So yeah, comedy was an escape for me. And also you mentioned horror. I think in a lot of ways my love for horror, which started in childhood, it was my mother, in fact, she was the culprit. She, the activist, she was the one who a police officer saw leading a protest in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1960, pointed her out, and said, “I want you,” and threw a tear gas canister into her face. So she had this lasting injury. She wore dark glasses all the time after that. I think when I listened to my mother tell her stories about being teargassed and being jailed for 49 days—she and her sister, my aunt Priscilla, who’s still living now—I really felt like I didn’t quite measure up in terms of my capacity for trauma. Compared to them, they had grown up in the Jim Crow South, and they’d been involved in civil rights in the ’60s to the point where my aunt fled the country after she was kicked in the stomach by a police officer. So this is, you know, my family has been directly, directly impacted by police violence.
I felt kind of like a weak link. I had this comfortable two-parent home in the suburbs and newly integrated United States. So I’ve never really been tested by much. I was like, I’m not ready. I am not ready for whatever it is, the big disaster. So I think I spent my whole life watching horror movies, bringing it back to horror. And my mother, I think, really did soothe her emotional wounds with horror. I regret deeply that I came to this revelation only after she passed away. Because we never really talked about it, ever. It was just something I always knew about her.
What were her horror movies?
Well, all of them, but starting with the old Universal ones, the black-and-white ones. Werewolf, Dracula, The Mummy, The Mole People, The Fly. I saw them all. We were raised on that stuff. And then when I was 16, she gave me my first Stephen King novel. And you know, that was it. I was gone. It was The Shining. Just the level of characterization, the realism of the scares. I believed it. And I’ve been a Stephen King fan ever since. And in a lot of ways, took my personal direction. I mean, it took me a while to wrestle with who I was as an artist. Am I allowed to write about horror? You know, I didn’t know any other black horror writers at the time I was coming of age. I had never read any horror by a black writer. And I was worried that my parents being civil rights activists, would I have enough respect, even, if I wrote horror? All these things were going through my mind. And it wasn’t just me. As I got older, I went to college, I started to get pushed away from my voice as an artist. I started to write white characters, first of all. I was disappearing in my own work because of exposure to the canon and not reading enough black authors as a part of my curriculum, despite having been practically homeschooled in black history at home.
It’s amazing how that conditioning to snap that, you know, you get exposed to the so-called canon. And I think a lot of writers face, um, identity crises when the canon doesn’t match what they want to write. And so I was getting it racially, and I was getting it with genre, by the way, as well. There was nobody pushing for genre in my college creative writing program. And I really had to sort of do some soul-searching and come back to horror as an artist. But the thing about it that still appeals to me, and I’m an executive producer on Shudder’s documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, which talks about, really, the conversation between artists who are of their time, you know, and telling stories of their time through the horror genre. Because horror, as a lot of people discuss in this documentary, is such an effective tool for amplifying our fears and making them larger than life.
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Why Hollywood Is Still So White, and Why Responding to the Protests Isn’t Enough - Vanity Fair
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