For my generation, and maybe even for the ones after me, Ernest Dickerson is as important a figure in horror as anyone. If only for TALES FROM THE CRYPT PRESENTS: DEMON KNIGHT (1995), he’d be in that pantheon. DEMON KNIGHT was decently received at the time and it has definitely found its audience in the years since, but I think it’s still probably under-valued for what it did for horror. Kids my age were building their horror appetites by sneaking late-night peeks from 1989 to 1996 at the Tales From The Crypt series on HBO. I don’t exactly want to call that show “the kiddie pool” from which we ventured into more heavy R-rated horror waters, but it’s not the worst analogy I’ve ever applied to something. The series was creepy and spooky and fun (I can still remember in ’89 or ’90 nervously anticipating the pop-up appearance of the Crypt Keeper each episode – I can still remember being young enough that the damn puppet alone creeped me out as much as he entertained me.) By 1995 I was already well into my teens, and DEMON KNIGHT hit just right. It was a perfect blend of scary and comic and managed to add in an extra note of shit-kickery to the symphony. Billy Zane was a great evil Übermensch of an enemy, William Sadler was perfect as the grizzled and noble avatar of decency who would ultimately fall, and in particular, Jada Pinkett was a new kind of badass, surly and cool and a joy to root for. I didn’t think about it much at the time, but it mattered that she was a woman and it mattered that she was Black. This predated Buffy and Danai Gurira’s Michonne. Not for me to argue, maybe, but DEMON KNIGHT‘s Jeryline is part of an important horror lineage, and with due respect also to his writers and producers, Ernest Dickerson is the one who presented her to us with perfection.
Speaking of Michonne, Ernest Dickerson was an essential element to the early success of The Walking Dead, which to be dead honest, has never been my bag, but there’s no arguing its importance to the modern mainstreaming of horror, and whatever qualms I have with the series can hardly be attributed to his contributions. Ernest Dickerson is a tremendous director of TV horror and drama, which goes back as far as Tales From The Darkside in the mid-1980s and continues through stuff that may not be horror, like The Wire, but sure can hit as hard as horror, straight up until the present day. Along the way, Dickerson was DP on DEF BY TEMPTATION, to name another notable accomplishment, and helmed SURVIVING THE GAME, which again, may not be horror, but if only I could tell you with how much force that film hit a much younger me back in 1994.
Now, the people who need to know how valuable Ernest Dickerson has been to horror already know. He was called upon to direct an episode of Masters Of Horror – one written by series creator Mick Garris himself. I’m sure I’m far from the only horror nut who thinks of Ernest Dickerson when they think of the modern masters. But it still doesn’t feel like he’s seen that way more widely, and the answer is probably pretty obvious: Most people probably think first and still of Ernest Dickerson as Spike Lee’s first (and arguably greatest) director of photography, starting with JOE’S BED-STUY BARBERSHOP, Lee’s masters thesis, continuing on to his first feature, SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT, and working with him all the way until MALCOLM X, a legendary run that includes SCHOOL DAZE, DO THE RIGHT THING, MO’ BETTER BLUES, and JUNGLE FEVER. Let me also mention that this period of creativity also includes influential films such as THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET, KRUSH GROOVE, and (even I forgot he shot this one!) EDDIE MURPHY RAW. When that level of genius is a guy’s initial claim to fame, it’s hard to get the Criterion crowd to look past it into the dark shadows of the horror genre.
Here’s a rare and distinguished conundrum, then: Ernest Dickerson may be overlooked as a horror master because he’s just too overwhelmingly talented. (And prolific!)
Which brings us to an odd outlier in every respect, 2001’s BONES.
