How Horror Highlights Healthcare Inequality In Black Communities
Black communities today continue to battle deep-rooted healthcare disparities even after all the policies put in place by health equity organizations and associations. We have to understand that healthcare inequalities have been long rooted in the history of the U.S. healthcare system against Black communities for decades. A look at today’s healthcare policies and events reflects the ongoing impacts of racism at multiple levels, including in systematic structures, policies, and interpersonal interactions. Black communities today face persistent disparities in health care, and Black horror films have always been a lens for confronting Black communities’ deepest anxieties.
For Black communities, the most terrifying stories aren’t just on the screen. Unfortunately, these stories are lived experiences of people today and the generations before with little to no changes. Through Black horror films, these fears are given a voice, exposing the unsettling truth that the greatest threat isn’t always the monster in the shadows; it is the system itself.
Black communities in the United States and other parts of the world continue to experience disproportionately higher rates of morbidity and mortality across multiple indicators of physical health. Structural factors such as systemic racism, unequal access to quality healthcare, economic disparities, environmental injustices, and the chronic effects of stress contribute significantly to these persistent health inequities. Thus, racial and ethnic differences in the quantity and quality of care are likely contributors to racial disparities in health status. Compared with their counterparts, Black communities and other minorities have lower levels of access to medical care in the United States due to their higher rates of unemployment and underrepresentation in well-paying jobs that include health insurance as part of the benefits package.
One of the most harrowing real-world horrors was portrayed in Miss Evers’ Boys, released in 1997, about the Tuskegee syphilis study, where Black men were deliberately left untreated for syphilis under the guise of free healthcare. This historical betrayal of the Black community, in Miss Evers’ Boys, was a dramatization that laid bare the deception and disregard for Black lives.
Similarly, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, released in 2017, told the story of a Black woman whose cells were taken without her consent, fueling countless medical breakthroughs while her family remained in the dark. These are not relics of a long-forgotten past, but rather fairly recent occurrences, at least in the concept of time. Today Black bodies are still disproportionately used for research without proper consent, and systemic neglect still persists in modern healthcare. But most importantly, understanding the past and how it shapes present-day disparities has strongly been highlighted successfully over the years in film.
This deep-seated mistrust in medicine isn’t just historical trauma—it’s an ongoing nightmare that Black patients still face. Black patients today receive less pain management, worse maternal care, and higher rates of medical neglect than their white counterparts. Documentaries like Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (2008) and Silent Choices (2007) confront the disparities in reproductive rights, abortion access, and maternal health. Black horror cinema serves as a visceral reflection of these fears, forcing audiences to reckon with the reality of racialized healthcare inequality. The years of systemic medical neglect, unethical experimentation, and racial disparities in healthcare have created a legacy of real-life horror, one that continues to shape Black survival today.
In horror, survival is everything—and in Black communities, survival isn’t just about outrunning a masked killer. It’s about navigating a healthcare system that routinely fails them. John Q (2002) dramatizes this fight for survival as a desperate father, played by Denzel Washington, who takes a hospital hostage after his son is denied a life-saving heart transplant due to financial barriers. The horror here isn’t supernatural—it’s institutional. Likewise, The Waiting Room (2012), a documentary that feels like a horror film, immerses viewers in the overcrowded chaos of an underfunded public hospital, where uninsured and underserved Black patients struggle to receive basic care.
The decades of transgenerational trauma and systematic racism can be seen in the psychological distress that affects Black communities; these mental health disparities have now added another layer to the lived horror. Black communities tend to experience higher rates of PTSD, depression, and anxiety due to the consistent systematic failures of their government and healthcare providers. Films like His House (2020) and Get Out (2017) use these horrors to externalize these psychological terrors, mirroring the real-world struggle of navigating racial trauma in a society that often gaslights Black pain.
Black horror has always been a genre that holds up a beacon to Black society’s fears. Unfortunately for Black communities, the most haunting narratives aren’t fictional—they’re drawn from reality. From systemic medical neglect to the radicalized disparities in healthcare, these films serve as both a warning and a call to action. Because in the end, the real horror should never be surviving a healthcare system designed to fail you.
Categorized:Editorials
