Editorials
Mami Wata and the Untapped Stories of Water Spirits in Horror
When Creature from the Black Lagoon splashed onto screens in 1954, it gave birth to a very specific kind of horror lineage. The Gill-man became shorthand for aquatic terror, spawning sequels, remakes, homages, and an entire design language of webbed hands, dorsal fins, and rubber-suited menace. Decades later, Hollywood is still wading in that same water. Shark thrillers, deep-sea survival films, mutated piranha, colossal squids; the mechanics change, the budgets grow, but the imagination rarely leaves the lagoon. All the while, an entire ocean of water spirits: older, stranger, and far more psychologically terrifying, remain largely untouched. I’m talking about Mami Wata.
Who Is Mami Wata?
I’m Nigerian, and my first encounter with Mami Wata wasn’t through film or television but through my grandmother’s stories. The descriptions were consistent across tellings: impossibly beautiful women with flowing hair, luminous skin, and eyes that seemed to reflect light even in darkness. They appeared near rivers, lakes, shorelines — always half-revealed. The upper body was woman. The lower half, fish.
What unsettled me wasn’t just the imagery but the certainty. My grandmother didn’t narrate these encounters as distant folklore. She spoke about sightings, about people who had seen her, about behaviors one was expected to follow around certain waters. You didn’t swim in particular rivers. You didn’t wear certain colors near the shoreline. And you never interfered with offerings left at the water’s edge.
I didn’t need Universal Studios to teach me that water was dangerous. Mami Wata wasn’t a movie monster. She was real. That distinction between spectacle and belief is where the divide between Western aquatic horror and African water cosmology truly begins.
When Water Has Memory
Western water monsters tend to operate on biological logic. The shark in Jaws is hungry. The predators in Piranha are territorial. Even more fantastical aquatic beings, from the Gill-man to the amphibious figures in Guillermo del Toro’s films, are framed as species with instincts, habitats, and vulnerabilities. They can be tracked, studied, and eventually killed. The horror is physical.
African water spirits operate on metaphysical logic. They are not random predators but enforcers of balance, custodians of spiritual agreements, embodiments of moral consequence. If a water spirit targets someone, the cause is rarely accidental. Something has been violated, promised, inherited, or ignored. The fear is not of being eaten but of being claimed.
The Diasporic Reach of Mami Wata: From West Africa to the Atlantic
This cosmological framing transforms aquatic horror from a survival narrative into an existential reckoning. You cannot harpoon a covenant. You cannot dynamite a spiritual debt. If the water is calling, it is calling for a reason, and that reason may predate you.
Part of what makes Mami Wata so cinematically rich and so underutilized is that she is not a singular entity but a vast spiritual continuum stretching across regions and diasporas. There are a thousand different variations of this spirit, and no one is truer than the other.
Senegal, she manifests as Mame Coumba Bang, a river guardian presence tied to protection and retribution. In Haitian Vodou, her energies merge with La Sirène, a mermaid lwa associated with beauty, wealth, and the depths. In Brazil and across the Afro-Atlantic religious sphere, her echoes appear in Yemanjá, the maternal oceanic force honored in coastal ceremonies. This Yemanja is just a transliteration of the Yoruba Orisha (celestial spirits of the Yoruba culture) called Yemoja, revered as the “Mother of All” or “Mother of All Fishes”, and the guardian of water, motherhood, and fertility.
Despite regional variations, core iconography persists: mirrors, combs, serpents, flowing hair, radiant adornment, and the promise or danger of prosperity. She is seductive but sovereign, generous but exacting, beautiful but never harmless. That multiplicity alone gives her more narrative elasticity than most cinematic monsters, whose mythologies are often fixed and biologically bounded.
Mami Wata (2023)
Mami Wata in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Film has approached this cosmology cautiously but meaningfully in recent years.
Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny (2022) offers one of the most psychologically layered depictions. The film follows Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant working in New York, whose life becomes threaded with visions of Mame Coumba Bang. Water appears everywhere: bathtubs, swimming pools, reflective surfaces transforming modern infrastructure into spiritual thresholds. The haunting is tied to grief, migration, motherhood, and sacrifice, presenting the water spirit as an emotional and cosmological force rather than a jump-scare device.
C.J. “Fiery” Obasi’s Mami Wata (2023) takes a more mythic approach. Shot in stark monochrome, the film portrays a coastal village structured around devotion to a water deity embodied through a human intermediary. As belief fractures, so does communal stability. The horror emerges not from attack but from spiritual imbalance, aligning the film more with atmospheric folk horror than creature features.
Even outside explicit depictions, diasporic media has drawn from the imagery. Lovecraft Country incorporates mermaid and water-spirit symbolism tied to Black feminine transformation. Beyoncé’s Black Is King floods its visual language with aquatic rebirth imagery; flowing fabrics, submerged figures, reflective ritual spaces invoking water as passage. The archetype is already present onscreen. It simply hasn’t yet been centered within a full-scale horror framework.
Erotic Horror and the Siren Archetype in Mami Wata Lore
One of the most cinematically potent aspects of Mami Wata mythology lies in how it intersects with erotic horror, though not through the framework Western audiences might expect.
She is not typically described as maintaining human lovers or demanding sexual exclusivity in the manner of succubi or possession demons. Her seduction is visual, atmospheric, and spatial. In many riverine and coastal accounts, she appears to fishermen or travelers as a breathtaking woman poised just above the waterline, adorned in jewelry, her hair impossibly still despite the wind.
Her beauty is disarming rather than aggressive. She beckons without words, drawing men closer step by step, deeper into the water, past the point where retreat is easy. By the time the illusion fractures, the shoreline is distant and the water heavy around the body. She pulls them under, sometimes violently, sometimes with an eerie calm inevitability. This places her closer to siren mythology than to Western erotic demons, her beauty functioning as a gravitational force.
Literature Has Long Understood Her Terror
While cinema is only beginning to explore these waters, literature, particularly African and diasporic speculative fiction, has spent decades charting them.
Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard presents one of the earliest surreal landscapes where seductive river spirits and feminine supernatural entities blur beauty with existential threat. The protagonist’s encounters unfold in dream logic, where attraction overrides caution and spirits operate according to unfamiliar moral rules. The instability of desire wanting to move closer despite danger mirrors the psychological pull found in Mami Wata lore.
Ben Okri expands this cosmology in The Famished Road. Though centered on an abiku (a child destined for an early death), the novel’s watery metaphysics are constant. Rivers function as liminal highways between worlds, and feminine presences tied to water drift through the narrative like half-seen memories. Okri’s horror is not violent but permeable. The material world feels thin, easily breached, as though something vast waits just beneath its surface tension.
Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl channels similar unease through psychological haunting. Mirrored selves, spirit doubles, and invasive presences echo Mami Wata’s reflective themes, especially the idea that one can be watched, claimed, or shadowed by a presence from beyond visible reality.
Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch and its sequels places water spirits within a broader African magical system. In these books, wealth and power connect to spiritual forces older than modern nations. Even when Mami Wata is not directly named, the cosmology she belongs to, rivers as sentient boundaries, spirits as binding forces, remains intact. When she was talking about describing the beings from her Akata series, Okorafor noted, “You would be shocked by how much I don’t have to make up.”
Literature succeeds where film often hesitates because it can inhabit interiority. It can describe the humidity of river air, the hypnotic shimmer of reflected light, the emotional dissonance of wanting to step forward even when danger is understood. Readers feel the seduction and the dread simultaneously. The terror lies not in attack but in recognition in sensing the water knows you.
Why Mami Wata is Horror’s Most Untapped Goldmine
Modern horror has already shown an appetite for spirit-driven fear. Films like Hereditary, The Witch, and His House prove audiences are willing to engage with spiritual systems, ancestral consequence, and metaphysical dread. Aquatic horror, however, remains largely trapped in biological threat models.
