We've always loved horror.
It's just that horror, unfortunately,
hasn't always loved us.
- Zombie! [indistinct]!
- What have we got here?
-
Terror and voodoo and all the weird black magic
that the white man seldom see.
- I'm gettin' outta here now!
You can be the boss down there.
I'm boss up here.
- Yes! That's history.
-
- "The name is Blacula!"
-
- Is there any more scary imagery than this?
- I wanna hear you scream.
- It's cool to see yourself on the screen.
- There's something so powerful about scaring someone.
-
- Oh, my goodness.
Allow me at least a kiss.
- I've been waiting for you, boy.
- Phew!
-
- Oh, my God.
- Yes, get rid of that, son.
-
- Isn't that beautiful?
It's crazy.
You got me all here in this creepy, confusing ass subarba.
You all so serious, though?
I feel like a sore thumb out here.
Lakeith. Oh, yeah.
Walking down the...
Walking down the sidewalk at night.
- In a suburban neighborhood. - In a suburban neighborhood.
- On the cellphone by himself.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- Shit! - All of that.
- I've been there. - Yeah, yeah.
- It was the perfect black horror story.
- Yeah, really.
-
- I've never felt so ill at ease
because, for me, there was so much riding on this film
in that is he going to get this right,
not just in quality,
but for the way that we understand black people.
- If there's too many white people,
I get nervous, you know?
When I found out they were gonna let me
actually direct "Get Out",
I knew something big was going to happen.
I thought there was a chance something very bad could happen,
that I would get run out of town, that, you know,
I thought there's a possibility that people, you know,
don't want to see entertainment about something that...
you know, has been traditionally dealt with
with a certain reverence.
But I also thought, you know,
this is the movie I wanted to see.
- To have a black protagonist,
first of all, just in a horror trailer,
had my attention.
"Huh? Wait, he might survive this."
He might not be the magical Negro
or the sacrificial Negro or the first to die
and all those tropes, so it's like,
"This is a story through a black lens by a black artist
and it's horror."
I thought I was in heaven.
Jordan Peele, "Get Out".
This had never happened before
to have an Oscar-nominated black horror movie.
- And I think it really shows
how horror films can really talk about things
that are affecting us.
- Black history is black horror.
- Before we think about horror
as we know it today, we can go back to the films
that perhaps wouldn't be on our radar as horror.
-
- There's a character, Gus.
Gus is a white actor in blackface
who was depicted as being in pursuit of
a young white girl.
Gus is essentially lynched by the Klan.
"The Birth of a Nation" was a horror film,
especially if you were a black person.
Most people, at that point,
were getting to know what African Americans were like
through that film because they lived in communities
where they had no African Americans.
This was the only source of information
and a lot of people got the wrong impression
of who we are, certainly.
- It's one of the first films
to be screened in the White House,
in Woodrow Wilson's White House.
Didn't help that Woodrow Wilson said,
"That's exactly the way it is."
- Oh, you know, I mean...
You know, he was a contributor to the problem.
- With the endorsement of the president,
it feels like policy.
There were even advertisements and promotions
that said this was essentially based on a true story
and it was as close to fact as one could get.
- The Ku Klux Klan
is being heralded as the solution to the black menace.
- This is a movie that really solidifies
that there's this sort of
odd black lust on the part of black men
towards white women.
You see it time and time again then
throughout the horror genre,
from "King Kong"...
...to "Candyman".
- It reigned as thepicture of black life
for so many years.
Hollywood could use its messaging
to create fear around black people,
especially fear around black men.
- It sets up black life and culture
as so deficient and so deviant
and I think we see that kind of history
in forming race relationships even today.
- Dr. Clinton?
Filmmakers in this period
really want black actors to be what they think blackness is.
- Don't bite on this time, Ms. Yoga.
These are the kinds of films
that are coming out in the '20s and '30s,
leading up to Oscar Micheaux and Spencer Williams
sort of saying, "Enough."
Oscar Michaeux,
who was one of the first African American directors,
who would, like a lot of people
doing today in the independent world,
he would have his own film crew, he would gather his actors,
he would write a script around the actors.
- What Oscar Michaeux's films do
is say, "Don't engage in these behaviors,
don't engage in these acts,"
which ultimately could sort of bring down the race
or sully the reputation of the race.
Oscar Michauex's making arguments
that we are equal and to be respected
and to be valued as human beings.
Spencer Williams' film
from 1940, "The Son of Ingagi", is as interesting case.
Its genesis was a little bit odd
because there was a film called "Ingagi".
"Ingagi" was an earlier
low budget effort by a white director.
- Which basically purported
that black Africans were mating with gorilla-like creatures.
- "Ingagi" promises
that it is a true story and that this mating
has produced half-ape, half-human babies.
The whole thing is a scam.
- Even whites were like, "But that's not true, you know."
The "Son of Ingagi" is basically considered
the first black-made horror film.
The makeup isn't great,
and they didn't have much of a budget.
-
- But Spencer got it made. - Got it made, exactly.
- And I look at that to this day as a testament.
- It stars a black woman as a scientist.
She has a scientific lab in her basement
and there is this ape-man that resides there
that she has been taming
and sort of helping this ape-man to thrive.
- If it does what I think it will,
I've done more for humanity than anyone else on Earth.
- So, Spencer Williams actually
kind of does the first black women in stem kind of film.
You really get to see the black middle class
on full display.
-
You're seeing a bunch of black folks
coming back from a wedding.
It doesn't sound revolutionary, but in that era, in 1940,
when did you ever see black people just being themselves?