BONES is the legend of Jimmy Bones, a neighborhood hero who rolls around regally and in 1970s style with his one true love, Pam Grier. Her character is named “Pearl,” but come on, it’s Pam Grier. She was cast because she’s Pam Grier – who else immediately signifies 1970s royalty? And the beloved kind of royalty? If Pam Grier loves Jimmy Bones, who are we not to? And we do love Jimmy Bones, because he’s played by Snoop Dogg, the gangsta rapper who exploded into fame in 1992 when he popped on Dr. Dre’s instant-classic album The Chronic. Snoop as an actor has been appearing in movies almost from the start of his career, but often as himself, or as a thinly-veiled meta-reference to himself. Other than BONES, I cannot think of any movie where Snoop played the main character. It’s interesting, intriguing even, that this is the one. My research so far has not yielded too much about the gestation of BONES – did it begin with the script by Adam Simon and Tim Metcalfe? Or was it commissioned? And was it commissioned by Snoop himself? I definitely have a major hunch that Snoop is a horror fan, though I’ve only got a couple things to go on so far: In 2006, he produced a film called SNOOP DOGG’S HOOD OF HORROR (which I like a lot!) and before that, all the way back in 1993, he released the video for “Murder Was The Case,” which opens with Snoop already dead and rapping from beyond the grave. Again, not exactly horror, but ask me how hard this hit in the early 1990s:
Not everyone loves Jimmy Bones, unfortunately. He’s betrayed by a corrupt cop named Lupovich (Michael T. Weiss, star of that show THE PRETENDER that was always on in the early 2000s but which I never saw a minute of) and by a rival pusher named Eddie Mack (Ricky Harris from HEAT – he’s Albert, the guy who Pacino yells at, which narrows it down), whose hairdo needs to be seen to be believed. Lupovich and Eddie shoot Jimmy and force his best friend Jeremiah (Clifton Powell, a character actor who you may not know by name, but who you’d recognize right off as “Oh yeah, him!”) and his bodyguard Shotgun (Ronald Selmour) to stick in the knife, sharing blame so that if one goes down for the murder, they all go down. They try to get Jimmy’s lady to do it too, but she refuses. The memorable-looking building where Jimmy was killed is where he’s buried, and the neighborhood goes to ruin over the years.
The movie actually opens on a sequence of scares. Two white boys are in the ‘hood to score. Two dealers named Stank and Weaze (Deezer D from CB4 and Garikayi Mutambirwa) run them into the run-down building. An older Shotgun has stationed himself in the building across the street, keeping watch, and warns against going near it, but of course the two guys get killed by something supernatural. An older Lupovich (same actor, now wearing a conspicuous fat suit) pops up just long enough to ignore it. The idea is that the building is bad because of the guy buried underneath it.
BONES is an anomaly in horror history because of its timing. It came after the late-’90s teen-slasher boom, and it came before the 2000s so-called “torture porn” era. Chronologically, it came on October 26th, 2001, just a few weeks after 9/11/2001, a time when nobody really wanted to think about horror movies. I bring that up not because it has much to do with where BONES falls thematically, but only because it explains a lot because why BONES may or may not be under-discussed. (What is or isn’t discussed enough is, as always, a matter of perception according to who is speaking in the moment. I might feel like BONES isn’t talked about enough. You might think about it every day of your life. Our mileage may vary.)
All that said, with the table set, now we need some dinner guests for the hosts to torment. Another one of many interesting things about BONES is the group of young potential victims who enter the story. Compare it to a movie like, say, URBAN LEGEND, where everybody is a similar shade and WB-ready. In BONES we get Patrick (Khalil Kain, one of the stars of Dickerson’s JUICE who you may not remember as well, after Tupac and Omar Epps), his brother Bill (Merwin Mondesir), his sister Tia (horror icon Katharine Isabelle, fresh off GINGER SNAPS at the time and a year or two ahead of FREDDY VS. JASON), and their friend Maurice (Sean Amsing). It’s interesting because not only do three out of four read as Black (Khalil Kain is mixed), but initially it’s a little ambiguous as to who is related to who. Patrick, Bill, and Tia are the children of Nancy (Lynda Boyd) and Jeremiah, who you may remember from the 1979 intro scenes. The kids are looking at the old scary brownstone to purchase and to turn into a happening nightclub. Into the mix comes Cynthia (Bianca Lawson), daughter of Pam Grier – sorry, “Pearl,” who still lives in the neighborhood and now works as a psychic. Though she warns Cynthia against getting close, Cynthia and Patrick start to flirt.
Bianca Lawson deserves more than a parenthetical consideration here: Not only is she the daughter of Richard Lawson (who appeared in movies like SUGAR HILL and STREETS OF FIRE) and therefore the step-sister to Beyoncé, but to genre fans she’s immediately recognizable as Kendra, “the Black Slayer,” who appeared briefly but memorably on BUFFY after Buffy died (when one Slayer dies, another is called into action). It may be fashionable now to undermine what BUFFY accomplished, and I’m not looking to do it myself, but even in 1998 I was disappointed by how quickly Kendra left the series. I think there was plenty more that could have been done with her, but even so, she’s part of a continuum of rarefied horror protagonists with Marki Bey’s Sugar Hill and Jada Pinkett’s Jeryline. Is Bianca Lawson appearing in BONES due strictly to her being an appealing actress, or does it have more to do with Ernest Dickerson knowing that casting carries weight? I tend to favor the second reading.
