Movies
Southern Black Gothic Films and Where To Find Them
When I think of Gothic horror, I typically imagine haunted and decaying castles, ghosts from the past, and arguments of morality. The colors are usually dark, often cool-toned, and shadowy. Part of this might be due to German Impressionism bleeding into classic American Horror films. Many of the early horror films naturally incorporated gothic elements such as fighting supernatural forces, big old houses, and religion. According to the New York Public Library, gothic fiction was established after Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto was published in 1764. The subgenre was named after the gothic castles that were often featured in earlier gothic works, such as Frankenstein and Dracula.
The aesthetic of death and decay around Gothic horror is reinforced with retellings of the most impactful gothic tales. There are countless remakes and retellings of Dracula. We just saw a new adaptation of Frankenstein from Guillermo Del Toro within the last four months. Additionally, the Hammer films from the 50’s-70’s focused on Gothic stories and helped to bolster the box we tend to place the subgenre in.
Gothic Horror Turned Southern Black Gothic
It’s easy to associate the subgenre with dread and gloom inside a Victorian mansion. However, Gothic horror has evolved with the times. There might not be an old haunted castle, but there might be an abandoned school from the 80’s. The elements of dread and decay remain, but have spread to other eerie buildings or maybe a forest. The same themes of sanity (or losing one’s sanity), death, morality, and the supernatural are still being explored, but updated and expanded with time. Gothic horror has even branched off to have its own subgenres like Gothic romance, Southern Gothic, and Urban Gothic.
Being a southern girl, I am fascinated with the Southern Gothic flavor of the subgenre. Britannica characterizes Southern Gothic as stories set in the American South with elements of the macabre and grotesque. The stories frequently tie into American history, which is riddled with ghost stories and tragedy, especially in the South. Many of the classic Gothic stories are set in Europe and take place over 100 years ago, so they feel distant to me. I haven’t been to a single decaying castle, but I have been to plenty of plantations.
Southern Gothic horror brings gloom and doom, but the color palette feels warmer. The terrors feel close to home. Black Southern Gothic films take a step closer to my heart by shifting the subgenre to a Black lens. The movies can feel like warm hugs, although they often explore America’s very dark past and present. Here are some excellent Black Southern Gothic Films you should watch right now!
Southern Black Gothic Films and Where To Stream Them
Sinners (2025)
Where to Stream: HBO Max
The world is going to have to pry Sinners from my cold, dead hands! It follows two brothers who come back home to start a business. It takes place in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The movie is dripping in Blues and Black history while incorporating so many Gothic horror elements. Instead of a big haunted Victorian house, there’s a juke joint with an implied violent past. The building is foreboding and dark against the sunny sky. The inside is old and worn. Before anything supernatural plays out, the brothers mention how they will handle the very real threat of violence from the Klan. Sinners also displays how poverty affected people and what it could drive them to do.
Religion also plays a big part in the story. We start and end the movie at church. The discussion of music and the devil is very prevalent in Black churches. Christianity isn’t the only religion included. I love the use of folk magic and the idea of “the other side.” If Sinners didn’t have enough Gothic flavor, it adds a supernatural threat with Remmick. Sinners is a must-see film!
Read our review of Sinners here!
Sugar Hill (1974)
Where to Stream: Tubi & Pluto
A lot of people might not think about Sugar Hill (1974) when they’re thinking about Gothic horror. It’s one of the first movies that comes to mind when I think of Blaxploitation films, but it has plenty of Gothic elements. The story follows Diana “Sugar” Hill as she seeks revenge on the men who killed her man. Sugar Hill takes place in Texas, AND there is an old dark house. We don’t spend a lot of time in the house, but when Sugar walks through the webs and dust, it feels like it’s straight out of a classic Gothic horror movie. She ends up going through the woods, and eventually, the dead begin to rise from the ground. It is a scene full of death and decay, and the zombies slowly rise (and I mean slowly) for revenge.
There’s also a taste of religion with Baron Samedi from Haitian Vodou. As Sugar gets her revenge, she encounters plenty of racism along the way, because is it really American without a little racism? If you’re in the mood for something fun, Sugar Hill is the way to go.
