The companion essay is still coming (along with a few other promised essays from 2025 that flesh out Plantation Horror).

Please watch our latest video above and leave a comment. Stick around for a companion essay later today now dropping Monday.

-Neil

Legacy of Folktales started as a place to dump ideas

While developing a feature screenplay, I realized I had an unwieldy amount of thoughts in journals, Apple notes, Scrivener, textedit, Bear, Ulysses… and any number of writing app I’ve used over the years…

At some point, these notes felt like questions I couldn’t shake. Notes from the script that couldn’t fit in a movie, but that I needed to get out of my head.

What I didn’t know at the time, is these notes were about connections between folklore, horror and American memory.

I didn’t expect it to grow like this.

In 2025, Legacy of Folktales brought in nearly 700k views on YouTube…

• We crossed 1 Million total channel views exactly 2 years after starting on my birthday in 2023.

• We added over 10,000 subscribers in 2025

• Our average view duration across the channel is over 8 minutes and 30 seconds

• Click-through rates (CTR) stayed around 5-6%

A majority of these views came from video essays ranging from 30 - 50 minutes. Viewers were tuning into the channel and sticking around. Our channel talks about plantation horror, race, horror, hidden history, slavery and… Disney -- and people still tuned in, commented and participated.

This is from long form videos alone:

Two pieces in particular clarified what the channel had become

The Shocking Reason BRER RABBIT Was Erased from Disney! and The Most Terrifying Trope In Modern Horror found an audience that was ready to sit with ideas Hollywood tends to avoid. Brer Rabbit and Plantation horror become the two spaces people most strongly associated with Legacy of Folktales. Which is really special, considering it was Disney’s Haunted Mansion in Disneyland and Splash Mountain that started this journey.

Alongside those essays, I also released shorter folktale retellings, like Charles W. Chestnutt’s The Conjure Woman. While these folktales don’t drive views like the longer video essays, I’ve learned they add texture and expand the world of the channel. They also show that plantation horror (and author’s responses to Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus-framed retelling of Brer Rabbit a century ago) can still resonate today. These folktales weren’t the channel’s engine but were good companions… and I still aspire to build a dedicated folktale series that lives alongside the essays, not in competition with them.

The thing that stayed with me the most, though, isn’t the analytics… it’s the comments.

People sharing family stories.
Sitting with discomfort instead of rushing to resolve it.
Correcting me, thoughtfully.
Saying, “I didn’t have language for this before.”

Here’s a comment from this week from a video we posted 7 months ago!

The Ripple Effect

Along the journey, I noticed a few copycat YouTube channels pop up, echoing similar themes and while it was validating in a way that was probably rooted in my own ego; it seemed to also confirm these conversations were bigger than any one channel.

2025 also showed me my limits. These longer essays that grow the channel take time: research, writing, editing, positioning… I underestimated how long it would take to work at the level I wanted.. You see, at the end of 2024, the Brer Rabbit video jumped to 400K+ views, after spending a full year capped at 6k views.

When I made Brer Rabbit video in December 2023, it felt like this would be the direction the channel would go in. In fact, a now defunct website predicted I would hit 250k views in the first month. When 12 months went by and I was still at 6,000 views — I’ll admit the slow adoption …in 2024 made me question the approach. But Brer Rabbit’s success in late 2024 and early 2025 clarified that I may have a format I can replicate for my channel.

The next video to follow was The Most Terrifying Trope… which has even higher engagement per view than the Brer Rabbit video.

I was certain that I would finish the Plantation Horror series by the summer of 2025, but instead, I still have the fourth and fifth entries nearing completion.

There were moments this year where I kept thinking: Should I be working on my script instead of making a YouTube video?

Writing this reflection helped me see that I can do both… This work isn’t a detour from the films - it’s part of the same process. It’s where ideas (and framing) gets tested, where themes sharpen, where an audience forms before a script ever leaves the page. Over the past 2 months, I’ve been quietly building a better system to coalesce my research, writing and production of youtube videos to make more space for outside creative writing.

In 2026, you’ll see more long-form essays, more folktales and the beginning of original narrative pieces that bridge directly into film, series and platform agnostic work. Not a pivot. A continuation.

Thank you for watching, reading and thinking alongside me. More soon!

Maybe readiness is less a milestone and more a mirage we inherit from systems we’ve outgrown. What truly moves a story forward is the community that gathers around it, long before the industry takes notice. This piece is about the moment I stopped waiting for readiness and started building the world my stories needed for themselves.

I used to believe in “ready.”

Not the kind of ready that means preparedness—doing the work, honing the craft, putting in the hours. That matters.

I’m talking about the other kind: waiting for external validation before you share your work.

For years, I waited for permission—from gatekeepers, from the industry, from some future version of myself who’d finally “arrived.” The right credits, the perfect pitch, the complete body of work. I kept working, kept refining, kept waiting to feel ready.

Then something shifted: I started sharing before I felt prepared. And that’s when things actually began to happen.

But when I actually interrogated “ready,” it wasn’t one thing. It was a composite illusion:

• Clarity – wanting to convey a film’s meaning cleanly and authentically.

• Timing – waiting for the moment that maximizes interest, whether for financing, talent, or opportunity.

• Negativity bias – anticipating objections and crafting responses that could slow momentum later.

• Credentialism – believing you need X credits to be taken seriously by Y gatekeepers.

• Desired affiliations – wanting to be affiliated with a community of filmmakers I admired.

All of it was either my idea of ready or someone else’s — and it felt like something important was missing.

The Industry’s Version of Ready

In the industry, “ready” means something different:

• A package that will move financiers

• Attachments that generate buzz

• The right project after the last project

• The metrics that help a script or debut feel “bankable”

And that’s without mentioning the well-documented obstacles career producers face now—many of them articulated clearly by the Producer’s Union.

When I produced Miss Juneteenth, which premiered at Sundance in 2020, I learned that community exists before the film—you join it, you don’t create it. But even with that lesson, I found myself waiting for “ready” with my next project.

When “Ready” Finally Arrived

For longer than I care to admit, I’d been trying to find the horror and the drama in a modern Southern Gothic folktale about a Black college student who discovers Confederate gold at an old plantation. The script became The Plat-Eye—named after the shapeshifting spirit from Gullah folklore, the kind of story my grandparents shared.

I had the research. I had the passion. But I had two competing ideas battling in my head: a horror movie about a plantation, and a lived appreciation of African-American folktales, family myths and how stories from previous generations were distorted.

