NelRae Toler

With films such as The People Under the Stairs (1991), Candyman (1992), and Tales from the Hood (1996), the 1990s served as a cultural renaissance for Black horror cinema. While influential in their own right, both The People Under the Stairs and Candyman were films about Black characters from white directors and writers. Tales from the Hood differs in that it serves as a reclamation of space in the cultural lexicon of horror cinema. Tales from the Hood is a film that explores fears and anxieties of Black communities told from the perspective of Black writers and directors. Police brutality, domestic abuse, racist politicians, and gang violence are all themes which director Rusty Cundieff explores in the four shorts that make up from Tales from the Hood. Through the format of the horror anthology, Cundieff utilizes horror and the supernatural to offer redemption in realities that often lack justice.

Although Tales from the Hood is a framed narrative designed to explore four separate stories, one specific image continues to resonate with audiences from this cult classic: the doll. In fact, the dolls in Tales from the Hood became so synonymous with the film that they are the only repeating image throughout any of the sequels, making a brief cameo in Tales from the Hood 2 (Rusty Cundieff, 2018). The dolls are featured in the short “KKK Comeuppance,” in which former Klansman, Duke Metger (Corbin Bernsen), runs for political office. Thus the dolls and Metger, who functions as a stand-in for politicians and political discourse grounded in racial oppression, are diametrically opposed. On the surface, Cundieff uses the image of the doll to obtain justice for the history of racial violence in the United States, but further analysis of this short crafts a more powerful, and nuanced, narrative articulating how America’s racial past violently collides with and influences the modern perception and politics of race in America. Furthermore, the election of Donald Trump and his attack on affirmative action, DEI, and Critical Race Theory, along with America’s horrific racial history, put him in direct relation to KKK politician Duke Metger, thus making “KKK Comeuppance” all the more readily poignant and topical in the 2026 United States.

“I found this doll, in a house, in the South”  

Playing the role of the mortician, Mr. Simms, Clarence Williams III introduces “KKK Comeuppance” by stating, “I found this doll, in a house, in the South,” while holding up a wooden doll. The short progresses in introducing the audience to former Klansman, turned politician, Duke Metger (00:50:28–00:51:26). This name was chosen carefully to evoke images of notorious racist political figures throughout the history of the United States, such as David Duke and Tom Metzger (Karn 359). Cundieff highlights David Metger as being grounded in United States political discourse as he shows an election advertisement that is heavily influenced by Jesse Helms’ (the Republican incumbent to the 1990 United States Senate election in North Carolina) political advertisement “Hands.”  The advertisement in the film focuses on the hands of a White man with a voiceover stating, “You can give it any name you want. The fact is, affirmative action, quotas, reparations all mean one thing: another qualified individual won’t get a job or an education simply because he’s not the right color” (00:51:28–00:51:52). Thus, Cundieff uses Metger as a stand in for racial inequality and violence in United States politics by tying him to real political figures. Furthermore, his campaign slogan, “an original American,” at its very core anticipates “Make America Great Again” in that they are both situated in a fetishized past of the United States.

Cundieff locates the “original American” in the center of an antebellum plantation. Metger renovates an old Southern plantation to serve as his campaign headquarters, establishing his campaign even more fully in conversation with the racial history of the United States—though this is where things go awry. What functions as a political statement for Metger, grounding his political career in a location synonymous with the oppressive racial past of the United States, ultimately leads to his downfall, as he fails to heed the warning of the dolls.

“There’s no peace in the dollhouse now”

As a crowd gathers outside the antebellum plantation, protesting Metger, a news reporter interviews two Black men. One of these men is Councilman Rodgers who, dressed in a suit and tie, explains the offensive nature of Metger’s residency as it is “for the sake of gaining racist votes.” Rodgers is interrupted by a man who is dressed in fashion more aligned with everyday citizens as opposed to the political class. This cigar-smoking, flannel-wearing character remains unnamed throughout the short, but he asserts that Metger will, as the title suggests, get his comeuppance: “They will make him pay, the souls are gonna make him pay . . . there was peace in the dollhouse, but there’s no peace in the dollhouse now!” (00:52:33–00:53:29). The two characters’ dress and rhetoric signify a class spectrum spanning from an upper-class Black politician functioning within the fabric of systemic power structures in the United States all the way to a rural Black man who is in touch with his folkloric roots. It is important to note that Cundieff allows both critiques to coexist—one does not overtake or usurp the other. Both vocalized concerns hold valuable weight, and, rather than being at odds, function in conjunction with one another through the symbol of the doll, and in turn, the plantation as a dollhouse.

