“Tales from the Hood” remains a beloved cult classic in the annals of horror film history for several reasons, but subtlety isn’t one of them. There’s a moment early in the film, when three white police officers are assaulting a Black man they’ve pulled over for no reason. Billie Holiday’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” begins to play, a top-five entry in the obvious needle drop hall of fame.
Conceived by Rusty Cundieff (who later directed “Chappelle’s Show”) and co-writer Darin Scott after the latter watched a one-act play performed by the former called “The Black Horror Show: Blackanthropy,” “Tales from the Hood” is an anthology with a purpose. Both men wanted to craft a horror movie about something, rather than just a cheap excuse for scares. That led them to create three excellent short stories (and one weak one) wrapped around an iconic framing sequence.
The impetus for each of the tales we’re told comes from a curious drug deal between three young men and the owner of a mortuary. Clarence Williams III (Prince’s dad in “Purple Rain”) imbues Mr. Simms, the peculiar funeral home owner, with unique and bizarre energy. From the outset, he captures the spooky charisma that horror host figures like Count Gore de Vol and Elvira have always brought to late-night television and B-movie double features — but he’s menacing and unpredictable in a way the paradigm doesn’t often make room for.
From the outset, he captures the kind of spooky charisma that horror host figures like Count Gore de Vol and Elvira have always brought to late-night television and B-movie double features — but he’s menacing and unpredictable in a way the paradigm doesn’t often make room for.
Under the guise of selling these local hoods drugs, Mr. Simms tells them a series of tales. His stories all feature one of his cadavers and the twisted ways they ended up ice cold and pumped full of formaldehyde. Each chapter begins with a familiar setup that feels like it would lead to a sad headline in the Black community, before taking a left turn into the fantastical. Stories that would end in tragedy in the real world are in the film given caustic conclusions typified by some measure of comeuppance. Like the aforementioned police brutality setup from “Rogue Cop Revelation,” there’s something fulfilling in seeing a bunch of corrupt, racist cops haunted by the innocent Black man whose life they’ve taken.
In “Boys Do Get Bruised,” Mr. Garvey (Cundieff himself) grows concerned for Walter, one of his students (Brandon Hammond), who seems to be suffering abuse at home. Walter discovers that the things he draws in class have a magical power and that the way to stop his in-home bully (David Alan Grier) is with his own art. The climax of this story and the craven, savage way this abuser is finally dispensed with proves to be one of the film’s finest moments.
But it’s not just the downright wanton nature of the violent restitutions made in these stories that makes them so memorable — it’s the startling clarity of the images and how they etch themselves into the spirit upon viewing them. There’s a shot in “Revelation” where the slain Martin Moorehouse (Tom Wright) is hoisted on a crucifix, hovering over Clarence Smith (Anthony Griffith), the Black officer who failed to stop his white compatriots from ending this man’s life. It is as transfixing as it is horrifying.
Maybe the funniest, most entertaining of the tales, “KKK Comeuppance,” features Corbin Bernsen as Duke Metger, a racist politician staging a campaign from inside a house on a former plantation. The spirits of the enslaved people who died there pop out of a mural in the form of cartoonish dolls who wreak all manner of mischief and carnage on Metger and his collaborators. Bernsen comes across so casually evil that it’s gratifying for him to lose a war to a bunch of pissed off haunted toys.
But the final short, not counting the conclusion to the framing sequence, is an outlier. “Hard-Core Convert” is a sci-fi tinged story about an incarcerated gangster serving a life sentence who undergoes experimental treatment in the hopes of an early release. The program is designed to help Crazy K (Lamont Bentley), a remorseless murderer and drug dealer, see the error of his ways and recognize how he’s been slaughtering his own people without a thought. Unfortunately, the way the film explores this is indistinguishable from right-wing stereotypes and a truly off-putting “pull up your pants” kind of Black conservatism.
By the time a white supremacist tells K that they’re the same because they both kill Black men, and the audience sees images of K and his cohorts featuring them wearing white sheistys made to represent Klan hoods, this otherwise impressive film loses the plot.
By the time a white supremecist tells K that they’re the same because they both kill Black men, and the audience sees images of K and his cohorts featuring them wearing white sheistys made to represent Klan hoods, this otherwise impressive film loses the plot.
In the ensuing 30 years, this franchise has had two more entries. Unfortunately, “Tales from the Hood 2” and “Tales from the Hood 3” each feel like all the lessons I wish had been learned from the first film’s final short were not only not understood, but repeated multiple times across both films. Each has its charms, most notably the presence of Keith David and Tony Todd, respectively, starring in the wraparound sequences, but having seen both in recent years, they’ve evaporated from memory, lacking the imagination to truly captivate. The original is still up here, though, burned into the nooks and crannies of any brain that has processed it.
“Tales from the Hood” is currently streaming on Peacock, AMC+, and Shudder.