Abstract: As Black horror film production flourishes in the wake of Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), the greater number of movies allows for a closer analysis of the filmic and generic traditions that contemporary Black horror invokes and draws from. The premise of this investigation is that a cohort of Black horror films have taken older, white-directed horror that includes Black characters as inspiration for their thinking on the question of Black social life. This essay proposes that contemporary Black directors and writers have looked to these older films, which often rely on stereotypes and tropes of Black experience, precisely as a way to grapple with contradictions in Black experience which have been thematized, sometimes crudely, by white directors of horror. Following the work of Robin R. Means Coleman, Kinitra D. Brooks, and others on the mechanics of racial tropes in cinema, I suggest that representations of Black social life begin to appear as a turbulent, at times terrifying, yet captivating alternative to relations premised on either the individualism of the private sphere, or the indistinct unity of the monoracial community. This alternative, adapting a term from Fred Moten, is the Black polis .