After a first round of sharing the script strategically, early feedback was excitement about the idea, but still needed a push to make it horror and overcome valid hesitation to make a horror film on a plantation.

I didn’t know how to reconcile them. So I kept working in silence, convinced I needed it all figured out before I could talk about it publicly.

Then I got into the inaugural Blumhouse/K Period Screamwriting Lab.

This was the moment that was supposed to make me feel ready. Time with mentors. A cohort of sharp writers. A space to push the project until it became both emotionally grounded and genuinely frightening.

And the lab really did change me—the mentorship, the breakthroughs, the ongoing WhatsApp accountability loop. All of it.

So I walked out believing: This is it. I’m finally ready.

But the truth is… something else happened. Something I didn’t anticipate — and not in the way you might think

The Disneyland Lightning Bolt

Shortly after the lab, I visited Disneyland (effectively for the first time) right when Splash Mountain was being announced for closure. Walking past the Haunted Mansion with my family, it hit me like lightning:

The Haunted Mansion resembles a Southern plantation estate. Right next door: a ride about Brer Rabbit, rooted in African-American folktales. And surrounding both: New Orleans Square, an antebellum re-imagining of the Old South.

This was the Disneyfied version of the world I was trying to write about.

My horror film lived between Disney’s Haunted Mansion and Splash Mountain—a Southern Gothic story about a young college student navigating a plantation while buried folklore surfaced around them.

I was invigorated. I had a refined lens to bring back to the rewrite. I wanted to rush out a new draft.

Then the strike happened

Suddenly I had this burst of energy, a new perspective to tackle a horror film based on my grandparents’ stories, their ancestry, their folklore—and the vehicle (the movie) was still months away from moving forward.

During the strike, I discovered The Annotated African American Folktales by Henry Louis Gates and Maria Tatar and American Trickster: Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit by Emily Zobel Marshall — this felt like a new lens to work through my horror script. I had a new way to attack the work.

During the pandemic, I’d started watching more YouTube videos—TED Talks, video essays, book summaries. I could find channels about Greek mythology, but there was a gap: no one was centering African-American folktales.

I thought I could finally make that channel. Exorcise this newfound interest.

That’s when I made a YouTube channel.

Legacy of Folktales became the 40-minute conversation I wanted to have about the movie.

That first video about plantation horror hit 100k views in 5 days!! We are currently shy of 290k views as of this writing.

The audience was already there. I’d just been waiting for permission to find them.

What the Audience Actually Cares About

Films can be “ready” by every industrial metric—cast, budget, acclaim—and the audience still doesn’t show up. The illusion isn’t just personal or professional—it’s structural.

Financiers, festivals, and executives have their own illusions of what makes a project viable, and those criteria shift with markets and moods. If you wait for the industry to decide you’re ready, you’ll be waiting forever.

Which is why audience development became essential for me. Not because it replaces the industry—but because it creates undeniable proof of audience that no illusion of readiness can dismiss.

The viewing audience doesn’t care if I have the perfect framework. They just don’t want their time wasted. They want escape, reprieve, something true—even if it’s messy.

Somewhere along the way, our ideas of readiness trumped what the audience actually needed.

The MC Hammer Kid

When I was 7, my 2nd grade teacher let me show a music video I made in my living room—me dancing to MC Hammer in my parents’ house - I believe it was Too Legit To Quit — but I haven’t seen this video in decades. I didn’t know about costumes. I didn’t know about lighting or editing or “correct” framing. I just knew I wanted people to watch.

I’ve been trying to get back to that.

What we learn along the way should empower us, not become prerequisites that bog us down.

Legacy of Folktales: What I Didn’t Expect

The process exposed every illusion of ready I’d been carrying.

At first, I used AI voices because I wasn’t ready to use my own. A Youtube scriptwriter encouraged me to intentionally misrepresent facts to boost engagement—the thinking was people would correct it in comments and ignite the algorithm. That wasn’t what I created Legacy of Folktales for, and that was the last time I worked with him.

When I finally started using my own voice, something shifted. The work became honest in a way others connected with.

Legacy of Folktales became its own thing

It evolved into a place for public domain folklore lost to history, for shorts I wrote years ago that I’m realizing have deeper roots, for new IP emerging from these conversations.

We made merch—sold our first “This is a Haunted House” t-shirt. We offered a storytelling workshop and got responses. The Patreon became a repository for sneak peeks and emerging essays. The channel kept evolving—17.8K subscribers and counting, but the mission shapes itself through practice.

The community sends me book, movie and comic book recommendations I’ve never heard of. Filmmakers share research on suppressed Southern histories. I discovered deeper connections to story ideas that have been with me for years.

The platform isn’t static. The mission emerges through practice.

From my vantage point, one truth keeps repeating itself: audience participation—not industrial readiness—is what sustains a project long after the premiere.

Not Views. Emergence.

Audience participation doesn’t mean “skip the film and just make content.” It means building something alongside the work so that when the film arrives, there’s already infrastructure. Not passive viewers—active participants who see themselves in the mission.

Here’s what I learned: 17.8K subscribers sounds impressive, but only about 10% take action off the platform—buy a shirt, book a workshop, engage beyond viewing. What matters is building systems that convert interest into participation.

That’s the difference between a million views that evaporate and a mobilized community that sustains the work.

The Plat-Eye: A Different Kind of Ready

For two years, I built Legacy of Folktales anonymously in public - over 700K combined views on Brer Rabbit and Plantation horror, 17.8K subscribers, proof that these stories have an audience.

But when it came to The Plat-Eye—my horror feature about plantation histories and the folklore my grandparents passed down—I stayed quiet. I told myself I was protecting the work. Really, I was protecting myself from the same vulnerability I’d been preaching others should embrace.

Ready had become a disguise for control. When you hear “no” or face a delay, it doesn’t always mean something’s wrong with your project—sometimes it’s just not its time yet. But in an attempt to steel myself against that next rejection, I kept imposing more limitations on what “ready” meant. More research. More polish. More certainty before I’d let anyone see it.

That’s the trap: you think you’re preparing. Really, you’re protecting yourself from the uncontrollable parts of the creative process—timing, reception, the audience’s response.

I thought I’d overcome the illusion of ready. Then I realized I was still living in it with my most important project.

That’s changing. And I’m working through what that means—for the film, for the audience we’re building, and for the stories that deserve to be told before we feel “ready” to tell them.

More on that soon.

—thank you for encouraging me to share this here. I’ve kept my YouTube world and my industry world separate for too long, worried one would delegitimize the other. But that separation was just another version of waiting for permission.

