Surviving the Nightmare: Supporting Black Healing Through Horror's Next Era

Horror has historically been a powerful medium for exploring themes of survival, resilience, and identity, especially for Black communities facing cultural and systemic challenges. In this presentation, we will explore horror's role as a therapeutic tool in supporting Black healing, focusing on the genre’s evolution in portraying survival, humanization, and nuanced representation. We will dive into how horror can foster clinical understanding of the Black experience, offering pathways to empathize, reflect, and engage with clients' narratives of survival. Celebrating horror’s unique ability to confront trauma and identity, we’ll discuss how practitioners can integrate the genre into therapeutic strategies to empower folks in exploring and reclaiming their stories. This session will equip attendees with culturally responsive techniques for using horror as a therapeutic tool, particularly in supporting Black communities.

Learning Objectives:

After this session, attendees will be able to:

1. Analyze how horror’s portrayal of Black survival and resilience serves as a therapeutic tool to engage and empower Black clients in geek therapy.

2. Identify ways horror can help bridge cultural and experiential understanding within clinical practice by humanizing the Black experience through complex characters and storylines.

3. Apply trauma-informed approaches to using horror narratives that encourage self-reflection, emotional processing, and resilience-building among Black clients.

4. Develop interventions that incorporate horror's narrative arcs of survival and resistance to foster therapeutic discussions on overcoming adversity and reclaiming identity.

5. Evaluate horror’s impact on the evolution of representation in media and consider its implications for future therapeutic practice.