Spell (2020)
Where to Stream: Amazon Prime
Spell crept under the radar because it was released during the pandemic. The film follows Marquis (Omari Hardwick) after a plane crash in the Kentucky Appalachians, which lands him in the care of Ms. Eloise (Loretta Devine). Spell displays the use of folk magic for sinister reasons. In place of the decaying castle, there’s an isolated farmhouse creaking with age. Marquis quickly learns that his caretaker has sinister plans. He recognizes her magic, because he grew up in the area. He denounced parts of his culture that end up being integral to his salvation. As Marquis tries to escape, he tours all of the shadowy parts of the old dark house to keep the Gothic flavor intact. There are also some NASTY foot scenes that bring the grotesqueness to the screen.
Beloved (1998)
Where to Stream: VOD
Beloved is such a haunting movie. It follows Sethe, who lives with her daughter, after she takes in an old friend. A new stranger appears in the trio’s life, and strange things begin to happen. First of all, read Beloved by Toni Morrison! It is a great book, but a heavy story. While the story takes place in Ohio, which is above the Mason-Dixon line, the ghosts from the past have moved north with Sethe. Beloved demonstrates the dark decisions people will make to escape the circumstances of enslavement. The wailing ghosts are a classic staple. The dreadful atmosphere keeps you feeling uneasy. In many ways, Beloved feels like a classic Gothic horror film. It has an isolated haunted house, a ghost from the past, and discussions of morality.
Eve’s Bayou (1997)
Where to Stream: Peacock, AMC+, Shudder
I usually have to come out swinging in order to prove that Eve’s Bayou is a horror movie in the first place. There are ghosts, people die, and people use dark magic. That’s enough for me! Eve’s Bayou centers on the Baptiste family and their turmoil. The sound of the swamp and nature is woven throughout the film. This movie feels so much like home that it feels like a grandmother’s prayer. I can nearly smell the summer air. The brightness, humor, and youth in the film are contrasted by the constant fear of loss that drives many of the characters’ actions.
There’s an entire plot point that involves the mom, Roz, keeping her kids inside, because their clairvoyant auntie saw a deadly vision. One of the most haunting scenes is when Mozelle tells the story of her curse and the fate of her husbands. It feels surreal and sad, but it still has the warmth of a southern summer. You can see her telling the story while it plays out in the mirror. Her voice is doubled with the voices of her past lovers, making the monologue more eerie. This movie is Black horror homework.
Wake (2010)
Where to Stream: YouTube
If you don’t have much time, Wake is only 20 minutes long, and it’s free on YouTube! The story follows a woman, after the death of her father, who uses rootwork to get what she wants, and she wants a man. The use of folk magic and the consequences of practicing but not understanding the magic almost plays out like a warning. Wake touches on repression and how far one would go to be free themselves. It also shows how societal standards can be a prison that people put themselves in. There’s a supernatural force, and an old house, two of the primary ingredients of Gothic horror. It is an underseen, but readily available, Southern Gothic film.
If you already enjoy Gothic horror, now is a great time to explore Black Southern Gothic films. The dark themes blend well with the warm hues. Although the dive into American history can feel heavy, it’s worth the weight. These are stories that need to be told.
I’ve spent years honing my craft making strange, retro-inspired horror films on a budget — films driven by style but rooted in emotion. Love, grief, heartbreak, longing — all filtered through darkness. I’ve always been drawn to horror because, like many people, I found healing there. In stories where fear becomes confrontation, where pain can finally take shape.
How Joshua Tree Inspired In the Valley
During COVID, my partner and I bought land in Joshua Tree and built an off-grid glampsite. It became an oasis away from the city — a place defined by silence, stars, old VHS tapes, and isolation that initially felt restorative. At night, we’d drift between local dive bars, searching for connection in the middle of nowhere.
One spot we frequented was Out There Bar — a strange desert refuge with drag nights, disco, and often only a handful of people scattered inside. Most nights felt harmless, almost dreamlike. But every so often, something shifted in me. A wall would suddenly go up — an instinctive voice whispering: Be careful. Don’t let anyone know you’re queer. The feeling was immediate and overwhelming. A defense mechanism I thought I had long outgrown. One of the largest military bases in the country sat only a few miles away, and soldiers would often cycle through the bar. Some encounters were warm, others less so, but there was always an underlying sensation I couldn’t shake — that isolating feeling of being watched too closely.