Legacy of Folktales has over 17.8K subscribers and 1.1M total channel views. The Plat-Eye is my directorial debut feature in development. Both exist because I started building before I felt “ready”—and both continue to evolve through community.

My Ask

So here’s my ask: What are you not sharing because it’s not “ready” yet?

The script that needs another pass? The creative essay sitting in drafts? The weird hybrid project that doesn’t fit clean categories?

What if you shared it anyway—not as a finished product, but as an invitation? To feedback. To community. To discovering what your work becomes when other people touch it.

I’m still figuring this out—but from a place of momentum, not hesitation. I believe the practice of filmmaking is evolving to include this new practice of communal sharing earlier.

Legacy of Folktales on YouTube // Currently developing: The Plat-Eye

What’s Coming In This Series

IN THIS SERIES:

• Part 1: Why Plantation Horror? (You are here)

• Part 2: Films That Got It Right (And Wrong)

• Part 3: The Disney Problem: Brer Rabbit and Lost Cause Mythology

• Part 4: Architecture, Memory, and Who Gets to Haunt

• Part 5: Where We Go From Here

I’ve been writing, planning, and researching a modern southern gothic folktale that takes place on a southern plantation. And between self-funded research trips to plantations in the South Carolina low country, the greater New Orleans area, Savannah, GA and a stop in Wilmington, NC - I’ve had a lot of time to think about American history, southern folklore and why there aren’t more horror films on plantations?

Let me tell you why that question makes people uncomfortable—and why we need to ask it anyway.

Of course there shouldn’t be MORE (or any?) horror films on plantations. When I think of horror, I think of jump scares, monsters, gratuitous violence. I think of escapism, a night of lighthearted scares and yelling at the screen. I think of fun. I think of entertainment.

And there are just some things in history that aren’t meant to be entertaining—

— countless movies have depicted the actual horrors of American slavery from Roots, 12 Years A Slave, Amistad — Those films aren’t fun to watch and often require distance after viewing.

And yet — there ARE horror films that take place on plantations - more recently: Antebellum (2020), Oracle, Alice and, in decades past, The Skeleton Key and Tales From The Hood — to name a few.. and this doesn’t mention historical dramas (depicting horrific life on plantations) - Harriet and Emperor and alternate history takes of plantation stories like Django Unchained.

And regardless of how these films perform critically or commercially, there is a consistent stream of essays and reviews that question should there be horror films on plantations and what kind should there be.

Here’s the distinction that matters: we don’t need more trauma porn. We need horror films on plantations made with reverence, respect, and a centering of perspectives often pushed to the side. Audiences aren’t interested in seeing more trauma—they want to explore the interiority of those who were enslaved.

I’m calling it Plantation Horror—Southern Gothic recentered from the perspective of enslaved people and their descendants, prioritizing their interiority over their trauma. It’s not new. It’s existed in literature for over a century. But giving it a name lets us examine it, refine it, and understand what separates respectful reckoning from exploitation. Which, as I continue to think out loud and refine via this Substack and our YouTube Channel (17.8k subscribers strong), has existed for a long time under a different label - Southern Gothic.

I believe Plantation Horror has a chance to give modern audiences a lens to approach American ghost stories with cathartic and fresh lenses built on over a century of Gothic literature, oral traditions and plantation fiction. Essentially, it’s Southern Gothic recentered—told from the perspective of enslaved people and their descendants, prioritizing their interiority over their trauma.

I wonder if those films can lead to conversations and a reckoning with history that provides insight into our modern world? More importantly, is that what audiences want?

And I’m specifically talking about film… literature is doing this work pretty loudly as well as certain tv shows. It seems to be cinema that’s a bit behind in creating more plantation fiction works. This is an attempt to contribute to the larger conversation happening culturally.

This underscores that Plantation Horror has been with us for a long time — reflected in books like Beloved, TV shows like The Underground Railroad, Atlanta, even the recent “James”, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel from Everett Perceval writer of American Fiction, takes Huckleberry Finn and retells it from the perspective of the enslaved.

Everett critiqued the film “12 Years a Slave” as an example, sharing his view that the film “cheated the enslaved out of their complexity,” due to its misrepresentation of how dialogue between enslaved people could be understood by outsiders.

• Duke Chronicle - October 23rd, 2025

In fact, he was recently quoting as saying that films like 12 Years A Slave don’t show the interiority of enslaved life… and in my research on plantation trips, talking to a few docents and the histories that seemed to be erased from certain tours - I agree — it’s time for a re-examining of plantation narratives that shows the fuller humanity of those who were enslaved (and, in modern stories, their descendants). This is what actual plantation horror looked like.

Horror isn’t something we’re adding to plantation stories. It’s already there. The question is: whose perspective do we center when we tell these stories? That’s why I created Legacy of Folktales (first on YouTube and then on Substack) to create a public venue to explore topics that were rooted in Plantation Horror (amongst other things).

You will see discussions on Disney, historical memory, architecture, films, horror movies and more…

The Most Terrifying Trope In Modern Horror (That Nobody Will Talk About)

The video that I wanted to make back when I started my YouTube Channel back in 2023 - it finally dropped in June 2025 and we’ve had ~290k views in the first month and climbing. But this is meant to be Part 1 …

Part 2 will list specific films and go into a bit more detail about what it would take for a film to be Plantation Horror. I will also start to

I Started With Brer Rabbit in 2023

Examining Disney’s relationship to Brer Rabbit (at the time of our writing, the most popular video on our YouTube Channel with over 490k views) is a direct connection to the legacy of Plantation Fiction - Brer Rabbit tales as told by Joel Chandler Harris is a Lost Cause framed retelling of slave narratives and folktales — is also part of this plantation horror.

I have a few more videos in the series that I am working on… and some essays I may tease here because it seems to take me longer than I care to admit to make these video essays.

This is also a public forum to explore this topic. So here’s my question to you: If you could see one story from plantation history told from the perspective of those who lived it - whose story would it be?

This is the beginning of a longer conversation—one I hope you’ll join. Because these questions don’t have easy answers, and that’s exactly why they’re worth asking.

Leave a comment

Frankenstein. Dracula. The Bride…

What do they all have in common?

Many of these monsters originated from Gothic (and Romantic) literature. And they were all tales from the “old country” — Nothing really provocative about that. This year alone, we’ll see Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein and next year Maggie Gyllenhaal’s’ “The Bride” [based on Frankenstein’s Bride]. Last year gave us Nosferatu by Robert Eggers (itself an adaption of an unauthorized retelling of Dracula) - any recent adaptations I’m missing? - we return to these stories. To me, Frankenstein was always a cautionary tale of man playing God, the limits of science and humanity, and a dramatic warning that sometimes our creations take on a life of their own (AI anyone?). I’m genuinely excited to watch these adaptions… but I wonder, where are the American horror icons… I mean, the ones who originated in the United States?

