Bones: Ernest Dickerson’s Buried Horror Classic
Did you know Snoop Dogg and Pam Grier starred in a film together?
“2021 marked the twentieth anniversary of Ernest Dickerson’s Bones and there was hardly any fanfare. No big commemorations from the big horror magazines, no think-pieces from the horror/pop culture writers across the zeitgeist, just…nothing. A quiet BluRay release occurred in 2020, but other than a single podcast from the lovely folks at Horror Queers, it’s been radio silence. This is indeed a travesty because there are so many iconic horror genre tethers (outside of Black filmmaking) we can trace back to this film narratively and visually, as an aesthetic, and as an anchor point between homage to Black horror of the past and the present. Bones may have been an homage to the Blaxploitation era, but the film was a harbinger of where Black stories were headed…away from ‘the hood’, the echo of the plantations, and onward to respectability.” — Class Matters and Respectability: The Great Migration in Black Horror
The above quote was from a piece I wrote in 2022 that ruminated on poverty, ‘the South’, and other tales…
