Black History is Black Horror: Traditions of Racial Storytelling Across Time from Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells to Black Horror Cinema

Abstract

Abstract This thesis argues that Black horror cinema emerges from long-standing literary traditions of racial storytelling rooted in Black autobiographical and documentary writing. In the nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells developed modes of narration centered on witnessing, testimony, psychological terror, spectacle, and resistance to describe racial violence as both a lived reality and a historical condition. Their work insisted on the visibility of violence, the credibility of Black witnesses, and the necessity of recording racial terror as a routine feature of American life. Through testimony, Douglass and Wells claimed authority over Black historical experience, creating narrative frameworks that linked personal experiences to public history. This thesis places their writing in conversation with six films—The Birth of a Nation (1915), Night of the Living Dead (1968), Blacula (1972), Candyman (1992 and 2021), and Get Out (2017)—to examine how Black horror cinema inherits autobiographical practices in a different medium. Black horror cinema translates earlier testimonial strategies into visual form. Psychological terror and spectacle demonstrate how racial violence is lived, remembered, and perpetuated across generations, while witnessing and testimony organize these films as historical claims rather than mere metaphors. Resistance remains central, shaping both narrative structure and moral purpose. By weaving together archival research, historiography, and film analysis, this project illustrates how Black autobiography and Black horror cinema function as interconnected modes of historical storytelling. Together, these modes preserve memory across time, advance the project of Black historical writing, and document how terror has structured Black life in America.