By Mo Moshaty

THEY CAN’T SAY THEY DON’T SEE US!

File Under Horror is returning to The Final Girl for a second year!

Horror has always been a genre of archives, of memory, folklore, grief, and the stories communities refuse to let disappear. File Under: Horror, the showcase created by Danielle A. Scruggs, returns with another program dedicated to Black femme-directed horror, continuing a mission that feels increasingly vital within the genre’s evolving landscape.

The initiative grew out of Scruggs’ broader work with the Black Women Directors archive, a digital platform documenting and celebrating the work of Black women and nonbinary filmmakers across the globe. What began as an archival impulse has expanded into a living exhibition space, bringing audiences directly into conversation with films that explore the uncanny, the political, and the deeply personal through horror’s visual language.

This year’s program moves between intimate surrealism, folklore-rooted horror, and the enduring power of urban legend. Together, the films demonstrate the breadth of storytelling emerging from Black femme creators, artists who approach horror not simply as spectacle, but as a space where history, identity, and imagination collide.

$5 gets you in
$20 gets you a limited-edition zine featuring collages and writings on films by Black Women Directors founder Danielle A. Scruggs!
Either way, your ticket purchase goes toward future community programming!

Grab tix here!

NEW TREASURE dir: Christl Stringer

Soft comforts can conceal strange anxieties. In Christl Stringer’s New Treasure, the familiar textures of adulthood, dating, vulnerability, and domestic space collide with a quietly surreal premise as a woman attempts to navigate romantic life while surrounded by an enormous collection of plush companions. What begins as quirky intimacy slowly edges into something stranger, probing the emotional attachments we build to objects meant to soothe us.

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HAINT dir: Jahmil Eady

Folklore becomes resistance in Jahmil Eady’s Haint, a story rooted in the cultural memory of the Gullah Geechee community. When mysterious deaths begin to claim the lives of gentrifiers, a displaced handywoman must confront the power of ancestral knowledge that lingers in the land itself. The film taps into a long horror tradition where spirits are not simply monsters, but guardians of history, and witnesses to erasure.

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CANDYMAN (2021) dir: Nia DaCosta

Urban legends rarely stay buried. Nia DaCosta’s Candyman revisits the Chicago neighborhood where the legend first took root, examining how memory, violence, and gentrification reshape the myths we inherit. Through its haunting imagery and social urgency, the film reframes the Candyman not just as a ghost story, but as a living archive of racial terror and cultural remembrance.

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As showcases like File Under: Horror continue to grow, they serve as reminders that horror has always been shaped by voices working outside the industry’s traditional spotlight. By centering Black femme and non-binary filmmakers, the program expands the genre’s archive while inviting audiences to encounter horror through new cultural lenses, where folklore, social memory, and personal experience transform familiar fears into something freshly unsettling. The event stands as both a celebration of the present and a quiet act of preservation for the future of horror storytelling.