The “Black people die first” trope dominated Hollywood for decades. We all know it. We all hate it. But Robin R. Means Coleman, a professor of media and African-American studies at the University of Virginia, recently boiled it down to the very unscary mechanics of psychology, race, and strength. In his book “The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar”, Coleman claims Black characters’ tendency to die quickly in film has always reflected a national connection to race and violence.
It’s no coincidence that a Black character’s murder coincides with the introduction of the movie’s monster. Some of us never realized it was for the purpose of building fear for the “scary” entity, however. Hollywood wants the audience to bear witness to a show of strength to cement the entity’s power. And in the eyes of predominately white Hollywood, what better way was there to laud the strength of your beast than to show it stomping the strongest perceived person in the room—a Black person.
People still overestimate the size and strength of Black men and often perceive them as more threatening than white men. The downside of this can be found in the higher likelihood of Black minors being tried as adults in the U.S. court system. For decades, Hollywood leaned into this, rooting movies in the “scientific racism” of believing the human species to be biologically divided into races. The same destructive theory adds fuel to arguments supporting racial superiority or inferiority. Contemporary science says race has no biological basis, but scientific racism is still very much a thing.
Hollywood, at least, has advanced from using Black bodies as mere props and now tells Black stories. The shift began in the blaxploitation era of the 1970s, with Black monsters like “Blacula” and the avenging spirit of JD Walker in “JD’s Revenge.” But these movies were not the Hollywood norm, and throughout the 1980s, horror largely reverted to killing its Black characters quickly. And then came an additional shift in the 1990s.
Georgetown voice writer Mia Boykin points to the monster in “Candyman (1992) and its 2021 remake as examples of a more modern evolution. In the original “Candyman”, a white mob lynches a Black artisan for his relationship with a white woman. They cut off his hand, jam a hook into the stump and cover him with honey and bees. His vengeful spirit spends much of the 1992 film terrorizing a blond-haired, blue-eyed post-grad student (obviously learning nothing from his previous stint with white women). In the 2021 “Candyman” remake, a Black struggling artist living in the gentrified haunting grounds of the 1992 Candyman catches the very worst of the spirit’s pent-up anger.
Both movies dive headfirst into social commentary, but the “monster” in the 2021 version leaned away from Black body fodder (say that fast five times) and targeted affluent white people and law enforcement. The shift in that movie and others like it reinforces Coleman’s theory that horror is a cultural temperature check of its times.
“Horror films teach us about our anxieties as a society,” Coleman says. “This is the reason why tropes and the genre itself is so fluid and changes every few years.”
An even more dramatic shift began with Jordan Peele’s stunning, “Get Out,” a post-Obama era horror flick that managed to nail home a solid interpretation of chattel slavery that resonated with white people without putting white actors in the driver’s seat. Peele’s work sent a much-needed ripple through the horror community, proving that Black screenwriters could present digestible Black cultural codes to non-Black audiences and still make a profit. Prior to that, Hollywood doubted a movie targeting only 14% of the U.S. population could recoup its investment, much less pack a budget.
The realm of “Black horror” has expanded since “Get Out” with entertaining, socially nuanced movies such as “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster,” “They Cloned Tyrone,” and the enigmatic “The Blackening,” which deliberately took a hammer to the whole Black fodder trope from top to bottom.
Things are finally evolving, and today, if we see a Black person dying first, they’re more likely dying as just another member of the cast, or perhaps the movie is an international film that hasn’t quite caught up with the times. For this, we are bloody, disgustingly, gruesomely thankful.
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