Mami Wata offers something far richer; a mythology where water remembers, seduces, rewards, and reclaims. Where beauty is as dangerous as teeth. Where drowning can be spiritual as much as physical. For Black History Month especially, I’m sure engaging these features through horror is cultural storytelling; preserving oral traditions and diasporic continuity through cinematic language. Hollywood has spent seventy years circling the same lagoon.
Meanwhile, somewhere between the rivers of West Africa, the diasporic Atlantic, and the reflective surface of a midnight pool, a far older presence waits for the camera to find her. Preferably through a mirror she’s already holding.
Last year for 420, the great Sharai Bohannon hit you with the Top 5 Stoner Horror Movies on streaming. To celebrate 420 this year, we’re expanding our scope with horror movies to watch when you’re super stoned. There is a difference, you see. Movies don’t have to be about stoners in order to appeal to the righteously baked. Let’s jump right into it, before that edible kicks in.
5. Hausu (1977)
The only reason Hausu is ranked so low is that you may not speak Japanese. If you don’t, subtitles will likely be a struggle to keep up with. However, you don’t really need subtitles to keep up with Hausu. Obayashi Nobuhiko’s surrealist classic isn’t about plot. A witch is sucking the youth out of schoolgirls by killing them one by one. It’s not hard to parse. What Hausu is really about is giving you the brain-scrambles in every possible way.
Scenes as simple as schoolgirls getting on a bus are presented in a kaleidoscopic, colorful barrage of imagery. So imagine how it looks once the story actually gets balls-to-the-wall nuts. We’re talking characters being eaten by pianos and turning into piles of bananas. It’s wild, and it’s impossible to predict what’s around the next corner. However, the movie’s nonstop sense of fun is a safety net that should prevent you from getting too overwhelmed.
Hausu (1977) is currently streaming for free on Plex.
4. Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992)
Honestly, being stoned could only improve this latter installment in the Amityville Horror franchise. You might not be alert enough to notice just how low budget this haunted house sequel is. This will allow you to focus on just how bananas its goopy, special effects-heavy time travel story gets. Between the inscrutable character motivations and creative visuals, it’s dreamlike in the best possible way.
Amityville 1992: It’s About Time (1992) is currently streaming for free on Plex.
3. Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)
There’s nothing better than a post-Elm Street sequel to a straightforward pre-Elm Street slasher. Wes Craven’s 1984 classic was a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart of the slasher genre. However, its supernatural premise meant that copycat filmmakers had to shift their priorities as the slasher boom continued. It doesn’t matter a lick that the original Slumber Party Massacre had no supernatural elements. Its sequel’s a straight-up musical about a dream killer bearing an electric guitar with a giant drill bit on it. You just gotta roll with it. This movie also features some gloriously gross, cheesy nightmare sequences that stand among the best of the Elm Street ripoffs. Nothing could possibly dilate your stoned pupils more than the “evil chicken” or “exploding pimple” sequences. It’s also just 77 minutes long. Even if you’ve overestimated how much awakeness you had left in you, you can get through it.
Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) is currently streaming for free on Plex.
2. Suspiria (1977)
Dario Argento’s Suspiria is probably the most intense movie on this list in terms of its horror elements. So be warned. However, its purity as a visual experience is unmatched in the horror genre. Many filmmakers have tried and failed to recapture its color-drenched nightmare logic. Everything in the movie, from the plot to the aesthetic, feels simultaneously bizarre and perfectly ordered. Of course that woman has fallen into a room full of barbed wire. Of course that scene of a corpse crashing through a stained-glass ceiling is beautiful enough to make you weep. Honestly, maybe being stoned will get you onto whatever plane is required to fully pick up what it’s putting down.
Suspiria (1977) is currently streaming for free on Kanopy and Plex (which is a friend to all stoners, apparently).
