The “otherness” associated with race in horror films made before the late 1960s is only now in the process of remission. Progress has been slow, but Duane Jones’s leading roles in George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess (1973) established them as landmarks in the history of horror noire. While the genre inched forward through the 1990s with key works from Black directors like James Bond III and Rusty Cundieff and white filmmakers like Wes Craven and Bernard Rose, it was Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) that most effectively opened up the genre to a new generation of Black filmmakers. And while the wait for Indigenous people to gain some control over their representation in horror films has been even longer, the cultural perspective that Mi’kmaq director Jeff Barnaby has brought to the genre in the last decade demonstrates that its messaging potential remains strong.
Organized by Ron Magliozzi, Curator, and Brittany Shaw, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Film, with Caryn Coleman, guest curator.
Film at MoMA is made possible by CHANEL.
Additional support is provided by the Annual Film Fund. Leadership support for the Annual Film Fund is provided by Debra and Leon D. Black and by Steven Tisch, with major contributions from The Contemporary Arts Council of The Museum of Modern Art, Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder, MoMA’s Wallis Annenberg Fund for Innovation in Contemporary Art through the Annenberg Foundation, the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art, the Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, Karen and Gary Winnick, and The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston.