Lately, it seems that answer is found in true crime stories: Ryan Murphy’s Monster series (The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, Dahmer, Ed Gein) or many true-crime turned mystery/thriller movies or series. For the purpose of this essay, I’m specifically looking for the American mythical monsters that inhabit literature and our movies. Those supernatural monsters created to reveal our weaknesses as humans.

It seems we should be looking for these monsters in American folktales (hey, This is Legacy of Folktales *wink) and its various origins stretching from Indigenous creatures (like Sasquatch - Bigfoot) , African-American folktales (like the Boo-Hag) or a number of cultural and regional monsters littering the American heartland. It just seems, films about these American monsters don’t get the same big Hollywood treatment. On one hand, I can understand — Bigfoot seems to have had his heyday in the 80s and 90s… maybe it’s time for a revisit? … and even still, lesser known monsters connected to specific cultures require more work to build the audience awareness needed to justify a bigger Hollywood budget - but this is where independents can shine… and Dracula had to start somewhere…

What fascinates me is that the late 20th century saw a burst of literary monsters who still get their modern-day due: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Dracula (1897), The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) — Sarah Snook just received rave reviews for her turn as Dorian Grey and Universal created a whole Monster series retelling these tales in the 1930s.

But while many of American monsters trace roots back to Europe, an exception being the Zombie from Haiti — it seems somewhere along the way the specific blend of American anxieties avoided American made monsters. Has the internet flattened our culture so much we don’t have specific anxieties rooted to America’s history? If 2020 taught us anything, America’s tepid history of facing its history as a nation built on slavery always seems to find a way to manifest and force some sort of reckoning. To be blunt: Why aren’t there more horror films on plantations? I’m talking about going directly to the plantation… in the actual “big house”… when do we get those kind of stories and what monsters would we encounter?

Enter Plantation Horror

And yes True Blood, Interview With A Vampire, Skeleton Key and AHS: Coven all exist — as well as Antebellum, Alice and Oracle — we touch on these in previous and forthcoming video essays

Many of the earlier literary examples I mentioned in this essay originated in Europe, and their early film adaptations could lean into racial stereotyping (looking at you Dr. Jekyll) but almost all of these stories were birthed during the Victorian era (1831-1901).

But before, and overlapping, with the Victorian era is the antebellum era in America - the years leading up the Civil War. Within this time we saw the rise of Plantation Fiction and Edgar Allan Poe’s most seminal works. And both of these literary traditions existed and evolved while slavery was a part of the fabric of American life. Toni Morrison has pointed out how Poe’s work helped to mythologize the creation of “The Other” in American literature while marrying it to the macabre and Gothic tradition.

And we still get Poe adaptations - just recently The Fall of The House of Usher - an American story originally published in 1839 — I think it’s time to start asking some more questions about American history, American horror and home-grown American monsters.

American Castles

I grew up watching a TV show on A&E called American Castles. This documentary show displayed architectural gems mainly from America’s Gilded Age. You know, those homes created by robberbarrons and titans of industry — as well as plantation homes like Nottoway, and Oak Alley (pre-dating the Gilded Age but firmly within the Antebellum era)… There was even an episode called “Cotton Kings” I recently watched while researching…

The show ran from 1995-2005, although I was watching it in the 90s, I remember for me, it framed America’s aesethtic of wealth, aspiration and grandeur as intentionally always there — this is what you do when you’ve defined an industry, leave a big house with intricate details for people to remember you and marvel at your taste… And many of these houses were mdoeled after European castles and estates…

Part Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and history lesson, I found myself fascinated by the ways these homes were time capsules into a speciifc and long gone way of life. And while these shows were about architecture, they were about memory and power!

You see, this seemed like the trophy rich people created as a legacy to say, “I was here”, this is how I lived, and this is how you should remember me — and we remember those houses, and organizations pay millions to maintain them… but something about those houses were lended them to being perfect settings for Victorian ghost stories…

But I wasn’t just watching American Castles —

I was watching Tales From The Crypt and Tales From The Hood, Are You Afraid of the Dark, reading Stephen King novels, R. L. Stine books and watching Candyman.

What I wouldn’t realize until pretty recently, Vox has a great video, that many of the houses in these horror films had one uniting feature — these homes were Victorian and/or built during the Victorian era… How does a house become a symbol of American wealth in the day and source of American macabre in the evening?

Well, Edgar Allan Poe plays a part, his brand of American Gothic literature expanded the dread that European authors examined. Or at least, that’s what I’m learning as I dive deeper into Poe and these sometimes overlapping Vicotrian and Antebellm era…

You see — what seems to have fallen out of fashion with the American plantation is these stories of the macabre and dread on a southern plantation. There have been many in the past Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte comes to mind — but these films were over 60 years old and they primarily looked at the plantation from those who descended from the masters (or the owners)… where are the films that center the perspective of those who were enslaved? Skeleton Key is a modern story, 20 years old this year, that plays with this perspective.

What if I told you, Brer Rabbit may hold the answer to this question.

Rabbits and Tricksters

Brer Rabbit originated from African-Americans folktales told on the plantation, and while Disney would feature these tales in the controversial film Song of the South. Brer Rabbit was a house hold name before Disney got a hold of him. Henry Louis Gates and Maria Tatar dedicate an entire chapter to the subversive nature of Brer Rabbit and how these stories gave instructions to navigate the plantation power system.

While Brer Rabbit is not a monster in the tradition I mentioned before. He, to me, reveals a way characters navigating this American history have to use their cunning, I would think, to outsmart the power structure.

Disney (and Joel Chandler Harris before him) removed some of the “fangs” from these Brer Rabbit tales… he could go to dark places and commit some pretty grotesque tasks for his survival — Disney removed these from his retelling. Even with a Hollywood retelling of Brer Rabbit, the subversive truth of his true meaning remained alive within the oral traditions of those who descended from formerly enslaved communities… even if the larger society saw them as simple children’s tales.

What was written in literature or made into films, has a way of capturing a snapshot of anxieties during that time — and when stories traverse through oral storytelling traditions, we run the risk of losing them if we don’t sit down to tell (and record) these stories.

