REAL-LIFE HORROR, TOO
‘The Black Guy Dies First’ traces evolution of a movie genre
If you want to survive a horror movie, there are a few things to remember.
Always make sure your phone is charged. Avoid abandoned farmhouses. If you absolutely must go inside, do not go in the basement.
Oh, and remember: “The Black Guy Dies First.”
That’s the title of Robin R. Means Coleman’s and Mark H. Harris’ sometimes funny, sometimes furious pop-culture history tracing “Black horror cinema from fodder to Oscar.” And it’s a reminder that, however fantastic the terror tale, America’s racial reality is scarier.
“Everyone dies, but Black people do so at a higher rate in both horror and, sadly, real life,” they note.
“But the Black presence in horror, as in America, has always been about resilience,” they add, referencing the genre’s typical Black victim. “He plays his role in film after film, knowing the odds are against him, that he’s started the race two steps behind, but he doesn’t give up.”
Major parts for Black performers barely existed in Hollywood’s early days. If there were a leading role, it usually came in a microbudgeted voodoo film like 1936’s “Ouanga,” starring Fredi Washington as the vengeful mistress of a plantation owner. In early Hollywood zombie movies, Blacks were stuck playing silent enslaved people of the white witch doctors.
They didn’t fare much better in other monster movies, relegated to playing supposedly comical servants. The job was to bug their eyes, shake with fear, then run. It gave long careers to comedians like Willie Best and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson. But the parts often came at the price of ridicule and racist stereotypes.
Like the rest of pop culture, much shifted in the late 1960s with the releases of two independent, unrelated horror films.
The first, Jack Hill’s “Spider Baby,” would become a cult classic and announced its iconoclasm immediately. It starts with one of the most popular of the old Black sidekicks, Mantan Moreland, nervously arriving at a spooky house, a well-worn comedy setup. Except, unlike his earlier Black colleagues, Moreland is immediately killed.
It was a hint that the action onscreen was about to change —violently.
A prominent sign of revolution came with George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.” A zombie movie without voodoo, or white witch doctors, its Black victim was also a hero. Romero later confessed he hadn’t intended it as a statement; Duane Jones was simply the best actor who auditioned.
Still, it presented audiences with the genre’s first brave, brash, Black protagonist — even if he died in the end, shot down by an ignorant white posse. “His heroism and almost-survival were a rarity that signaled promise for a future in which Black actors and actresses could headline horror, Black characters could save the day, and Black horror movies could be commercial and critical successes, worthy of the highest accolades,” the authors write, “like the four Oscar nominations and one win for Jordan Peele’s ‘Get Out.’ ”
Yes, but it would take nearly 50 years to get there.
First, horror movies — and American movies in general — would have to survive blaxploitation. That era began with socially conscious films like Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” and Gordon Parks’ “Shaft.” It would soon devolve into cheap monster movies thrown together by white filmmakers trying to cash in.
Occasionally, the films would accomplish something more. There probably weren’t high hopes for a movie called “Blacula.” But then the studio “reluctantly allowed star William Marshall to alter the original script to create a more elevated, racially conscious backstory for the titular character,” the authors write.
In the star’s rewrite, his character, once a generic Black man who stumbled across Dracula’s castle, became Prince
Mamuwalde, an 18th century African prince who tries to dissuade the Transylvanian count from supporting the slave trade. The vampire angrily puts the bite on the prince, then locks him in a coffin.
Cut to 1972 Los Angeles, where Mamuwalde’s casket has been shipped by a couple of antique dealers. The lid is popped, and suddenly Blacula is on the prowl.
Marshall, who returned to the part in “Scream Blacula Scream,” saw his regal character not as a monster but as a tragic hero and practically a Black role model. “It’s important that these people in particular see a demonstration of themselves in a very positive way,” he said.
Unfortunately, the people behind films like “Black Voodoo,” “Blackenstein,” and “The Thing With Two Heads” — which had a white bigot’s head transplanted onto a Black convict’s body — likely had less noble intentions.
By the late ’70s, the blaxploitation era started coming to an end. So, it seemed, were parts for Black actors in horror films.
In 1978, though, “Halloween” heralded a new genre, the teen slasher movie. And while that movie had an all-white cast, the copycat films that followed tried to diversify. Most starred a good girl (who usually survived), surrounded her with varied yet predictable victims — a bad girl, a jock, a nerd, a stoner, a Black guy.
If you have any doubt about who usually went first — look at the title of this book again.
Audiences eventually tired of dead teenager movies, and once the slice-and-dice horrors disappeared, so did those roles for Black performers. But when “Do the Right Thing” opened in 1989, it helped jump-start an early ’90s surge of urban movies — “Boyz n the Hood,” “Menace II Society” and “New Jack City.”
And just as “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” eventually led to “Blacula,” “Do the Right Thing” paved the way for genre films like “Def By Temptation,” “Tales from the Hood” and “Demon Knight.”
It helped usher in the creation of an iconic Black monster in 1992’s “Candyman,” a film whose “racial commentary deftly ranges from slavery and century-old violence to modern socioeconomics and de facto segregation,” the authors note. “Albeit through the eyes of a white female protagonist.”
If Nia DaCosta’s 2021 reboot, “Candyman,” sharpened that focus — thanks to its Black director and even more political approach — horror fans have Jordan Peele to thank. A monster movie maven, Peele brought the Black perspective back to scary movies with his Oscar-winning “Get Out” in 2017. Like one of his idols, Rod Serling, Peele realized genre stories provide excellent frameworks for addressing serious issues.
“‘Get Out’ was a perfect storm of wokeness,” the authors write. “Exasperated Black audiences were hungry for a repudiation of the Obama-era lie of a postracial America, while white audiences, disillusioned by the onslaught of headline-making racial injustices, were increasingly open to being schooled. Both groups got their wish.”
Since, Peele continues making movies with a message. “Us” examined class. “Nope” took on America’s love of spectacle. Both delivered necessary shocks — murderous home invaders, a giant, hovering, hungry alien. But, like “Night of the Living Dead,” they were about something more than horror, something scarier than monsters — real life.
And they’ve inspired other filmmakers to do the same.
“In Hollywood, trends come and go, but one thing we can be certain of is that there will be plenty of material, because our Black history and present are the wellspring of horror,” the authors write. “And if history is any indication, we can expect to be enjoying Black horror for many years to come.”