On a screen, a snarling, feral face materializes out of the darkness. “Whoever is bitten by a werewolf becomes a werewolf himself,” a voice intones. The scene then flickers through clips of classic monster movies as a manic voice cries, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”
The trailer for National Geographic’s upcoming series, “Monsters: The Truth Behind the Myths,” teases some of the most enduring archetypes of horror: the beast, the blood sucker, the animated corpse. While these bogeymen are undoubtably nightmare fuel, they are also enduringly fascinating. The question the trailer seems to suggest is, “why?”
MSU’s Kinitra Brooks, a scholar of Black horror, unpacks this and other contradictions as one of the featured experts in the new series. Its Oct. 24 Disney+ premiere is timed for the week leading up to Halloween.
“Monsters are never only monsters,” Brooks says. “They reflect our cultural anxieties. And many times, those anxieties deal with race, gender and class.”
A endowed chair in the Department of English, Brooks traveled to Toronto to film the show, where she shared insights garnered from a career spent asking what monsters reveal about the people who create them.
In her Black horror course at MSU, Brooks challenges students to identify who a story trains to fear and who benefits. Leatherface and his family in “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” embody anxiety about poor white people; “Attack the Block” places poor Black characters within the same machinery of suspicion. The creature changes, but its social symbolism remains.
Brooks applies that intellectual rigor without draining horror of its pleasures. She is, after all, a lifelong fan. Her education in fright began at age 6, watching Grace Jones in “Vamp” with aunts who introduced her to movies that were, by her own account, not always age appropriate. She calls herself a second-generation horror fan, although her expertise has not made her immune to fear.
“I like to say I am the world’s most easily frightened horror scholar,” she says. “I’m a complete scaredy-cat.”
That fascination became a career. Brooks wrote her doctoral dissertation on Black mother-daughter relationships in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature, including a chapter about mothers who remain as ghosts. Her first monograph, “Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror,” examined Black women in science fiction, fantasy and horror. Her other books include “Sycorax’s Daughters,” an anthology of horror fiction by Black women, and “The Lemonade Reader,” a collection of essays about Beyoncé’s 2016 audiovisual project, “Lemonade.”
The work challenges the persistent assumption that horror can only be artistic or profound when someone rescues it from the genre shelf.
“Horror is a lot smarter than people give it credit for,” Brooks says. “It’s just been culturally dismissed.”
She sees Black horror’s current prominence as another turn in a long cycle, from “Blacula,” a 1972 blaxploitation horror film, to the 2025 vampire movie “Sinners.” Each generation explores familiar forms by changing what they represent.
For example, Brooks points to “Sinners” as also being siege horror, a subgenre in which danger gathers outside while a community tries to survive within. One critical reason that “Sinners” stands out, she says, is how long director Ryan Coogler spent on its Black Southern characters, allowing them to emerge as full people rather than one-dimensional devices in someone else’s nightmare.
“We see the complexities of their lives,” Brooks says. “We see that they are whole people.”
Brooks can personally relate to “Sinners” on several levels. Annie, the Louisiana conjure woman in the movie belongs to a tradition Brooks is in the process of documenting for her upcoming book “Divine Conjurers: Rootwork, Resistance and Revolution,” which examines the historical conjure woman, her practices and her role during and after enslavement. In the book, Brooks also addresses how African spiritual traditions endured alongside Christianity and shaped Black Southern religious life.
For Brooks, that history cuts close to home.
“My great-grandmother is the first conjure woman I knew. She practiced herbs and healed,” she says. “So, this book is sort of my ode to her.”
She hopes to finish the manuscript soon. Brooks also has adapted N.K. Jemisin’s “Red Dirt Witch” as a graphic novel for Abrams ComicArts; the story follows a Southern conjure woman who passes power to her daughter and defends her from a threatening supernatural figure.
Across television, teaching, criticism and fiction, Brooks keeps returning to the same unstable border: who gets cast as monstrous, who gets protected from the monster and what truth is concealed in the difference? Horror can entertain, she said, without surrendering its capacity to examine power.
“Horror allows us to examine these relationships in a way that is entertaining and fun, but no less serious,” Brooks says.
In the trailer, the werewolf’s eyes glint and disappear. A coffin lid creaks opens. A man throws back his head and screams.
“We carry our monsters with us,” Brooks says, “and they change throughout time, just as we do.”
