The Blaxploitation Horror Film

It's horror movie season! This week's review digs into the adaptation of Gothic narratives by mainstream and Blaxploitation horror films.

Posted on October 20, 2025 in Reviews of the Month

The Blaxploitation Horror Film: Adaptation, Appropriation and the Gothic

Mustafa, Jamil. University of Wales Press, 2023
272p bibl index, 9781786839978 $63.00, 9781786839985

Mustafa (Lewis Univ.) seeks to situate blaxploitation horror films within the broader tradition of Gothic horror narrative. He argues that these films appropriate an existing Gothic trope or text but subvert it in a way meaningful to a contemporary Black audience. Chapters examine queerness and gender; justice, criminality, medical ethics, and the biological versus social origins of monstrosity; multiple layers of identity, inversion of Black/white racial stereotypes, and policing; and gendered power dynamics and religion. Mustafa treats a wide range of films, including Blacula (1972), The Thing with Two Heads (1972), Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976), and The House on Skull Mountain (1974). All these films deal with issues of race in a complex way, sometimes challenging convention and other times not. Mustafa does not shy away from tackling complex cinematic, literary, and social concepts, and does so with writing that is both academic and accessible. Overall, the text balances theory with examples from the films and draws its connections to the Gothic in a convincing manner. This book would mostly be of interest to faculty or graduate students in film studies, popular culture, or race and ethnicity studies programs.

Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: E. Jeitner, Stockton University
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies, Racial Justice
Subject: Humanities – Performing Arts – Film
Choice Issue: Oct 2025

Enjoy this week’s review? Check out more reviews of related titles:

• Textiles on Film
• Ambiguous Cinema: From Simone de Beauvoir to Feminist Film-Phenomenology
• A Very Nervous Person’s Guide to Horror Movies
• Afrofuturism in Black Panther: Gender, Identity, and the Re-Making of Blackness

Related Posts