1. Killer Party (1986)
Killer Party is also a post-Nightmare on Elm Street slasher. However, the liberties it takes with the genre are even more unhinged. It’s simultaneously a sorority slasher, a college comedy, and… well, I shouldn’t spoil that last subgenre. It’s a lot of different movies at once, all of which are perfectly designed to appeal to the stoned palate. Plus, its opening sequence within an opening sequence within an opening sequence should unlock your galaxy brain headspace right away.
Honorable Mention: Idle Hands (1999)
This title was already on Sharai’s list, otherwise it would have been at the top of mine. Not only is it a movie about stoners, but it’s a damn delightful horror-comedy thrill ride. 1990s horror icon Devon Sawa stars as a lazy young man whose hand is possessed by a homicidal demon. Things only get kookier from there.
Someone calls you on the phone. Already, this is a nightmare, but we’re not at the scary part yet. Let’s pretend you answer it. They ask, “What’s your favorite scary movie?” Your pulse races, sweat builds on your brow, and your voice begins to quiver. If you’re anything like me, this just became your favorite conversation ever. I love horror. The rush of a jump scare. The artistry of a well-executed kill. The familiarity of a formula and the thrill of upended expectations. Horror is malleable; there are at least as many fears as there are people on Earth, and my favorite subset is the Slasher.
What Defines Slasher Horror and Why It Resonates
What do I mean by Slasher? Not to be confused with slash fiction, which has its own merits, the dictionary definition reads thusly: a horror movie, especially one in which victims (typically women or teenagers) are slashed with knives and razors.
Simple. Clean. Anything but easy. For every The Strangers, there’s a The Strangers – Chapter Three. But the takeaway, at least my focus here, is that the killers in these movies are human, attack with everyday means, and therefore can be defeated by everyday means. And I find them extremely inspiring.
Supernatural Horror vs Slasher Horror: Where Hope Disappears
Hereditary is an astoundingly original and disturbing horror film with an ending that betrays everything that came before it. I absolutely loved jumping at every mouth click, the eerie presence of being watched by white-clad cultists, and a mother’s descent into madness brought on by generational trauma. I was all in! Then came the demon king Paimon. Any human connection we had, and the unrelenting tragedy the Graham family has had to endure, seems to have been for naught.
It is my contention that the film loses all of its dramatic umph the moment Toni Collette starts climbing walls and sawing off her head. You can’t beat a demon! You never had a chance. I love supernatural horror (my favorite series of any genre is The Evil Dead), but it does not leave you any room for victory, for the audience to think that “YES WE’VE WON” before having the rug pulled out from under once again (see Drag Me To Hell for the exception, not the rule). I like Midsommar more for that very reason; Florence Pugh’s Dani makes a choice. The horror comes because of human action, not an overpowering of it.
Why Human Villains Make Horror More Relatable and Beatable
People scare me. Aliens, ghosts, ghouls, imps, devils, and the like also scare me. But when a film’s villain is decidedly human, the horror hits harder because it can happen to us. Slashers deal with “the real” (again: knives, razors); they can be defeated. No film franchise better exemplifies this than Scream. In the first Scream, we see Sydney and the rest of the Scooby Gang kick/punch/evade Ghostface as he gets knocked down, falls, stumbles, and bumbles his way through the film while also scaring the ever-living crap out of some teens. These trips and slips add a layer of relatability to our evil purser.
I may not be able to see myself terrorizing an entire high school, but I sure know it hurts to fall down the stairs. Ghostface is the ur-example of defeatability. Yes, he gets up again, but part of the genius is that there typically are two (or more) people sharing a mask, so whoever just took a stomach kick or a tumble on the lawn probably has some rest time between games, as it were. This faceless evil is seemingly everywhere, popping out from any doorway and around every corner, but we can defeat it with a well-placed shove or a bullet to the head.
How the Scream Franchise Shows Horror Villains Can Be Defeated
Scream 2 followed much of the same suit (and taught us to never underestimate Laurie Metcalf). Give or take your suspension of disbelief about how good voice changers have gotten, the same could be said for Scream 3 and the return to form of Scream 4.
Where the franchise begins to lose its luster is in 5CREAM (pronounced as intended five cream). A fairly fun reboot until the appearance of one Billy Ghost Gruff. The moment we bring in ghosts (or visions brought on by blood memory, however they explained Billy Loomis showing up) into a slasher, out goes the fun and the understanding that this is something to be defeated.
Scream 6 has some great bits, but Ghostface doesn’t need a gun to scare us, and the less said about Scream 7, the better.
Horror Sequels and the Problem With Unkillable Villains
We want someone to survive. Not always (see any Final Destination), but if a horror film has done its job well, we should care about the characters and what has happened to them. That is, until we see them go through the same circumstances again and again and again, and this time with roman numerals.
Let’s take a look at Laurie Strode. In the original Halloween, she survives vicious attacks by Michael Myers, who is just a guy. A scary guy for sure. A guy with “no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong”. But a guy nonetheless. We see his face!
People forget that Michael’s mask comes off, and there in all terrifying glory is… a dude who looks like he gave himself the nickname T-Bone. “But what about when he is shot and falls out of a second-story window, he gets up again,” you scream at your computer, “doesn’t that prove he’s more than a man?!” That’s exactly my point. At the end of Halloween (1976), we can presume Michael will go die in the brush like an injured animal, with his disappearance serving as a stark reminder that evil is inside and around all of us. Roll credits. Cue that funky synth score and play us off, John Carpenter to never visit Haddenfield again… what’s that? Halloween was a huge success? Massive return on investment? Nevermind! Money, as they say, is the root of all evil, and that has never been more apparent than in the horror movie business.
How Horror Franchises Remove the Possibility of Victory
This is why Michael Myers came back for 6 sequels, 2 reboots, and 3 requels, not counting the solitary spinoff. Horror makes money, a lot of it. One of the best ways a new filmmaker can break in is to make a successful horror film (heck, I am trying it myself). But with the franchising comes expectations. We need bigger kills; a cast of fresh-faced future stars; our original protagonist needs to hand over the reins, but also be on call for every iteration. And the villain CAN NOT DIE.
If our face of the franchise is taken off the board, how else are we going to milk him for all he’s worth? This is how we go from Michael Myers: the escaped institutionalized murderer, to Michael Myers: the embodiment of evil, who can also infect others with it literally, not inspirationally (hashtag opposite of justice for Corey Cunningham). Or in simpler terms, they took The Slumber Party Massacre killer, who used a stolen power drill to kill with impunity, and made him the personification of rockabilly killer with a drill on an electric guitar who kills with a song in his heart and hips that don’t lie and can’t die in Slumber Party Massacre II.
Yes, objectively cool. But The Driller Killer is not someone you can outrun.
HORROR IS A MIRROR (THIS IS WRITTEN IN LIPSTICK AS SOON AS YOU GET OUT OF THE SHOWER)
Horror has the great opportunity to reflect. It is the most immediate of film genres. What is scary today can be made into a movie tomorrow. What was scary 3 decades ago is often still scary today. When we see someone in a mask with a knife in their hand, it’s perfectly understandable to run. Scream. Panic. But if in your escape, you throw a pot of hot coffee on them and they are scalded, you have a chance. You can win. And the first step in winning is believing you can.
Why Modern Horror Needs Survivable Stories Again
Horror should not always be about impossible situations. We want heroes we can root for because we see ourselves in them. We want to yell at the screen, “Don’t go in there!” because we want them to survive. Or know that we wouldn’t be that dumb to split up the group.
As horror has moved on from its slasher heyday and into “the monster is actually our trauma,” this unexpected consequence has taken a toll. Life feels incredibly hard right now because we are not seeing villains we can defeat.
The Hope at the Heart of Slasher Horror
To quote a GREAT slasher (yes, Predator is a slasher and Arnold Schwarzenegger is a fabulous final girl), “If it bleeds, we can kill it”. If it bleeds, we can win. There is no great conspiracy; villains are dumber than they appear, and we’re stronger than we think.
So answer the phone, you’ll be alright.
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