What unsettled me most was the contradiction. I had been openly queer since I was seventeen. Proudly. Yet suddenly, in the place I considered my sanctuary, old survival instincts came rushing back. Joshua Tree is romanticized as liberating and expansive — a place people go to find themselves. And yet, underneath that openness, I found myself shrinking again. That feeling became the seed of In the Valley.
The stars are why you go to the desert. No matter how many vintage motels or pools people chase, the conversation always circles back to the sky. The desert remains one of the few places where light pollution disappears, and the stars reveal themselves fully. But I became fascinated by another feeling entirely: the sensation that something might be watching back. As the desert became my second home and that defensive wall kept resurfacing, I started interrogating the feeling more deeply. Why was I suddenly so concerned with safety? What exactly was I afraid of?
Queer Fear and Survival in Isolated Spaces
The answer was complicated because I hadn’t experienced overt homophobia in any defining way before. Sure, there had been passing slurs shouted from cars or strangers trying to provoke something ugly, but those moments felt easy to dismiss. What unsettled me more was the quieter feeling underneath it all — inherited vigilance. My partner is non-binary, and their safety often occupies my mind more than my own. Even in harmless moments, I found myself scanning rooms, reading body language, calculating exits. It wasn’t irrational. It was conditioning — a survival instinct sharpened over generations of queer people learning when to stay visible and when to disappear.
Building Horror From Internalized Fear
That was the horror I wanted to explore.
Not simply homophobia itself, but the psychological architecture it leaves behind. The way fear embeds itself into the body long after you convince yourself you’re safe. Eventually, I realized I had to confront it. I had to give it a face.
In the Valley is a descent — a body-switch film wrapped in alien imagery and retro western horror aesthetics. The film begins with Josh entering a queer speakeasy hidden in the middle of the desert. The room immediately studies him. Josh carries himself with hesitation, almost like someone entering a gay bar for the first time and trying desperately not to appear uncomfortable.
Romance, Desire, and Alien Horror
After several strange encounters with the bar’s enigmatic owner, Dahlia, the atmosphere shifts when Richard enters the room. Their connection is immediate, communicated through something as simple as a smile. Quiet conversation turns into flirtation, flirtation into dancing, and suddenly the film reveals itself as a romance. Richard takes Josh home after Josh admits he can barely remember where he lives — an important detail. Josh exists untethered, emotionally disoriented, searching for grounding in another person. Outside, the two lie beneath impossibly purple desert skies, staring upward as the stars loom over them.
For a moment, the desert becomes sacred. Then the film turns.
After the two move inside together, storm clouds begin swallowing the sky while purple lightning fractures across the landscape. The storm doesn’t interrupt their intimacy — it amplifies it. Desire and danger begin occupying the same emotional space. I wanted the sequence to feel like the best night of your life teetering on the edge of violence. With every flash of lightning, horrific images invade Josh’s psyche: a man bound to a barbed wire fence, an ominous cowboy gripping a bat, fragments of brutality interrupting intimacy like inherited nightmares.
By the climax of the sequence, the lovers are no longer alone. Their bed now sits exposed beneath the storm as two towering extraterrestrial beings silently observe them above. Because for me, the horror was never simply the aliens. It was the feeling of being watched while trying to love someone openly. At the final moan, Josh awakens alone — naked and abandoned beneath the brightness of the desert morning. Richard is gone.
The Desert, Memory, and Queer Trauma
Searching desperately for help, Josh instead discovers something impossible: a single black orchid growing from the dry sand. The flower mirrors the tattoo seen earlier on Richard’s arm. In panic, Josh rips the flower from the earth. Inside, a violent purple light pulses outward. Fractured memories stab through him in flashes: the dancing, the bedroom, the storm, the extraterrestrial figures looming above them. Then the desert itself revolts, erupting into blood and consuming him completely before releasing him back into the endless landscape.
By nightfall, dehydrated and unraveling, Josh discovers a lone fire burning beside an unfinished barbed wire fence. A baseball bat rests in the flames. Torn clothing hangs from the wire. Nearby, he finds a mound of disturbed earth crowned with a cowboy hat. Beneath the hat sits another black orchid.
Uncovering the Film’s Central Mystery
This time, when Josh removes it, there are no violent visions. Only silence. He begins digging. Slowly, a grave reveals itself. Inside lies a body reduced almost entirely to bone and weathered skin. Then Josh realizes who he’s looking at. Richard. Not recently dead — but buried there for years.
