5 Horror Movies to Watch in Honor of Juneteenth on Thursday, June 19th

“If there’s too many white folks, I get nervous, you know.”

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Duane Jones became the first Black actor to play the hero as a lead character with his role in Night of the Living Dead (1968).

June 19th is Juneteenth, an annual holiday celebrating the end of slavery on June 19, 1865. After decades of effort by activists like Opal Lee, Juneteenth became an official federal holiday in 2021 under President Joe Biden. For horror fans, there’s no better way to celebrate a holiday than by watching horror movies. This list contains excellent Black horror movies to queue up in honor of Juneteenth:

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

Duane Jones in Night of the Living Dead.

Credited with creating the modern zombie genre as we know it, this independent horror movie was directed and co-written by George A. Romero. It follows siblings Johnny (Russ Streiner) and Barbara (Judith O’Dea) as they travel to rural Pennsylvania to visit their father’s grave. At the cemetery, they encounter a ghoul who attacks and eats Johnny. Barbara flees and finds help at a local farmhouse where Ben (Duane Jones) and a group of survivors have taken shelter. With his role as Ben, Duane Jones made movie history as one of the first times a Black man played a heroic role as a lead character in a film.

Candyman (1992)

Candyman grossed $25 million and led to three sequels.

Urban legend tells the story of the son of a slave who was accepted into white society, simply for his unique artistic skills. When he was ultimately lynched for having an interracial love affair, his spirit came back to haunt anyone who denied his paranormal existence. In this film, a grad student’s thesis research leads her to track down Candyman in a Chicago housing project.

The monster of Candyman is the product of white racism. The son of a freed slave, an inventor who amassed a fortune and provided him with an education, he crosses the color line when he takes a wealthy white woman as his lover and impregnates her. In retaliation, her father and a white mob turn on him. They saw off his right hand with a rusty blade, strip him, and smear his prone body with honey to draw the bees that sting him to death. Then, in proper fashion for a lynching, they burn his body. Legend has it this act of race hatred took place on the site of the Cabrini-Green Housing Projects in Chicago.

Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror

Get Out (2017)

Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out.

A psychological horror movie written and directed by Jordan Peele in his revered directorial debut. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) and Rose (Allison Williams), an interracial couple, travel to Upstate New York to visit Rose’s family for the first time. While Chris notices that Rose’s family and friends seem strange, he is polite and just tries to make it through the trip. Unfortunately, Rose’s family has other ideas. There are scary and violent scenes in Get Out but they aren’t overly graphic and Lil Rel Howery brings comic relief that prevents it from being too scary for most viewers.

Get Out is one of the most important black horror movies because it is a well made and (majorly) commercially successful horror movie by a black writer and director, because black actor Daniel Kaluuya gives an incredible lead performance, and because the the film itself upends horror tropes as a vehicle for retelling a familiar story from a black perspective.

The Blackening (2023)

The Blackening was first a skit by comedy group 3peat.

This horror movie is literally about Juneteenth. It is a comedy horror movie that asks the question: If the Black character always dies first in a horror movie, what happens when all the main characters are Black? The story is about a group of friends getting together for a reunion while celebrating Juneteenth at an isolated cabin in the woods. After discovering a… questionable board game in the basement of the cabin, the friends find themselves in a fight for their lives as they are questioned, stalked and attacked throughout the night by a mysterious killer.

Sinners (2025)

If this image from Sinners (2025) could speak, it would say “Nah, we cousins.”

On the surface, Sinners is a story about twin brothers who open a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta in 1932 and the vampires who ask to be invited in. Another foe in Sinners is the KKK, who wait for the right time to lynch the brothers and steal their money. The movie has rich characters, is visually beautiful and has a soundtrack full of bangers.

Further reading:

Meet The Author

Chrissy is the co-founder of Creepy Catalog. She has over 10 years of experience writing about horror, a degree in philosophy and Reiki level II certification.

Chrissy Stockton