier choices, such as the aforementioned discussion of This Is a Game, Ladies, begin to coalesce.