The Horror of “Bury Your Gays”
Josh stumbles backward in horror only to suddenly find himself seated beside Richard once more at the barbed wire fence, the same way they sat together in the bar earlier that night. Only now the atmosphere has changed completely. Romance has curdled into mourning. Richard speaks like a ghost struggling to remember his own humanity. He tells Josh the story of a man who only wanted love — and another man too terrified to survive what that love awakened inside him — and suddenly everything clicks into place.
The uneasy looks from the bar patrons were never truly about Josh. They were about what he represented: a repetition. An echo. The cowboy was never a monster in the traditional sense.
He was fear weaponized.
A closeted man who carried his self-hatred into the desert and attempted to bury it there alongside the person who exposed it. A literal manifestation of the old horror trope: “bury your gays.” Richard tells Josh it’s time to leave. The grave suddenly splits open into a violent purple void as storm clouds consume the desert once more. Before falling in, Josh looks back one final time. The extraterrestrial beings stand silently above the true history of the murder unfolding beneath them: Richard bound to the barbed wire fence while the cowboy approaches slowly with the bat in hand. Josh is no longer witnessing metaphor. He is witnessing buried history itself.
How In the Valley Reclaims Queer Horror Tropes
Josh crawls out of the grave and back into the present day. Disoriented and exhausted, he stumbles toward the bar from the beginning of the film — only now it has changed. Modern cars sit outside. The once-forgotten dive has been transformed into a stylish Airbnb. Inside, a man frantically calls the police, searching for his missing partner.
Then Josh collapses through the doorway. His own partner rushes toward him, holding him tightly in relief. And in that final moment, music begins playing softly in the background.
The spirits of Richard and the Cowboy appear together one last time, replaying their dance across the room. But now the cowboy is no longer monstrous — just young, frightened, human. Josh watches as they move together exactly as he and Richard once did. Finally, everything aligns.
The Hidden Meaning Behind In the Valley
Josh was chosen to relive this forgotten history — not simply to witness violence, but to understand survival. To recognize the privilege and responsibility of existing openly in spaces where others once had to hide. The desert did not just hold trauma. It held memories. In The Valley is intentionally layered. Viewers may miss the clues on a first watch: the body switch, the orchid tattoo, the realization that the sex scene is not simply passion but “gay panic” refracted through alien abduction imagery. The storm itself becomes psychological — terror building inside someone unable to reconcile desire with shame.
Why Horror Is the Perfect Language for Queer Stories
I never wanted to make a “clear” queer film because my experience as a queer person has never felt clear or linear. Fear rarely announces itself directly. Trauma lingers, mutates, hides in the body, resurfaces unexpectedly. Horror became the only language that felt honest enough to express it. The core of In the Valley is about the collision between passion and fear. A film wrapped in neon skies, extraterrestrials, and retro horror, but underneath, grappling with violence, shame, inherited trauma, and survival. Even the barbed wire fence carries historical weight. It directly references a young queer man whose death mirrored the imagery in the film. If you know, you know. If you don’t, I encourage you to research the history of violence against queer people, particularly in isolated spaces where secrecy and fear have too often turned deadly.
When Art and Reality Collide
Since the film’s release, it has played festivals around the world and received recognition I’m incredibly grateful for. But life has a strange way of collapsing the distance between art and reality. In February of this year, I was physically attacked for being queer for the first time in my life. The assault left me with a severe concussion and heavy bruising, and I’m still processing what it changed inside me.
The Real-World Importance of Queer Horror
More than anything, it forced me to confront a difficult realization:
The fear that inspired this film was never imaginary. It was always real.
Which is precisely why we have to keep protecting one another. Keep creating spaces for queer people to exist openly. Keep telling stories that confront what others would rather bury. And keep making horror films that remind us we survived.
Yes, Paul W. S Anderson’s film Event Horizon is far from perfect. In fact, it is very deeply flawed, especially because of its semi-lost, boundary-pushing torture scenes, dated character motifs, and a sense of humor that, tonally, does not feel a thousand percent well-balanced with the existential, hopeless tone. That being said, many of the negative reactions do not account for the pure nightmare fuel of this film at its core. Event Horizon might not be the greatest sci-fi horror film of all time (though I would personally say otherwise), but there is more than enough of a case for it being the most frightening.