Which brings me to Disney

In 2023, there was a big controversy when Disney decided to remove Splash Mountain and rebrand it with Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. What I thought was missing from this conversation was the origins of Brer Rabbit… in fact, it felt somewhat superficial to make the controversy about a movie from the 1940s — to my mind, the real controversy was that Disney took a Lost Cause framing of Brer Rabbit tales and Disneyfied them… which for the time may have made good business sense, but when I reframed it as a Lost Cause retelling, I undetsand why Disney continues to not want Song of the South available - that feels true.

And all of that coincided with me going to Disneyland for the first time, a few weeks after a transformative writing lab where I was workshopping my horror script, I noticed that right next to Disneyland’s Splash Mountain was Disney’s Haunted Mansion (and it looked like a plantation)…

With all sincerity, it hit me like lightening that I needed to explore this and here we are with Legacy of Folktales.

Thanks Disney

Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion is one of the most popular haunted attractions in the world, and it’s housed within an antebellum home, the Greek Revival columns recall antebellum home, southern estates, and yes, American plantations.

The Haunted Mansion was revealed in 1969 and it would quickly become one of Disney’s most popular rides. In the time since it’s release, there are 4 Haunted Mansion-type rides stretching over 3 continents in Disney Parks, 2 feature film adaptations, a cruise ship overlay, a Muppets Movie and countless other commercial tie ins… The Disneyland ride has the distinction of being the ONLY one set in a southern estate — and I imagine it makes sense, because it sits right next to New Orleans Sqaure (which itself a re-imagining of antebellum New Orleans Disneyfied — ‘when Cotton was King'' [as a Disney promotional video announced when New Orleans opened].

But if one of the most famous haunted attractions is housed within a plantation, why didn’t that jumpstart a whole movement to place haunted houses in plantations? - Why aren’t there more horror movies on plantations?

Which Led Me To This Most Recent Video

The Victorian Era and the Antebellum Era overlapped and both periods gave us two literary traditions that are still with us today - they’ve spawned successful films and stories… whether plantation fiction or gothic literature, both genres have given us works like Gone With The Wind, Fall of the House of Usher, respectively.

What started this video was a question: what do these overlapping periods have to teach us about what we think haunts us? What does it say that there aren’t as many films that take place on a plantation?

The initial response is, of course there shouldn’t’ be films on a plantation, the risk of a filmmaker not honoring the very real and horrific history is too great to play this history up for cheap scares and monsters — but what if we could find a way to explore these stories using horror in a way that was not exploitative? What would that look like? What would the thought process be?

What if we created a new monster that was born from this twisted American history that was built on the traditions in the past… Dracula had to start somewhere

Across TikTok and YouTube…

I’m noticing more and more creatives making content where they explore plantations, specifically the Myrtles Plantation, one of the most haunted houses in America… and these videos amass Millions of views.

It seems audiences on these platforms don’t have as many reservations watching modern folks wandering through haunted halls, acknowledging the trauma that happened on plantations and exploring the ghosts believed to inhabit the area.

I’d like to give a Shout Out to Tiya Miles’ “Tales From The Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era” - a must read to provide context to the motivations behind ghost stories centered around enslaved folks and plantations —

You see, depending on who you ask, sometimes the Myrtles plantation makes an appearance, and sometimes it’s left off the list. Plantations are not without their controversy, and I think that we have a rightful hesitation to tell stories there… who gets to tell the story? Who has the right intentions? And how can a story about plantations be transformative, entertaining and respectful of the past?

True-stories like the Nottoway plantation burning down reveal there’s a hunger for a reckoning… why not make a horror film part of that conversation?

And It Matters Now

You see, 50 years ago Alex Haley’s Roots debuted on TV and, in my opinion, provided a new context to display the horrors of slavery via slave narratives. From those who wirntesse dthe original broadcast, there were feelings of anger and realization that this was a part of AMerican history — an important part that needs to be told, lest we forget.

If Roots came out in 1977, it would take another 12 years for Hollywood to make a film that centered the fight black soldiers made in the civil war in the movie Glory… and then we’d get films like Amistad, 12 years a slave and others that depicted this different perspective. In 2012, Django Unchained gave us an alternate history (albeit blaxploitation-adjacent) type of movie about the antebellum South centering Django.

It seems to me, more movies that give plantations an opportunity to be the center of a reckoning with this piece of American history is long overdue… and the lack of a consistent presence of horror movies (or just straight ghost stories) that take place on plantations is a major oversight in our current media landscape (specifically in regards to films - books are doing the work).

Like the American Castles, Architecture that was left behind, and is preserved, tells a story about our history and the myths we choose to remember. And these artifacts (be they architecture, literature or oral traditions, give us the building blocks of the stories we will tell ourselves and leave for future generations. 25 years into the future and another generation will be coming of age bringing their own perspectives and insights to these places. And many of the elders who have insight into life in a Jim Crow South will have passed on — are we recording the oral traditions they remember?

Now seems the time to capture those and encapsulate them in horror stories on film — let me know what you think in the comments below!

Leave a comment

This video (and essay) is part of a “Plantation Horror” series - a deep dive into a new-ish subgenre of Southern Gothic cinema - that I believe can lead to new films, perspectives and a cinematic reckoning of American horror. This started because I wrote a horror script set on a plantation, and along the on-going journey of getting it made, I started noticing patterns that I hoped would be best explored on YouTube (17.8k subscribers) and now Substack with hopes it would lead to a film that could be bring both a reckoning and cathartic release.

Want to catch up with previous comments? Read Comments Section #1 here

I enjoy reading the comments Legacy of Folktales receives. As of this writing, we’ve received over 1,836 comments on The Most Terrifying Trope In Modern Horror… 57 comments on the Haunted Mansion video (it’s been live for 7 days) and 1,896 comments from our Brer Rabbit Video.

The Most Terrifying Trope In Modern Horror is our highest engagement of any video on the channel, even if it has half the views of the Brer Rabbit video…

I say all that because the comments are becoming a treasure trove to discover new viewpoints and books (that we will focus on in the Reading List we’ll post soon)…

But today, we start with a frequently mentioned book —

When The Reckoning Comes

This was the 4th comment I received mentioning LaTanya Mcqueen’s novel When The Reckoning Comes.

Many users mentioned that it seemed to cover the same ground of the “Plantation Horror” sub-genre I proposed. I admit there are a number of films that take place on a plantation.

Several of you pointed me toward LaTanya McQueen’s When The Reckoning Comes. It’s a haunting novel that lives right inside the ‘plantation horror’ space I’ve been exploring. If you’d like to read it (and support indie bookstores) you can find a copy here.

