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:
