Black Horror IRL

  The 2015 short film Paralysis directed by R. Shanea Williams follows a 30-year-old woman named Jessica who is a photographer and is suffering from chronic sleep paralysis. At the beginning of the short film, Jessica expresses that she is not taking on any new clients and it is revealed that she experienced childhood trauma when her mother passed away when she was 10. During a conversation with her father, it alludes that Jessica has a history of self-harm as a deep parallel scar is shown on her wrist. For the entirety of the film, it is clear that Jessica’s life is unraveling and constraining. For the majority of the film taking place in Jessica’s apartment, the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred. Just like Jessica has a dwindling perception of time and reality, so too is the audience sure what is real and what is a dream. Jessica’s sense of personhood begins to dissolve as two variations of her sense of self emerge, her nighttime self and her wakeful self. As the perc...

  In The Bride Before you, one of the six installments of the collected short films included in Horror Noire conceptualized problematic themes of colorism and gender favoritism that are embedded into the social landscape of the modern African American community. The short story follows a young prosperous Black couple, although they are wealthy they are desperate to conceive a child. Full of desperation and frustration, the young wife confides in her trusted housemaid to connect with a local voodoo practitioner. After following the instructions the young woman falls pregnant and births a light-skinned son. The son grows up and is a prosperous man; however, the house seemingly is haunted as it frequently shakes and growls. As a grown man, the son presents a beautiful and wealthy debutante he intends to marry named Clara. Clara pressures the housemaid into allowing her into the attic to inspect the source of the noises, and she is killed by a strange figure. Devastated by the loss, th...