Cursed, Chosen, and F*ckin' Undeniable: The Best of Black Horror Cinema
These are the stories where Blackness survives the nightmare—and sometimes becomes it.
Black horror is more than jump scares and cheap screams. It’s blood memory. It’s ancestral reckoning. It’s centuries of spiritual warfare, grief, laughter, resistance, and legacy packed into 90 minutes. Our horror don’t always come with fangs—it comes with truth. And truth don’t flinch.
When we talk about horror through a Black lens, we’re talking about survival. About being haunted by systems, not just spirits. About conjuring safety in a world that keeps trying to bury us. These movies ain’t just for entertainment. They’re a sermon. A mirror. Sometimes even a warning. The monsters? They might live upstairs, wear badges, or carry family secrets behind their smiles.
What makes Black horror so powerful is that we’ve been living it. We carry generations of untold stories in our bones. Rootwork in our blood. Dread in our dreams. And film—when done right—gives those stories a place to rise. To haunt. To demand witness.
This list doesn’t cover every film. But these ten works—alongside a few crucial honorable mentions—changed the way we’re seen and the way we see ourselves. Some are rooted in Southern soil and Hoodoo. Others touch the cosmic, the psychological, the undead. But all of them matter.
Because horror, when told by us, becomes resurrection.
And these stories? They didn’t just survive—they clawed their way out the grave and stood tall.
Let’s walk into the dark. Together.
1. Get Out (2017) – Directed by Jordan Peele
Spiritual Meaning: Identity theft of the soul.
This psychological horror redefined modern Black horror by fusing racial commentary with deeply metaphysical horror. When Chris, a Black man, visits his white girlfriend’s family, what begins as microaggressions spirals into a terrifying plot of spiritual body-snatching. Get Out introduces the concept of “the sunken place”—a visual metaphor for powerlessness and stolen agency. Spiritually, this film mirrors ancestral fears of being trapped in a body that doesn’t belong to you. Peele’s masterpiece gave voice to subconscious racial dread and made it a national conversation.
2. Candyman (1992) – Directed by Bernard Rose, featuring Tony Todd
Spiritual Meaning: The conjured spirit of Black pain turned vengeful legend.
Set in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing projects, Candyman is more than an urban legend. It’s the ghost of racial injustice, housing discrimination, and Black erasure—literally summoned by saying his name. Tony Todd’s portrayal gave us the first complex Black horror icon—tragic, seductive, and terrifying. The bees, the hook, the mirrors—every symbol ties back to history and how trauma becomes folklore. Spiritually, it reminds us: some spirits are born from injustice, not evil.
3. His House (2020) – Directed by Remi Weekes
Spiritual Meaning: Guilt as a ghost.
This British horror film follows Sudanese refugees haunted by an apeth—a night witch who demands justice for the dead. It's not just a ghost story—it’s the collision of war trauma, forced migration, and cultural displacement. Spiritually, it explores what happens when you flee with the dead still tied to your name. The past isn’t buried. It follows. This film matters because it’s the rare horror piece that centers African mythology in a modern diasporic nightmare.
4. Bones (2001) – Directed by Ernest Dickerson, starring Snoop Dogg
Spiritual Meaning: Retribution from the grave.
Jimmy Bones, a 1970s hustler betrayed and murdered by the community he once protected, rises from the dead to reclaim his name and his neighborhood. Bones is drenched in Hoodoo iconography—mirror portals, sacred burial, and revenge rituals. While stylized and often overlooked, its message is clear: Black neighborhoods have spiritual memory, and betrayal echoes. Bones isn't just undead—he’s conjure justice wrapped in fly suits and bloodshed.
5. Us (2019) – Directed by Jordan Peele
Spiritual Meaning: Your shadow self will not be ignored.
In Us, a family faces their doubles—tethered versions of themselves who were abandoned underground. It’s a metaphor for the parts of Black identity that America hides: the overlooked, the suppressed, the brutalized. Peele layers this with numerology (Jeremiah 11:11), duality, and biblical undertones. The horror isn't the others—it’s the reality that we are them. Spiritually, Us speaks to generational trauma and the reckoning with our own reflection.