The Hellish Premise That Makes Event Horizon So Terrifying
The film itself follows a group of scientists in the distant future looking for a lost ship – the “Event Horizon”. The ship, which was revolutionary in its ability to literally fold space time, poke a hole through it, and go through, went missing years ago, and had only just been discovered. As the crew boards the abandoned ship, the film plays out like a combination of cosmic terror, a haunted house/gothic aesthetic, and hopeless dread, as they discover the ship may have passed through Hell itself.
The Chaos Realm and the Fear of a Fate Worse Than Death
Probably the scariest existential concept introduced in Event Horizon is the concept of a fate worse than death. In addition to the haunted house horrors of visualized grief and deadly kills, the film vies for a more Hellraiser approach of inflicting brutal, unflinching nightmare fuel on its characters and audience. I am of course referring to the chaos realm, and how it completely derails any expectations of what the movie might have been.
So let’s say you go to a movie theater to see Event Horizon in the 1990s. It’s labeled as sci-fi horror. With Alien 4 scheduled to come out in a few months, and films such as The Arrival, 12 Monkeys, and other grunge science fiction outings filling the decades, one could assume the movie would be an alien, time travel, or other high sci-fi concept film. Soon, it shows itself as a haunted house story in space. Then, with one more twist, it becomes half Lovecraftian cosmic terror of the unknown, and half otherworldly torture. The ship passes through a Hellish torture realm; anyone who sees it becomes corrupted, and they might even participate in the infamous “blood orgy” scene. Seeing is not just believing-it is possession and corruption. This is Hellraiser in space.
Cosmic Horror and Lovecraftian Terror in Space
The concept of the chaos realm, as a demonic version of the zone from Annihilation, is partially scary because of the movie’s pacing, and how it takes a while to set up this twist of a concept. It is a festering, evil place we are dealing with. Even inanimate objects such as the ship itself, can become sentient demons in their own right. The movie, intelligently so, also does not overexplain this place. It is not quite Hell itself, but rather, a place of pure evil caught in between time and space, that people may have interpreted as Hell.
Sam Neill’s Dr. Weir Is an Underrated Horror Villain
Throughout the film, Sam Neill’s character, Dr. William Weir, makes a horrific transformation. Revealed to be the designer of the Event Horizon, visions of his dead wife led him to reach this chaos realm himself. On the Event Horizon, which had become a demon, William becomes a corrupted servant of the Hellish servants on the other side.
A potential factor in the lack of awareness of Event Horizon is that it came out in the 90s, not the 80s. If this film had premiered about ten years earlier, it almost definitely would have held Sam Neill’s character on the same pedestal as Pinhead, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, or Michael Myers. However, in the late 90s, there was such a fatigue over slashers and high-concept antagonists that his character didn’t receive the cult status he should have.
Seriously…the bloody, scraped-in satanic symbols into the body? The blood-drenched skin? The cold, unloving attitude? He gives Pinhead a run for his money, and is a whole lot more sadistic than him. All the elements are there for an iconic horror villain, making his way into Funko Pop figures and T-shirts. However, he is not held on that pedestal as he should be. Maybe if there were a couple more sequels with him doing wacky kills and making puns? Sign me up for Event Horizon: The Dream Master.
The Gothic Design of the Event Horizon Ship
In addition to Sam Neill’s character, the ship itself should be as iconic as the Overlook Hotel or Amity Island. It is not a regular science-fiction designed thing, but rather more akin to a gothic Church. It gives the impression that it was destined for evil from its conception, and no one would have any control over where it went. Truly chilling-huge props (pun not intended) to production designer Joseph Bennett.
Why Event Horizon Is a Sci-Fi Horror Masterpiece
Event Horizon is a masterwork of terror. Yes, it’s cheesy at times with dated effects, and yes, some of its corny jokes feel out of place when the rest of the movie is painstakingly serious, but at its core are some truly terrifying concepts.
Ending on a final factoid, the movie was famously cut down from its original length. Some of the cut scenes from the horrific torture sequences, which were shot on film, were actually found years later in a Transylvanian salt mine of all places. Imagine being the poor sucker who uncovers practically done torture scenes in a mine. Hopefully, one day we might have a Director’s cut that would somehow be even scarier. But for now, Event Horizon as is, could take the cake as the most frightening sci-fi-horror film of the 1990s.
