In teaching her “Religion and Film” course, DeAnna Daniels centers on Black horror, using the genre as a way to understand religion and film in all of its multiplicities.
Daniels and her students spend the semester exploring the relationship between religion and visual storytelling and analyzing various ideological and moral topics and messages.
“Horror is the perfect genre,” Daniels said. “It provides catharsis, it provides escape and it helps you wrestle with those thoughts around what we are afraid of, culturally and societally, and wrestle with what happens after death. It gets to the questions of human existence and gives us an outlet to visually see them.”
Daniels, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Religious Studies, extends the theme to her research, which includes a current project co-editing a collection called “The Sinners Reader: Black Horror, Black Religion(s), and Contemporary Popular Culture.”
The prevalence of horror films across countries and cultures provides a number of different vantage points to consider the existential questions around death, the afterlife and what people both fear and embrace.
“The western cosmological system is not the only one that experiences death and dying, or supernatural entities or spiritual beings,” Daniels said. “Taiwanese horror is going to have a conversation about the afterlife. Japanese horror is going to have a conversation about the afterlife. Black horror is going to have a conversation about the afterlife. These beings, these monsters, these entities, are going to help you wrestle through what’s possible. We don’t know what happens after death and horror is a great way to explore that.”
As part of the 2025 Tucson Humanities Festival, Daniels shared a playlist of horror-related hip-hop songs on Halloween as a guest DJ on KXCI Community Radio. Daniels’ selections included: Missy Elliott’s “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly),” discussing its stylistic music video and the connections between Afrofuturism and horror; Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s Grammy-winning “Tha Crossroads,” which she says offers a different perspective on theological concerns around how one dies well; and the Nicki Minaj verse on “Monster” as a metaphorical commentary on her artistry in a male-dominated arena.
Daniels is a longtime fan of horror films, with the level of refined analysis she now brings to the genre developing throughout her academic journey.
“I was always engaging with it, but I never had the language for it. Once it clicked, everything just made sense and it felt like a beautiful tapestry of connectivity. Now everywhere I go, I can say ‘That’s the horror, that’s the monster, that’s the gothic,’” she said. “It took time and education, but the themes were always there. Having the right vocabulary and tools to assess them properly came through education and Africana and Black Studies are prime for that.”
Daniels said students often enroll in her course because they get to watch a film in class, but end up with an experience that goes beyond their expectations.
“I think they stay because I have a pedagogy of tension. I want them to be uncomfortable, I want them to ask the uncomfortable questions and sit with what those answers might bring up,” Daniels said. “I just want them to think what’s possible, explore what they know already, find something new and try to tangle with it. Usually they’re ready to do the work.”
Horror offers a lens to view experiences of being “othered,” whether that’s along lines of race, sexuality, gender and more, Daniels said. On screen, the monster, as well as the victims, can exist outside the norms of a society, but are given voice by the filmmakers.
“How does the monster show up? What does the monster have to say? When they speak, it’s loud,” she said.