Forget It Jake, It’s Chinatown Disney

[Not everybody is a fan of my take on Disney’s Haunted Mansion]

I didn’t know that the WDW Haunted Mansion referenced an Indian Burial Ground as part of that mansion’s lore. Our most popular comment with over 7K likes on the Most Terrifying Trope is about the need to look into the Indian Burial Ground trope.

Disney, of course, is the lightning rod. For some, critiquing the Haunted Mansion is like critiquing their childhood. But that’s exactly why it matters: Disney shows us what we’re willing to forget in the name of ‘family-friendly.’

I’ll keep posting these reflections as the comments keep coming. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what books, films, or haunted places you think belong in the conversation.

The House That Wasn’t Dilapidated

Legend has it that Walt Disney always wanted a haunted house in Disneyland. Early sketches showed an aging Victorian home with a church near the edge of town. But ultimately, Walt decided against that. He didn’t want any decay at Disneyland. And shortly thereafter new plans were drawn that showed a prestine home where the haunted house woudl be.

There are other articles that dive deep into the haunted mansion history, but eventually, Disney settled on an antebellum theme for the haunted house, most likely because New Orleans Sqaure was meant to have the antebellum aesteethic. The mansion would move from the end of main street to being on the Rivers of America next to New Orleans sqaure.

In 1963, Imagineers built the shell of a antebellum home and for years that facade sat in Disneyland like a ghost iteself.

A Theme Park For A New Era

Disneyland was more than an amusement park, it really revolutionaized the concept of “theme parks” - each land designed to immerse visitors in a specific fantasy and time.

When Disney added New Orleans Square — a “gay paree” of America, frozen in time before the Civil War — this new land was notable befcause it had NO rides… it was just a vibe. Months before Pirates of the Carribean would open and years before the Haunted Mansion opened, New Orleans square was just atmosphere.

That choice wasn’t neutral. “Antebellum” literally means before the war — in the U.S., before the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. In celebrating this period, Disney was participating in a much longer tradition of romanticized plantation fiction, offering a version of the South scrubbed clean of its ghosts.

The Empty Mansion

By 1963, the facade stood, but the ride did not. For six years, visitors saw an immaculate plantation-style home with nothing inside. It became a local curiosity. “When will the ghosts move in?” people asked.

That hollow shell mirrored something larger: America’s own silences in the 1960s. Civil Rights marches filled the streets, but inside Disneyland the South was represented only through genteel architecture and jazz bands, not its real history.

The World’s Fair and Technological Optimism

Why the delay? In part because Disney was pouring energy into the 1964 World’s Fair.

It was there that Imagineers perfected the technologies that would eventually bring the Haunted Mansion to life: animatronics and whole new ways of telling stories. Attractions like It’s a Small World became showcases of Cold War optimism — America could imagine itself as both technological pioneer and benevolent storyteller.

That optimism bled into the Mansion. Its ghosts would be silly, musical, and endlessly repeatable — not the restless spirits of southern folklore.

A Ride Without Its Creator

By the time New Orleans Square opened in 1966, Walt was already ill. He would live to see Pirates of the Caribbean take shape, but not the Mansion itself. He died later that year.

That left Imagineers with blueprints, half-formed ideas, and the challenge of building a ride without its visionary. The result was a compromise — a museum of the weird, a comedy of the macabre, a haunted house that never fully committed to being southern gothic.

In the end, the mansion kept its antebellum exterior but filled it with jokes, illusions, and gags. A ride that looked southern but told no southern story.

Why It Matters

The Haunted Mansion is more than just a theme park attraction. It’s a snapshot of America in the 1960s:

• Optimistic on the outside (clean suburbs, bright futures).

• Avoidant on the inside (silences around race and history).

• Technological at heart (animatronics, ride systems, repeatability).

• Haunted by loss (Walt’s death, a country losing innocence in the same decade).

That combination is why the ride feels timeless — and why its facade still matters.

Where We Go Next (Part 3)

But here’s the real twist: once Disney had this formula, they copied it the inside but changed the facade. In Disney World, they mirrored the theme park appropriate Hudson Valley Gothic style home. Which suggest, the Haunted Mansion was never tied to any regional specific story — which, admittingly, I think I would prefer…. Instead, the Haunted Mansion is a classic of Disney Gothic - a term we will dig deeper into in the next part.

And when the Mansion was exported abroad — to Tokyo, Paris, and Hong Kong — the American South wasn’t part of the story at all.

So what happens when Disney’s ghosts travel the world, stripped of their southern shell? And how did Disney Gothic adapt from a Silly Symphony of dancing skeletons in 1929, to the Haunted Mansion’s opening in 1969.

That’s where Part 3 takes us.

I’ve spent the past few years thinking about horror films on plantations.

That fascination comes from growing up in the South, hearing my grandparents’ stories about my enslaved great-great-grandparents, and wondering what responsibility I have to pass those stories — and the emotions that come with them — to future generations.

The stories I carry aren’t long epics. They’re fragments, snapshots. But as I look at my child, my nieces, and my nephews, I think about them more and more. What will they retain? What have I retained? How have the recordings, notes, and oral histories from my grandparents, parents, and uncles shaped me — and how do they continue to shape me?

Family, I think, is at the heart of why I started Legacy of Folktales. And oddly enough, if it weren’t for my first trip to Disneyland in 2023, Legacy of Folktales — the YouTube channel, this Substack, and even the Patreon — might never have existed.

A Disneyland Realization

I was in the middle of writing a screenplay when I visited the park, and I couldn’t shake what I noticed. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion and the (now closed) Splash Mountain sat side-by-side, quietly telling two very different — yet eerily connected — versions of the Old South.

It hit me that the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland wasn’t just a generic spooky house. It was an antebellum estate. A plantation-style façade right in the middle of California.

At the same time, the country was debating the removal of Splash Mountain and its ties to Song of the South — a film now widely recognized as a romanticized, one-sided portrayal of slavery and Reconstruction. The Splash Mountain debate was loud. The Haunted Mansion’s connection to the Old South? Almost silent.

And that silence is what got me thinking: How does Disney — and by extension, the American entertainment industry — deal with complicated Southern history when it comes to amusement, spectacle, and memory?

The Bigger Pattern

We live in a world with many perspectives, but mainstream culture has been slow to give equal space to all of them. That isn’t shocking to say, but it is important to reckon with. Because the stories we tell — and the silences we keep — shape what future generations think is worth remembering.

In the wake of the George Floyd protests and the so-called “national reckoning,” I’ve wondered: How will art, entertainment, and even theme parks change? Will new creators bring fresh perspectives to old, romanticized antebellum stories? Or will those ghosts remain hidden in plain sight?

