Domestic Disturbance: Afro-Feminist Poetics in Dilman Dila's Ugandan “Horror Romances”
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Published:April 2025
Nedine Moonsamy, 2025. "Domestic Disturbance: Afro-Feminist Poetics in Dilman Dila's Ugandan “Horror Romances”", Contemporary African Screen Worlds, Lindiwe Dovey, Añulika Agina, Michael W. Thomas
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This chapter examines two video films by the Ugandan filmmaker Dilman Dila in order to explore them as sites of knowledge production for our understanding of genre films and their representations of Black womanhood. Focusing on the films How to Start a Zombie Apocalypse and Cursed Widow Blues, the chapter illustrates how they bring together popular genres like romance and horror in ways that undermine the formulaic nature of romance. In doing so, these films offer revisionary responses to the stereotypical representations of African women espoused by the Third Cinema style of production as well as more contemporary popular video films. In particular, the chapter argues that these films disturb the domestic by effecting a haunting on the cinematic image of a “good African woman” in order to intimate at alternatives beyond the frame that may better serve to represent the realities of urban African women in contemporary African cinema.