6. Tales from the Hood (1995) – Directed by Rusty Cundieff
Spiritual Meaning: Storytelling as judgment.
This anthology horror film serves horror with a sermon. Each tale is a parable—brutal police, domestic abusers, racist politicians—all punished by spiritual law. One story includes a haunted painting with souls of lynching victims; another uses dolls animated by ancestral wrath. This is Hoodoo wrapped in horror, offering warnings to those who forget their bloodlines. Tales from the Hood is prophecy disguised as popcorn.
7. The People Under the Stairs (1991) – Directed by Wes Craven
Spiritual Meaning: The oppressed will rise.
Young Fool, a Black boy breaking into a rich white family’s home, discovers a house of horrors beneath the floorboards. This film flips the “haunted house” trope into a metaphor for systemic oppression. The white landlords hoard wealth and literal bodies. Spiritually, it evokes ancestral burial, hidden truths, and spiritual incarceration. The monsters aren’t under the stairs—they're the ones upstairs holding the keys.
8. The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) – Starring Sennia Nanua
Spiritual Meaning: The rebirth of divine feminine power.
In a world infected by a fungal plague, a young Black girl is the key to humanity’s future. She is both zombie and messiah. Melanie embodies the sacred Black feminine—persecuted, feared, and yet the only one who holds balance between old world and new. This film offers a subtle mythological frame: she is the end and the beginning, the curse and the cure. A rare horror film that places a Black girl as savior and evolution incarnate.
9. Ganja & Hess (1973) – Directed by Bill Gunn
Spiritual Meaning: Blood as both curse and sacrament.
This avant-garde vampire film isn’t about horror—it’s about immortality, addiction, and Black divinity. Dr. Hess is stabbed with an ancient dagger that turns him into a blood drinker, but the real focus is his descent into a spiritual hunger he can’t escape. With rich Afrocentric themes and Christian imagery, this film reclaims the vampire myth through a Black theological lens. It still matters because it dared to be intellectual, erotic, and horrifying all at once—long before it was safe to do so.
10. Eve’s Bayou (1997) – Directed by Kasi Lemmons
Spiritual Meaning: Memory is magic.
Set in 1960s Louisiana, this Southern Gothic tale isn’t marketed as horror—but it is. Hoodoo is in the soil. The dead whisper in mirrors. Secrets sit heavy in the swamp air. Through the eyes of a young girl named Eve, we witness betrayal, prophecy, and the power of belief. Spirituality is quiet but ever-present—Aunt Mozelle’s second sight, the curse of knowledge, the weight of ancestral silence. It reminds us that horror isn’t always supernatural. Sometimes it’s family.
Honorable Mentions
Spell (2020) – Hoodoo horror in Appalachia.
A man crashes his plane in a rural town and wakes up bound by rootwork and captivity. This film explores manipulation of tradition and the fine line between healing and harm.
Ma (2019) – Psychological horror with a twist.
Octavia Spencer plays a lonely woman who offers teenagers a place to party, but her trauma becomes obsession. Spiritually, Ma is what happens when pain festers into punishment.
The Skeleton Key (2005) – Southern Gothic meets Hoodoo.
While the leads are white, the spiritual backbone is Hoodoo. The body-switching spell at the heart of the film is pure conjure—dealing with belief, mirrors, and entrapment.
Blacula (1972) – The original Black vampire icon.
A prince turned vampire by Dracula himself, Blacula’s story is drenched in tragedy and racial commentary. It kicked open the door for Black horror to even exist on screen.
Nope (2022) – Cosmic horror, spectacle, and Black resistance.
Peele once again flips expectation—this time using alien horror to critique exploitation, trauma, and the cost of being seen. It’s not just about aliens—it’s about control.
Last Thought:
Black horror isn’t just entertainment. It’s exorcism.
These stories carry the voices of our people—buried, betrayed, but not forgotten. They remind us that the dead don’t rest easy, truth don’t stay buried, and legacy always speaks.
These aren’t just movies.
They’re mirrors. And sometimes, monsters stare back.