Which brings me to the question that shaped this entire series:

Why would Disney create a haunted ride that looks like a plantation… and not tell a Southern Gothic story?

That’s where Part 2 begins.

Coming Next

In Part 2, we’ll go back to the 1960s to see exactly how Disneyland ended up with a plantation in the middle of California.

Here is the full 40-minute video below. If you’re really interested, check out the Patreon Exclusive cut that includes 3 additional minutes of thoughts and connections. This is for paid members.

Today, we want to highlight some of the 1,200 comments (at the time of this posting) we’ve seen that either sparked discussion in our comments section OR sparked a thought in my mind.

I could easily see many of these comments becoming their own videos and future Substack essays.

TOP COMMENT

Indian Burial Ground Trope

This comment, from our "Most Terrifying Trope…" video, opens a rich parallel discussion: America's buried history, its tendency to treat present injustices as relics of the past, and contemporary perspectives on the treatment of Native Americans.

The trope reached peak popularity in 1980s horror.

This list of horror films is pretty long:

Amityville Horror (1977), The Shining (1980), Poltergeist (1982) Pet Cemetery (1986) are just a few that come to mind… I’ll leave it to these indigenous creators and artists to break it down. This video does a great job of giving a precursor to this topic:

A commonly cited podcast with comedian, producer and enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, Joey Clift, from the Dead Meat Channel offers great insights as well:

And this is another video that highlights the different uses of the trope over the years… We see this appear in The Simpsons and The Family Guy as well…

A story about slavery and plantation horror must engage with Native American resistance and influence. What the failures of 1980s horror teach us is this: indigenous voices aren't optional — they're essential in the creation, advising, and consulting process.

Even better, is to center the voices of those whose culture is rooted in both the history, resistance and customs. More than representation, we need to amplify and seek out creators who are creating authentic tales rooted in cultural specificity. And, the Indian Burial Ground trope seemed to have missed this point during its horror heyday.

This comment also reminded me of a brief but important scene in the movie 12 Years A Slave. Here is an article that digs a bit deeper into this moment:

Louisiana Indians Who Defied Removal: as seen in "12 Years a Slave"

The article points out that the autobiography “Solomon Northup: Twelve Years A Slave” includes more details about Soloman’s time with the Choctaw tribe while he was enslaved.

As well as a Reddit thread that digs a bit into this specific scene from 12 Years A Slave. If I can find the specific scene, I hope to update this post.

Something I want to do more research on. What do you think? What other articles or films cover the Indian Burial Ground trope? What are some indigenous films or books that tackle this trope that you’d recommend?

Re-examining Victorian Gothic Novels

This is an interesting question - Toni Morrison’s book Playing In The Dark is a really great reference when thinking about re-examining gothic literature and how it used race to create “The Other”.

While making the video, and something I didn’t have enough space to squeeze into our YouTube video, was the role of colonialism.

Colonialism casts a long shadow over our stories and references — the Indian Burial Ground trope and the scarcity of plantation horror in mainstream media are both symptoms of it. Countries around the world continue wrestling with colonialism's influence decades, sometimes centuries, after British rule — and connecting that lens to plantation horror could reframe what is often dismissed as an 'American' or even 'American South' problem into something far more global. In fact, connecting the influence of colonialism in this new branch of plantation horror could lead what is often seen as an “American” problem or sometimes even seen as an “American South” problem

Some miscellaneous comments:

With over 1,200 comments, this conversation is clearly just beginning. Thank you to everyone who watched and left a comment.

What do you think? Should we do more comment series like this?

Let us know below. We did another one:

Jump to Comment Section #2

The comments, DMs, and emails have given me a whole new watchlist: books, video games, deep-cut films, and essays that I’m now digging through like a haunted librarian.

So here’s the first Legacy of Folktales Community Reading List, made up of your recs (and a few of mine). Consider this your companion piece between videos.

More coming soon—but for now, here’s what caught my eye:

Books

• Swamp Thing (#41 and #42) - Alan Moore’s 1980s arc that blends ecological horror with southern gothic themes. Haunting, weird, and incredibly ahead of its time.

Short Stories

• A Rose for Emily - William Faulkner’s famous Southern Gothic short story.

Podcasts

• Hi Nay - translated to “Hi Mom”, is a Filipino led analog-style, supernatural folk horror anthology podcast with an overarching plot.

Video Games

• South of Midnight - this is a 2025 Video Game that explore the American South with elements of magical realism.

  '

Movies + TV Shows

Please note: When I finish Part 2, I plan to also publish a list of the Movies, TV Shows and sketches we included in both videos. For the time being, I’d like to highlight some of the recommendations that I found most interesting OR were new to me after publishing.

• Scooby Doo - Plantation Episode

  • I had a chance to checkout some version of this on YouTube. Outside of the aesthtic of the south, it pretty much treates the plantation as a haunted house with a typical

• Brother Future (1991) → Link below

  • This film is about a teenager who gets hit by a car and is transported back to 1820s plantation.

What’s Next:

I’m deep in the next video now.

Thanks for being part of this. And if you have more recs? Drop them in the comments. I read every one.

—Legacy of Folktales

Is Gone With the Wind a horror film?

Go ahead. Google “horror movies on plantations.”

Don’t worry—I already did it for you.

You’ll find maybe 10 to 15 titles, depending on how generous the algorithm is feeling.
There’s Antebellum (2020), The Skeleton Key (2005), and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). All… mixed bags. Some thrillers, some mysteries.

But if you tweak the search slightly—try “films shot on plantations”—you get a different lineup:

Interview With the Vampire. 12 Years a Slave. Gone With the Wind. Django Unchained. The Notebook.

That list spans historical drama, romance, Southern Gothic, prestige cinema. But where’s the horror?

Where are the ghosts?

Where is the terror?

Why is it that Victorian mansions—the creaky floorboards of New England, the wind-swept hills of Cornwall—get to be haunted, while the American plantation… just gets rehabilitated?

Why This Matters

Stephen King once said horror is the art of making the mundane terrifying. And if horror is meant to explore our deepest fears—death, shame, guilt, generational sin—then why isn’t the plantation America’s ultimate haunted house?

It’s a setting born from trauma. Blood. Erasure. A system built on the commodification of human lives. And yet…

It’s hosted thousands of weddings.

It’s served as the backdrop for honeymoon photos.

It’s been Airbnb’d and Instagrammed and made picturesque.

