Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or Reinscription?

Benshoff, Harry M.  2000.  Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or Reinscription? Cinema Journal. 39(2): 31-50.

 Benshoff examines the racial, social and gender issues highlighted in the subgenre of horror within blaxploitation films. Aside from movies set against crime backdrops and ghetto life, horror was also a very popular genre within blaxploitaiton. Films such as Blackula  (a black retelling of Dracula) and JD’s Revenge were highly popular with black audiences. Benshoff argues that the images of monstrosity and normality correlate directly to what W.E.B. Dubois called the concept of “twonesss” in the African American psyche-two social identities struggling to coexist (39).  In addition, these films further echoed black nationalistic themes of “black power”, black “rightness” and white being seen as bad.

Although I have no intention of using horror movies within my research project dealing with blaxploitation and women, Benshoff’s article was indeed helpful. His section on “Gender and Sexuality” (40-43) delved greatly in the portrayal of African-American women in horror blaxploitation.  For example, once possessed with an evil “spirit” the women become hypersexualized monsters, ravenous creatures, “ethnically” blatant, and demonic women.   Once relieved of their possession, women become demure, complacent and traditional in their gender roles.   This echoes the same “twoness” of identity defined by Dubois that Benshoff points out with male characters in horror blaxploitation (although he does not elaborate on that idea with regard to women characters). Very few of these films stared black women in lead roles, but women are used (as they are in most horror films) as objects of sexual desire at the expense of black, patriarchal violence. There is no sense of empowerment in horror blaxploitation as there is in more “mainstream” blaxploitaiton films such as Coffy or Cleopatra Jones.   However, both horror and action blaxploitaiton films often subjugated women to roles of mere sexual objects. Thus, there is a slight contrast in the use of women in blaxploitaiton horror versus other subgenres within blaxploitation.