‘First’ explores Black representation in horror films
Robin Means Coleman has heard it all. Cliches like: Maybe we should split up and look. Tropes like: I didn’t get bit, I’m fine. Also: That sound — it’s probably just the wind. And: My uncle owns a cabin in the woods. Plus, of course, the evergreen: I’ll be right back.
Coleman has watched a lot of horror movies.
Way more than you have. By day, she works out of an extremely uninteresting office tower in downtown Evanston, Illinois, where she serves a sobering, indispensable professional function: She is Northwestern University’s vice president and associate provost for diversity and inclusion. She also doubles as the school’s Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett Professor in Communication Studies. Her office is as you imagine: Walls papered in framed honors and degrees, muted colors, tidy furniture, academic studies spread across a bookcase.
But the rest of the time, for at least a decade now, she’s also been known by a far more unusual distinction: Coleman is our preeminent scholar on Black representation in horror movies. Her 2011 book, “Horror Noire: Blacks in American
Horror Films, From the 1890s to Present” (and a subsequent documentary of the same title) became the authoritative study of the subject. But it’s not exactly hilarious, and as Coleman notes, one defining characteristic of Black horror is a sense of humor, an unsinkable irony, an underlying sense that, as she puts it, “no matter how bad things get, you have to laugh.”
Consider “Nope,” the title of Jordan Peele’s 2022 horrorsci-fi thriller.
“That’s a title so rich it hails Black folk in a particular way,” Coleman said. “The movie poster, the images that came out before it was even released, offered only flags, sky and one word: Nope. As in: Nope, we’re not exploring this. It picks up on African American vernacular. You see your intelligence respected in a title like that. You know Peele is not going to indulge images of Black slaughter — the Black guy will not die first.”
In “Candyman,” the Chicago-made
2021 follow-up (produced by Peele) to the 1992 classic, a Black character considers a dark descent into a creaky, creepy basement.
“Nope,” she says, turning around, opting out.
Even decades ago, in that first season of “Saturday Night Live,” Richard Pryor’s parody of “The Exorcist” found him as a pastor deciding the only sensible way to reason with a devil was ... to not to. Coleman can rattle off those moments of good sense, and more decades of stereotyping, all day. This is why, with journalist Mark H. Harris — whose BlackHorrorMovies.com is itself a bottomless resource tracing the highs and lows of the Black experience in scary movies (including “Scary Movie”) — she wrote a new book with an ancient trope right in the title: “The Black Guy Dies
First: Black Horror Cinema, From Fodder to Oscar.” The cover illustration is a clever