Even in 2023’s American Fiction, the idea of a horror movie set on a plantation is treated as a joke. A character pitches a film where a white couple gets married at a plantation—and is haunted by the spirits of the enslaved.

It’s played for laughs. And yeah, it sounds silly.

But why does it sound silly?

Because it centers white protagonists?

Because it assumes the spirits of the enslaved are vengeful?

Because it feels… a little too close to home?

There’s an entire industry—an economy, really—based on the erasure of that horror. And to understand why horror filmmakers avoid plantations like the plague, we have to understand something called:

Plantation Fiction

Before there were horror stories set on plantations, there were fantasy stories about plantations. Not dragons-and-wizards fantasy—but antebellum fantasy. Tales of gentility. Heroic Confederates. “Happy” enslaved people who sang in the fields and smiled when the master’s child patted their heads.

The first work of what we now call plantation fiction was Swallow Barn (1836), written by John P. Kennedy. Kennedy was a Baltimore politician with conflicted views on slavery—calling it a “curse” in his private writings, while deleting harsher critiques from the final published work.

That pattern of ambivalence—acknowledging the horror privately, while sanitizing it publicly—feels… familiar. We see it in Gone With the Wind. We see it in Song of the South. We see it in Hollywood’s century-long dance with the South.

In fact, Kennedy was an early supporter of another Baltimore writer you might’ve heard of: Edgar Allan Poe. Which means plantation fiction, gothic literature, and slave narratives weren’t just running parallel. They were intertwined from the start.

The Haunting That Wasn’t

After the Civil War, the plantation didn’t become a site of terror in American pop culture. It became a stage—for romantic dramas (Gone With the Wind), for Southern comedies, even for classic silent comedies like Buster Keaton’s The General, a film that centered a Confederate protagonist and never once questioned it.

Then came The Birth of a Nation (1915), adapted from the novel The Clansman. The film was groundbreaking for its cinematic language—and infamous for its racist mythmaking. It painted the Ku Klux Klan as saviors, “restoring order” to the South during Reconstruction.

The technical genius of the film was studied for generations. Its message? Not so much.

There’s a pattern here.

Some of America’s most important films—on a formal level—are deeply invested in Southern mythology. And that mythology avoids the horror of the plantation… by transforming it into nostalgia.

What Horror Could Do

But what if horror reclaimed that ground?

What if, instead of hiding behind magnolia trees and mint juleps, filmmakers used horror to excavate the truth?

We’ve seen glimpses—Antebellum, Oracle, Alice—but what we haven’t seen—at least not at scale—is horror that leans into the full potential of the plantation as a setting:
A place of buried memory.
A place of resistance.
A place where the past never died… it just changed costumes.

And it’s not because we don’t have the stories. Black folklore, slave narratives, Southern Gothic, the works of Toni Morrison—they all point to a path forward. It’s just that, for the last hundred years, Hollywood hasn’t wanted to walk it.

What Connects Us Across Generations?

Wars. National tragedies. Olympic Games. Movie franchises. Chart-topping albums. These are the kinds of things that etch themselves into our collective memory. Not always because we understood their meaning in the moment—but because they stuck. And with time, they shape how we see the world.

Think for a second: What are the defining moments of your generation?

I was born in the '80s, raised in the '90s. So I remember exactly where I was when I heard Tupac died. I remember the eerie feeling of buying Ready to Die just a week after Biggie was killed. I remember when Britney Spears hit us with “...Baby One More Time,” and when DMX dropped two albums in one year like he was holding the world on his shoulders.

At the time, it all felt urgent. But I didn’t know it was history yet.

The deeper meaning of those moments reveals itself over time—years, sometimes decades later. What seemed like gossip, or just good music, often becomes a map of our cultural values, our fears, and what we needed in the moment to survive it all.

My dad’s memory map looks different. He’ll tell you where he was when JFK was killed. Or when MLK and RFK were assassinated. For him, the message wasn’t subliminal—it was loud and clear: People who think like you can be killed. Whether you hold the highest office or a Nobel Peace Prize.

For him, the message was political.

For me, the message was emotional.

Both of us were teenagers when our world began to feel unsafe. But the threats we felt? Different shapes. Different rhythms. And yet… somehow, these generational beats run parallel.

So what’s the glue?

What connects these moments across generations?

That question brings me back to an unlikely figure.

Brer Rabbit.

Yeah, that rabbit.

Before he was a Disney character. Before Splash Mountain. Before comic strips and lunchboxes—Brer Rabbit was oral tradition. A trickster. A survivor. A coded symbol passed down by enslaved people who told stories not just to entertain, but to endure.

In those stories, Brer Rabbit didn’t win because he was the strongest. He won because he was clever. He made do. He figured things out. He outwitted forces stronger than him. That made him more than a character. He was a cultural blueprint.

And yet, by the time I was growing up, Brer Rabbit had been Disney-fied into something else. A theme park ride. A sanitized relic. Something nostalgic, but barely understood. Most people forgot (or never knew) that these tales were rooted in slavery.

In fact, when Disney quietly shut down Splash Mountain, it felt like they were saying goodbye to Brer Rabbit forever. But was that goodbye—or erasure?

Maybe Brer Rabbit was never meant to be a franchise. Maybe he was always meant to be a whisper. A subversive figure who lived just below the surface. Passed down not through studios or streaming, but in stories whispered after dark.

So what happens when those whispers fade?

I once worked on an audio documentary in North Carolina. We interviewed elders who had grown up in the Jim Crow South. I remember one woman’s eyes drifting into the distance as she recounted the shame, the humiliation—and the quiet, burning defiance it took to survive.

I was 20 years old. And in that moment, I realized something.

Some stories don’t die. They just go underground. Some memories are so painful, they live inside us like ghosts. Until someone finally asks the right question. And then… everything stirs.

That’s what Brer Rabbit was.

That’s what those defining moments were.

And as Gen Z and Gen Alpha come of age—looking at our cultural icons like Wikipedia entries, I wonder: What will theyremember? What will they feel?

Our JFKs. Our Biggies. Our Brer Rabbits.

It turns out, we don’t just pass down stories. We pass down emotion.

And if we’re lucky, someone in the next generation will still be listening.

2025 marks 18 months since I started Legacy of Folktales YouTube Channel.

What a ride.

The purpose of this channel is to use folktales to analyze history (films, entertainment and literature) to bring context to our modern world.

Hoping Substack will be a repository for conversations and long-form essays on the videos we make on YouTube. Thinking about giving sources, and additional material to subscribers as well.

Looking forward to more in the future.

All the best,

LoF