Does the Black guy always die first?
a spoiler-filled forensic analysis.
It’s the whole hook of the new horror-comedy The Blackening. It’s the punchline of a million jokes, from movies to Twitter. The black guy dies first. People will swear to you on a stack of Berenstein Bears books that it is the norm, or at least that it was the norm before Jordan Peele started directing. But the truth is more complicated.
Spoilers for, like, a BUNCH of horror movies. Sorry.
Even if you go back 100 years, the Black person dying first was never the rule. But it feels very true. We may not always die first, but we will very likely die, our deaths—like our on-screen lives—being in service of the white protagonists’ story. Black characters in white media have always been expendable. Horror is just the only genre that makes our expendability literal.
The way we’re used in horror movies is typically very gendered, as well. As Robin R. Means Coleman shares in Horror Noire, Black men are often used to show how truly dangerous the monster/killer is. In movies, as in real life, the default coding for Black men is “physical threat.” The more physically imposing the character is, the more terrifying the thing that kills him. Think Yaphet Kotto in Alien, Trevante Rhodes in Bird Box, or Ken Foree in Dawn of the Dead. If these Black men are vulnerable, the movies suggest, imagine how vulnerable the white protagonists with regular human strength are!
All three of those examples also play the Sacrificial Negro in their movies. That’s the Black character—usually male—who throws themselves into harm’s way so that the white protagonists can make it to the next scene. (This usually involves a physical fight with the monster, but could also just be the man blowing himself up, because Black people. are always. demolitions experts.) Yaphet Kotto’s character sacrifices himself so that Sigourney Weaver can strip down to her extremely functional skivvies and defeat the alien. Trevante Rhodes sacrifices himself so that Sandra Bullock and her children can outrun the depression monster. (This is even after Lil Rel had already sacrificed himself so that people could make it out of a grocery store. Not all the sacrifices have the same weight.) Ken Foree’s ultimate badass initially sacrifices himself for a pregnant Gaylen Ross, but has a rousing change of heart, punches, like, 30 goddamn zombies, and escapes with her in a helicopter. An icon.
Black women in horror movies are typically the Final Girl’s sidekick, and fall victim to a whole other set of tropes. We are always preoccupied with the Final Girl’s wellbeing—as The Craft’s Rachael True puts it, our most frequently recurring line is “are you ok?” Whereas Black men’s strength is their subtextual contribution, Black women’s intuition is ours. We’re the first to express misgivings about a new character or situation, and typically try to convince the Final Girl to prioritize herself. The Black Girl Bestie dying is an emotional loss—now that she’s gone, who’s going to look out for the white girl? (Hopefully a white male love interest, but do not trust to hope. It is forsaken in these lands.)
Closely tied to a Black woman’s intuition is a Black woman’s apparently innate knowledge and fear of the occult and the supernatural. If the movie has anything to do with urban legends or voodoo, it’s better than even money that the person who can fill the protagonists in on all of this is a Black woman. It’s Joy Bryant in The Skeleton Key, Kasi Lemmons in Candyman, or Cathy Tyson in The Serpent and the Rainbow.
You could say that complaining about dying in a horror movie is a fool’s errand. Death is the central theme of the whole horror thing, after all; and in slashers in particular, the body count is supposed to be high. But the horror movie tropes we see over and over don’t come from nowhere. They come from biases and stereotypes and hatred that guide how people actually treat us. We’re marginalized on-screen in a more explicit way, but the marginalization is definitely familiar. Which is the whole sentiment behind “the Black guy dies first” in the first place.
So, what happens when, like The Blackening says, we can’t all die first? What kind of stories do we get? What do the stakes look like when we allow ourselves to emotionally connect with Black characters in horror movies, because we don’t assume they’re all going to eat it by the end?
