What's Good about Tales from the Hood?

 

Retribution to me, is one of the most powerful themes displayed in Rusty Cundeiff’s 1995 original film, Tales from the Hood. The film is a now classic horror anthology that intertwines comedic relief to some of the very real truths behind the stories told by the strange and wild mortician, Mr. Simms. While all of Mr.Simm’s stories told in the film confront difficult experiences for African Americans, the fourth and final story, “Hard Core Convert'', speaking on the choices of gang members to kill one another, is rather controversial and arguably problematic for several reasons. 

Through meeting Cundeiff in our Black horror class at UCLA and hearing his justifications of the story and perspective on gang violence and instances of crime overall in predominantly Black neighborhoods, I wasn't moved to shift my stance on the necessity of the fourth story in the film.  While violence and death related to gangs is a horror that many members of the Black community are affected by one way or another, the film’s final wraparound story, “Hard Core Convert”, addresses this issue in a way that magnifies the choices we make but ignores the systemic issues that force people to make this choice. Survival through systemic and institutionalized racism is real horror, in and of itself, and I believe the fourth story that wraps up the anthology diminishes some of the powerful messages that acknowledge this form of racism earlier in the film, such as slavery, police brutality, corruption, and political racism in the United States.

Stories 1 through 3 all collectively utilize the theme of retribution in different ways to combat the horror of racialized violence and even domestic violence in story two, “Boys Do Get Bruised”. This theme is particularly powerful in the story “KKK Comeuppance”, that is notably reminiscent of the 1975 Trilogy of Terror film, where the dolls with the souls of massacred slaves on the senator’s inherited plantation satisfyingly ruin his life and rip him to pieces by the end of the story. Retribution has always been a significant theme in Black cultural works. Many works of African American folktales, written in the era of slavery, feature the small but mighty Brer Rabbit who consistently gets revenge on Brer Fox through his wit and smarts, representing the reclamation of power of the enslaved and revealing collective feelings about the cruel and unjustified power dynamic of slave masters. 

Overall, I believe the movie addressed systemic issues in a unique way through the first three stories. By utilizing themes of Black complicity in racism or revealing the ultimate message of Black community responsibility in the manner that the story “Hard Core Convert” did, it fed into conservative ignorance that fails to acknowledge WHY these issues exist and WHY some Black people and other individuals of marginalized groups turn to gang affiliation, because the reason is ultimately for what they perceive to be their survival- the horror of facing life or death, and having no control over the power of institutionalized and systemic racism.