ABSTRACT
Chapter 2, “Jungle Fever—A Horror Romance: 1930s,” reveals horror’s fascination with predatory primates, as well as its sickening narrative tendency to identify apes and Black people as being virtually inseparable on the evolutionary scale. Apes and Black people have been linked in “Blacks in horror” films through, for example, the exploitation film Ingagi (1930), a mockumentary that claimed that Blacks and apes could (and do) procreate. The chapter then turns to the island of Hispaniola and the country of Haiti. Haiti saw enslaved Africans bring with them cultural practices that were thought to be at best foreign, at worst deficient, by French, Spanish, U.S., and British colonists. African folkways and religions were imagistically exoticized and mangled during this decade in now-classic films such as White Zombie (1932).
