Hello, and welcome to week 3 of Fandom Horrorfest 2020! It’s crazy that we’re already at 3 weeks into the spooky season. This week will focus on horror writers, their books, their film adaptations, and the contributions they have made to horror. We wouldn’t have many of our favorite horror movies and games if it weren’t for the writers behind them, so let’s spend a week devoted to the often unsung heroes of horror!
Tananarive Due
Historically, like most literature and filmmaking, horror is a genre that has been mostly dominated by white men. Recently, we’ve begun to see other, more diverse voices pop up in horror, and I’ve endeavored to include some of those voices throughout the last few weeks of Horrorfest. However, as is often the case in cultures of group dominance, other races and demographics have not been totally absent, and it can often be quite beneficial to study how minorities have been treated throughout a medium or genre. Horror is no different, and perhaps the most important voice in this study of minorities in the history of horror is professor and writer Tananarive Due.
Due is an excellent horror novelist; after a career in journalism, she published several horror novels as well as mystery novels. Due has won and been nominated for several awards for these books, including such awards as the Bram Stoker Novel award for best novel and the NAACP Image award. While her writing is excellent (I particularly recommend My Soul to Keep, for which she won the Stoker award), Due is perhaps best known for being a film historian of the horror genre. Due teaches a class that I would personally love to take, “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival and the Black Horror Aesthetic” at UCLA, which is an entire course on Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. Most recently, she executive produced the wonderfully insightful Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, a documentary examining various Black horror creators and the history of the Black experience in the horror genre. This documentary is currently available on Shudder and Amazon Prime, and I highly recommend it for literally anyone. Even if you aren’t interested in horror, this documentary is fascinating and contains great interviews with Due herself as well as Jordan Peele and other creatives.
When I decided to craft this year’s Horrorfest as a more academic approach to horror, examining the dominant themes, creators, and history of my favorite genre, I knew that I wanted to include as many diverse voices as possible. Tananarive Due offers a unique insight into the history of horror and the driving themes behind Black creators and actors and feminist criticism that I would never be able to offer due to my own background and privilege. Due is an academic to her core and a horror enthusiast at her heart, a balance that I myself try to live in my own life. I cannot emphasize how important her work is to understanding the social commentary of horror and what it can mean for us in our everyday lives. Again, her own horror writing is excellent and worthy of its very own college course, and you can view many of Due’s lectures and interviews on her personal website, https://www.tananarivedue.com/
Fandom is for everyone, and I can’t think of a modern creative who embodies that sentiment than Tananarive Due.
