Adia Cullors - Bitches, Babes, and Badasses: Exploring Black Final Girls in Horror History

In this lecture, Adia Cullors will discuss the unique and overlooked role of Black final girls in horror history. With their origins in 1970’s Blaxploitation, Black final girls are often depicted as being highly sexual, strong, matriarchial, and altruistic. Over the past fifty years, these women have evolved to become mainstays of high-profile Black horror films.

This lecture will trace the evolution of Black final girls and explore how they are reflective of the intersectional experience of Black womanhood. So long as Black women have been survivors in horror they have also been targets for biting critique and controversy surrounding who should control the role of Black womanhood on screen. Using archival film reviews and opinions pieces this talk will discuss not only how Black women have evolved on the horror screen but also how, over the past fifty years, that evolution has been shaped, challenged, and embraced by Black audiences and critics.

Adia Cullors is a Baltimore-based historian and archivist who writes on Black history, queer culture, and genre film. Cullors has worked as an archivist for both the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture and the John Hopkins Medical History Archives. She wrote her thesis About the Bodies: How the Modern Museum Helped Invent Race in 2021 and since continues to explore Black death culture and justice through her writing for The Order of the Good Death.

Rhonda Jackson Joseph - Mothers, Lovers, and Others: An Examination of Black Female Characters in Horror Films

The very existence Black women and the nuances of Black femininity are often horrific in ways that are rarely seen in horror, aboveboard. This erasure ensures that horror fans rarely experience horror through the lens of a Black female experience and prohibits Black female horror fans from seeing their experiences played out in the genre they love. In Mothers, Lovers, and Others, I am performing an interdisciplinary examination of varying depictions of Black women in horror films through the lenses of gender, film, and cultural studies. This analysis is rooted in the oppositional gaze as introduced by bell hooks and the male gaze coined by Laura Mulvey. I will use these theories to analyze Black, female characters in various horror films as grouped by the following categories: mothers, lovers, and other depictions.

This examination further takes into account the unstable gains Black women have made within the parameters of the horror film genre and seeks to ultimately argue two facets of this issue. First, that many experiences of Black women are horrific and nuanced; thus, the experiences should be used to create multi-dimensional and realistic Black, female characters in these films while extending to support for why these lived experiences should be held as a standard to which the horror genre aspires as a genuine effort towards inclusion. Secondly, allowing more Black, female horror content creators the opportunity to develop their works for the screen would result in more multi-dimensional, nuanced characters than the ones we are often offered.

Rhonda Jackson Garcia, AKA RJ Joseph, is a Stoker Award™ nominated, Texas based academic and creative writer/professor whose writing regularly focuses on the intersections of gender and race in the horror and romance genres and popular culture. She has had works published in various applauded venues, including the 2020 Halloween issue of Southwest Review and The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Series. Rhonda is also an instructor at the Speculative Fiction academy.

She occasionally peeks out on Twitter @rjacksonjoseph or at www.rhondajacksonjoseph.com

Tira Adams -  Vampire Witch Sistahs

What do SCREAM, BLACKCULA, SCREAM, Beyonce’s LEMONADE, and AMERICAN GODS all have in common? Give up? Well...they all in their way explore the archetype of the Conjure Woman through the lens of Horror film and television.  

Horror and The Conjure Woman share a reciprocal relationship, extending one hand to help the other. Horror films and television have been the modern-day vessels through which the belief of conjure has been preserved and reached a broad audience. While also providing a space for Black Women to be powerful, have agency, and celebrate their sexuality. Storytellers in turn have purposely, often with mixed results, incorporated conjure’s female-centric sensibilities into their stories.

This talk will take us on tour through history, from the blues lyrics where The Conjure Woman first shows up to films like SCREAM, BLACULA, SCREAM (1974), THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988), EVE’S BAYOU (1997), and LEMONADE (2016), ending with television shows like TRUE BLOOD (2008 - 2014), and AMERICAN GODS in order to highlight how these women evolved from only occupying the space of the feared communal outcast to being embraced for their feminist ideals, all the while taking viewers on an emotional journey that often ends in self-fulfillment.

Tira Adams is a writer and performer. She is the creator of her youtube channel Mistress of the Imaginarium, where she posts reviews and video essays in Sci-Fi, Horror & Fantasy for every 80s baby and 90s kid!

This event is free and donation-based

5x6€ special at City Kino Wedding

7€ Individual tickets at City Kino Wedding

COVID-19 Safety Precautions

All our events are 2G+ - please bring your vaccination pass or proof of recovery, and a negative test result from the same day.