While the kids explore the building, they find two things: One, a striking black dog with red eyes. Whether you’re a horror head with plenty of knowledge of the centuries of lore of black dogs or whether BONES is your first movie ever, you know there’s something up with that dog. Two, Jimmy Bones’ bones. Finding a skeleton in a basement isn’t a great sign that your club is going to be a cash cow, but the kids go ahead with their plans anyway, even after – or especially because – Jeremiah orders Patrick to sell the building. From there, the plot accelerates pretty quickly (this is not a long movie) and we find that when that black dog eats meat, the flesh returns to Jimmy’s bones and he returns from the netherworld, looking for revenge on those who wronged him. It’s an easy bet that he’s going to go after Eddie Mack and Detective Lupovich, but the more complicated question is whether or not he’s going to extract blood as payment from Shotgun and in particular Jeremiah. He has made himself a better life and started a family, and I don’t know about you, but when I watch BONES, I like those kids! I don’t want Jimmy to kill any of them.
I come here to praise BONES. I love it. I’m happy it exists. What an unusual movie. If I had to get critical, I’d have to say there’s a lot of extravagant table-setting and in the end, things start to feel kind of rushed. There’s more to be explored, particularly in the character of Jeremiah. Clifton Powell does what he can with his limited screen time to give the character some depths, but there’s such rich ground available to really look at this guy, who left one life and entered another. Does he really deserve what Jimmy intends to give him? The movie does raise the question, but the answer, such as it is, ends up feeling rushed. Even in 2023, seeing a blended family on screen is preciously rare, absolutely moreso in the horror genre. And in 2001 as much as in 2023, a horror movie where the population of victims consists primarily of young Black men would have been incredibly charged in a way that the movie doesn’t end up getting to search around that fertile terrain as much as it could. Again, this is hardly my place to speak definitively about, and without question it’s likely a marketplace concern that BONES becomes the bloodbath it becomes in its third act. (Those gorehounds need to be satisfied!)
There’s another problem with BONES, though I hesitate to call it a problem when it’s also sort of a compliment. The premise is ultimately engineered in such a way that Jimmy Bones seems intended to be a fearsome figure. He’s the Freddy Krueger here. How it plays in reality, at least to my eyes, is that he’s Freddy Krueger several sequels in, you know what I mean, when Freddy was rapping with the Fat Boys, not A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET Freddy, where he’s the scariest thing you’ve ever conceived of. For me, personally, that’s just not possible when it’s Snoop. I can’t think of many more widely beloved figures in American popular culture. I’m wisened in the tooth now, but I remember with crystal clarity those long-ago days when kids got put onto new music from MTV and not TikTok. I remember when The Chronic dropped. I remember absolutely well what it was like when “Nuttin’ But A G-Thang” arrived. For me, and for millions like me, it was love at first sight. It’s something to contemplate, this notion of “fear.” Sure, I do believe my parents were expected to greet Snoop with fear in 1992. (Good luck with that, by the way – both my folks are well to the left of me.) Dre was selling himself and Snoop as a nightmare for the parents of America. But not to me! And after growing up with Snoop for a decade at the time of BONES‘ release, and now two decades after that, it would be hard to get me to even be a little startled by Snoop if he showed up behind me as I type this sentence. Doubt I’d do anything but smile. That’s got to be great news for Snoop’s Q rating, not as great news for a horror movie where he’s playing the bad guy.
Also, yes, I apologize for the spoiler, but there is a moment where the black dog briefly half-morphs and puts on Snoop’s face and voice. Even if those effects were state-of-the-art for all eternity, which I regret to inform you that they are not, I cannot imagine a universe in scores upon scores of multiverses in which I could ever be scared of this:
So while I can’t whole-heartedly argue for BONES as a terrifying experience, I still do insist that it is blessedly unique and highly worthy of revisiting. I continue to maintain that anything Ernest Dickerson does is important to the horror genre, for one thing, but BONES itself is an October treat. Its star may be no Robert Englund, but he’s motherfucking Snoop Doggy Dogg, and he has rarely been so iconically presented, just as an image and a general presence and as the platonic ideal of “Snoop.” It’s also nice, it should go without saying, to look at this movie for a glimpse of Pam Grier. She is one of the great American movie stars ever, in my humble estimation, and it’s a great failure of movies that the Pam Grier renaissance that should have begun at least after JACKIE BROWN, if not a hundred other times, never fully came to pass. BONES gives you Pam Grier in full “1979” glory, the platonic ideal of “Pam Grier,” and shows just as well how she could play a concerned mother, a bereaved lover, a real person, and in just really a few relatively short scenes. This is the story of Jimmy Bones, but Pam Grier makes you wish you got more of Pearl too.
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Tags: 31 flavors of horror, Adam Simon, Bianca Lawson, Clifton Powell, Deezer D, Dogs, Elia Cmiral, Ernest Dickerson, Flavio Labiano, Horror, Katharine Isabelle, Khalil Kain, Michael T. Weiss, pam grier, Primo The Dog, Ricky Harris, Sean Amsing, Snoop Dogg, The 2000s, Tim Metcalfe
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