The folktale of the dollhouse in “KKK Comeuppance” address racial violence in the southern United States. It is interesting that Cundieff has Metger tell the story of the history of the plantation. Having Metger retell the story shows the audience that he is aware of both the history and folklore, but chooses to embrace both. Metger states:

After the Civil War, the man who owned this plantation, Nathan Wilkes, he, uh . . . he was upset that his slaves were gonna walk away free. When they tried to leave, well, the old man snapped—turned into a massacre. Hundreds of slaves, lynchings, burnings, twelve bodies hanging from that tree alone . . . Now people believe that their souls never rested until Miss Cobbs, an old voodoo woman, bought the place . . . Legend is, she transferred the souls of the slaves into little dolls. Niggra dolls. (00:53:40–00:54:35).

In using a racial slur to refer to the dolls, Metger calls upon the racial history of dolls made as caricatures of prejudiced beliefs. US history is full of gross caricatures of dolls created in such a fashion to exaggerate stereotypical attributes of Black individuals. Scholar Anthony Martin explores this history in “Toys with Professions: Racialized Black Dolls, 1850–1940,” in which he claims, “In the 1890s, racialized dolls with pejorative names and advertising descriptions and exaggerated features, stereotypically dressed as domestics and laborers, more than doubled on the market” (145–146). In response to such negative depictions, Black businessman and minister, Richard Henry Boyd, founded The National Negro Doll Company, which aimed to provide Black children an object for play that was better representative of their own community and experience and was not inherently grounded in prejudice (Gordon).

In her article for the Tennessee Historical Society, Skyler Gordon writes:

[Boyd aimed] to protect youths against the racist images of black people popularized after emancipation, African American social reformers championed refined and intelligent black dolls as a means to teach black children ‘that there is some pride, some merit, some worth and something to be admired in dark skin’ . . . According to one account, Boyd sent photos of black Americans to the manufacturer to ensure that they truly convey, not caricaturize, the likeness of their black subjects.

The black and white photo above shows dolls from an advertisement from The National Negro Doll Company. The image on the left is a close up of the main doll in “KKK Comeuppance.” When they are looked at together, it is clear that Cundieff draws on the history of Black dolls in the United States in his creation of the dolls for this short. In other words, the dolls in Tales from the Hood draw from the mainstream, racist dolls in their dress, distorted facial expressions, and the fact that they live on an antebellum plantation while simultaneously drawing upon dolls from The National Negro Doll Company in their size and the fact that they have less exaggerated, more human, features.

Additionally, according to scholar Jacqueline Fulmer, dolls play a crucial role in African American folklore. Fulmer states, “Dolls have further connection with the dead in African American lore, as doll heads, small cups, or toy animals [were] placed on the graves of small children to assuage those who died young, much like the murdered slaves in ‘KKK Comeuppance.’ As with the dolls in Tales, such objects serve to inspire deference in the living as much as to placate the dead” (433). The terms assuage and placate situate the doll inherently as an object for vengeance—as an offering to settle a wrong deed. Cundieff unleashes this vengeance and redemption in the third act of “KKK Comeuppance.”

“It gives you a new reverence for dolls, don’t it?”  

Throughout the third act of “KKK Comeuppance,” Metger, while hurling racist commentary riddled with racial slurs, begins to hunt the dolls throughout the plantation home as they slowly reveal themselves. In this final act of the short, Metger confronts the consequences of his gross negligence and hate directly. In the end, Metger cowers behind a United States flag, as if he is using it for protection (01:08:21–01:09:02). He ran his political campaign on eradicating and minimizing the racist history of the United States, campaigned under the slogan, “An Original American,” and the imagery of using the United States flag as a security blanket should not go ignored. This is stark commentary on Cundieff’s part. At its very core, as Metger portrays it, to be “An Original American” is nothing more than hiding behind a sense of fetishistic and pseudo-nostalgic patriotism that neglects, and violently erases, the atrocities of America’s racial past.

