This is a word, a podcast from Slate. I'm your host, Jason Johnson. For years, movie lovers

knew exactly what was going to happen to the black character in a horror film. They were

either going to die first, die in some terrible way, or sacrifice their lives so that the

white people could survive. But now, African American characters and artists are flipping

the scripts by writing the scripts and thriving in the world of horror. Obviously, we are so

blessed to have a Jordan Peel who is such a great artist who happens to be one of our own.

He's black and he's horror. I mean, how lucky are we, right? So as long as Jordan Peel

is making films, black horror will be a conversation.

The black horror renaissance coming up on a word with me, Jason Johnson. Stay with us.

Welcome to a word, a podcast about race in politics and everything else. I'm your host,

Jason Johnson. Much of US history has been a horror show for black people, but the black

voice has just recently become a major force in the horror genre and literature, movies

and television. Audiences have embraced black horror stories like Lovecraft Country,

Candyman, them, Jordan Peel's Get Out, one of the writers documenting and leading the

black horror renaissance is Tanana Reeve Dew. She's an award-winning author of horror and

science fiction and a professor teaching black horror and Afrofuturism UCLA. Dew is also

an executive producer of Shudder's groundbreaking documentary, Horror Noir, a history of black

horror. It shows that this new horror revolution has been decades in the making. Here's a clip

of Tanana Reeve Dew talking about the historic 1972 horror movie, Blackula.

The movie opens with him with his queen trying to argue with Count Dracula to end the transatlantic

slave trade. When is the last time black audiences had seen themselves expressed visually

in the 1700s as area diet and intelligent and holding court and trying to discuss world

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