Culture Shock: Black Horror Shorts was a program of excellent horror shorts by Black filmmakers that screened on October 20, 2026, at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. It was followed by a fabulous Q&A with creatives involved in all but one of the six films.
Here are some highlights!
Grampa (2026)
The six films were all very different, but I have to say my favorite was the horror comedy, Grampa, directed by Justice Smith and starring Nicholas L. Ashe as the main character, James. James is visiting his white boyfriend’s family home for Thanksgiving dinner, and things take a turn for the grotesque, the terrifying, and the hilarious when Grampa lumbers to the table. You may think you’ve seen this story somewhere before, but Grampa is perennially surprising and downright hilarious (I can’t stress that enough). A huge portion of the humor is due to Ashe’s performance as James: he plays the role with a wide-eyed incredulity that had the whole theatre laughing – absolute disbelief that he’s seeing what he’s seeing and that no one else thinks that what he’s seeing is absolutely batshit crazy. There’s an absolutely brilliant scene filmed mostly from above in a tiny bathroom in which James’s boyfriend persistently tries to bring what’s going on outside into the realm of totally normal relationship conflict. In the Q&A at the end, Ashe talked about why horror’s so great – and one of the things he said was about the way the genre can spectacularize the everyday. Grampa totally does this. Interestingly, he also said that Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-ho, 2016), with its fast zombies, was one of the inspirations for the film. Watch this if and when you can!
You can check out a trailer for Grampa on YouTube:
The Keeper (2025)
Directed by Steven Barnes and Tananarive Due, The Keeper is based on their graphic novel of the same name from 2022. This film reminded me of the segment “Boys Do Get Bruised” from Randy Cundieff’s Tales from the Hood (1995), a segment that I always find hard to watch because of the vulnerability of the central child character. In both short films, though, the child is ultimately protected by a monstrous entity – one that could be terrifying (and is, to some characters!) but which acts as a guardian, a ‘keeper,’ to the child. And we’re glad that it does, though the source of terror then shifts to a society that leaves these children with no source of support in the real world. That terror isn’t dispelled by The Keeper’s conclusion, even though the ‘monster’ satisfactorily does away with a few more tangible threats. It was great to hear Due speak of both the satisfactions and challenges of directing an adaptation of her novel – an d it sounds like viewers might want to read the novel to see a fuller unfolding of the ‘Keeper.’
Angels Pull Your Hair (2026)
Directed and written by Gabby Beans, Angels Pull Your Hair also features Beans as lead actor; in fact, Beans won the Best Actress award in the Shorts section. Angels is perhaps the most experimental of the shorts. Beans noted in the Q&A that she was influenced both by the portraiture of Francis Bacon and Black folkloric iconography, influences that are very visible. The film elliptically portrays the experience of growing up around, and then struggling yourself with, mental illness – the effects of which are not predictable or linear. It’s a really compelling film that leaves you with images that impress the damage on you rather than a narrative that maps them out. In the Q&A, Beans talked about the function of horror as a safe space to explore dangerous things, including inherited trauma.
The Inheritance (2026)
Directed and written by Destinee Stewart, The Inheritance (like Grampa) takes the conceit of the visit to the white partner’s family home, where things don’t go well (understatement). In this case, Arie Thompson plays Venus, who goes to her wife Harley’s (Hetty Abbott) family estate – one’s that’s steeped in history, none of which is good. Once there, Venus starts having nightmares in which a version of the nursery rhyme ‘And Then There Were None’ plays over in her head. (I loved this since I’m currently reading the Christie novel and reading/watching adaptations for our podcast.) Red features prominently in these nightmares, evoking violence and blood, and there are images from slavery – chains and nooses. In the Q&A, Stewart talked about what the ‘monster’ of this film is – and she quite frankly said that it was ‘white women.’ She elaborated by talking about her research into how many white women owned slaves in their own right – and the perennial difficulties for Black women of alliances with white women. The transformation of Harley in the film is indeed ‘monstrous’ – and totally chilling, as Stewart visually references how history has a strong propensity to repeat itself.
Night Feeds (2025)
Written and directed by Rana Roy, Night Feeds is an intriguing body horror film centered on a new mother and her baby. What makes it distinctive is that Roy embeds the physical and mental struggles of being a new mother within an inescapable geopolitical context, as news plays constantly about the children being killed in Gaza. In the Q&A at the end of the film, Roy said that there was no embodied monster in her film; rather, the ‘monster’ is the mother’s ‘mind’ and ‘the world.’ The mother is forced to wonder ‘Is it me or is it the world?’ as things spin into violence in the world that enters her home through the TV. Roy added that she made a point of introducing no markers of identity or place, so viewers from everywhere could empathize.