Cundieff discusses the original ending of the film in an interview featured on the Scream Factory special edition release of Tales from the Hood, revealing that the original ending saw Metger hanging from the rafters in the plantation with a noose made from the very United States flag he so desperately clung to for protection. While this would have been yet another powerful image to end on—a former Klansman turned politician suffering a similar fate to the lynched slaves of his plantation—test audiences had hoped for something else: the dolls. Audiences want to see the dolls get their revenge. In the documentary film, Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, Cundieff states that he wanted to make the horror in Tales from the Hood “redemptive” (00:56:50–00:56:55). He mobilizes the supernatural to enact a form of vengeance – and justice – where reality lacked that catharsis.

With that being said, the ending of “KKK Comeuppance” does allow the dolls, and by extension victims of systemic racial violence in the United States, the chance to get revenge. As Metger cowers behind the United States flag, the dolls swarm and devour him, taking small bite after small bite from his flesh (01:08:30–01:09:40). This is a powerful ending in that the souls of the murdered slaves get a form of redemption, but, additionally, Metger, who calls upon nostalgia for a past grounded in racial violence to win political power, is quite literally consumed by the victims of the very past he seeks to exploit. This ending is far more redemptive than the original planned ending because the audience is rewarded by the sight of Metger getting—as the title of the short suggests—his comeuppance.

Conclusion

As objects of play, dolls evoke the uncanny, functioning as mirror-objects for their users. That, of course, is an analysis of dolls in their simplest form—nobody is ready for when dolls play back, when the subjected becomes the subjecter. As seen in “KKK Comeuppance” in Tales from the Hood, Rusty Cundieff allows for the reversal of those roles as his dolls come to life and serve up vengeance against those who seek to exploit, eradicate, and whitewash the history of racial violence in the United States.

Cundieff does seem to be interested in the history of the doll as it relates to Black history in the United States. Not only in the short examined in this article but in another short as well – “Good Golly” from Tales from the Hood 2, which also explores the fetishization of racist images and objects, in this case the golliwog doll. Future research could examine the golliwog, which is, according to the Jim Crow Museum, “the least known of the major anti-black caricatures in the United States” (Pilgrim).

In his Tales from the Hood film anthologies, Rusty Cundieff uses dolls in horror to offer both critical reflection and redemption. In blending horror and the supernatural with real world horrors Cundieff calls upon his audience to reflect upon their own complacency and negligence within systemic power structures defined by race.

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Works Cited

Fulmer, Jacqueline. “‘Men Ain’t All’ – A Reworking of Masculinity in Tales from the Hood, or, Grandma Meets the Zombie.” Journal of American Folklore, vol. 115, no. 457, 2002, pp. 422–42. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/jaf.2002.0033.

Gordon, Skyler. “The National Negro Doll Company.” The Tennessee Historical Society, 11 Dec. 2017.

Harvey, Paul. “Richard Henry Boyd.” Tennessee Encyclopedia, 8 Oct. 2017.

Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. Directed by Xavier Burgin, Stage 3 Productions, Shudder, 2019.

Karn, Colleen. “From Tales from the Hood to Candyman: Teaching Trauma Studies with Black Horror Cinema.” The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film, Oxford University Press, 2025, pp.340–46.

Martin, Anthony. “Toys with Professions: Racialized Black Dolls, 1850–1940.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage, vol. 3, no. 2, 2014, pp.137–158, doi:10.1179/2161944114Z.00000000016.

Pilgrim, David. “The Golliwog Caricature.” Jim Crow Museum, Nov. 2000.

Tales from the Hood. Directed by Rusty Cundieff, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Scream Factory, 1995.

Tales from the Hood 2. Directed by Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2018.