It was a way to show that not all black people
were the way they had been depicted in films
up to that time.
So we have a doctor and a lawyer,
everyone is well-spoken, and in that way,
it was a slice of black life that, to me,
is one of the most important aspects of that film.
- And if you know anything about television,
Spencer Williams sounds familiar, right?
He starred in the television situation comedy "Amos 'N Andy".
- Oh, Andy, I love jokes!
- Then you gonna like this one
because I bought this gun at a joke store.
- So, what's sad about that
is that people will always know Williams
as from "Amos 'N Andy",
but what Spencer Williams contributes
to the history of film is absolutely unmatched.
He sets up what we really probably think of is
modern black cinema today.
By this time, Hollywood realized
that horror was big business,
especially during the Great Depression.
I think people were looking for that kind of escapism in films
and film going was like huge.
That's where you get those Universal Studio classics like
"Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Mummy", "Dracula",
"Frankenstein", "The Bride of Frankenstein".
I love all of those films but clearly in the 1930s,
they weren't really big on racial representation.
Back in the '30s and '40s
in those days, you know,
there were only a few roles for black people.
Yeah. - It was like a quiet servant
who's just basically furniture, tribesmen like in Africa
or voodoo priestesses, that sort of thing.
- Hmm... At the theatre. - It was like...
- It was like the comedic buffoon
who was like scared of his own shadow.
- Mantan Mulan. - Yes.
- Was the last actor to play that kind of character
and that was in spite of the baby,
and after that, I would just say they were ready to move on.
We are moving into this period
of kind of the scientific or atomic age.
There's not a lot of room for servants,
so in laboratories,
there's no really place for blacks in that space.
In the '50s and '60s,
no studio wanted to put a black scientist in there.
That was a place where they felt black people weren't allowed in,
so like in hidden figures how hard it was for black people
to get into the space race and that sort of things,
so it has another reason I think that black people
would pretty much disappear during the whole, you know,
the decade or two.
- In all of those classic alien movies...
like"The Day the Earth Stood Still"
and all that stuff, there are no black people
but the "other" is this monster thing
that I think is supposed to represent all people
that are not white.
"Creature from the Black Lagoon"
looks so much like those advertisements
from the '20s and the '30s and the '40s.
The bulging lips looks just like those awful ads
for Nigger Head Shrimp.
- It's like first we weren't in it,
we were played by white people...
- Yeah. - Then we were in it
but we looked like aliens.
-
So here I am, this 10-year-old,
in a drive-in theater with my mom,
but even then, I knew that there was something
that horror was saying to me about blackness, about race.
I knew that King Kong was a metaphor for blackness.
-
- Even as a kid, there was something
uncomfortable about it.
- Monsters and aliens
are stand-ins for black folks
but we're not actually present in the story.
- But then there's this moment...
"Night of the Living Dead".
- It's 1968, and that's important.
-
I don't scare easily.
"Night of the Living Dead" I think gave me nightmares.
- It was a frightening, frightening film,
and the black and white of it...
...play such a huge part in what makes it scary.
All law enforcement agencies and the military
have been organized to search out and destroy
the marauding ghouls.
There's a zombie apocalypse
and we have a small group of folks
who all sort of converge on a cabin house to survive.
- It has a black protagonist in Duane Jones.
- You can be the boss down there.
I'm boss up here.
- He's in charge.
- If you stay up here, you take orders from me!
- You can never quite tell if the white woman
who Duane Jones is essentially saving
is more creeped out by the fact that there's zombies outside
or the fact that there's a black man in the house.
- I was probably way too young to see it
but I was absolutely fascinated by the fact
that there is this a beautiful, handsome black man.
That was the first time I probably saw somebody black
in a movie, and they weren't a criminal,
and they weren't gangster, and they were the hero.
- At that time, there was not a black character
who was really a man,
who was, again, who took charge of his fate.
Who wasn't waiting for the white man to save him.
Duane Jones' performance stood out for me.
By that point, I knew I wanted to be an actor
and I said, "Okay, I was gonna be fearless."
- He's slapping white people up inside the head.
He's killing white zombie after white zombie
after white zombie.
This had to be horrifying to racists.
- The '60s was a turbulent time, you know.
We had assassination after assassination.
We had riot after riot.
- Civil rights movement and all those movements
were combining together and we were producing those men
that were standing up and saying, "Not here.
Not again. Not me."
At the same time, he comes up and he does this film
and that's the character, that's the man,
that's the man I saw.
"Night of the Living Dead" was so important
because for the first time, we're not just the victims.
We were the destroyers and the protectors
for other people against monsters,
That's a good point.
Years later, I got to know George Romero.
I asked him, I said, "Why Duane?"
and he said, "The role wasn't even written,
it wasn't written black.
Duane just happened to be the best actor
to show up on that day."
This is like in the '60s
when people being hosed, people in sit-ins
and stuff like that. - Jim Crow era.
- Exactly. - Yeah.
- It just blew my mind that
this was a black guy who was doing all this,
taking charge, he was the hero,
even though it didn't turn out for him in the end.
- Alright then, hit him in the head,
right between the eyes.
I can remember seeing this
and not being able to move.
- Okay, he's dead. Let's go get him.
That's another one for the fire.
He's killed by the white mob
which had to look a lot like white mobs
that were roaming throughout the South,
menacing black folks and terrorizing black folks.
You see lynchings.
You think of Emmett Till and it's just too much.
And so you are left just sitting there going,
"My God. Did this just happen?"
George Romero tells the story of putting the film cans
in the trunk of his car, driving to New York City,
and they hear it.
They hear it on the radio.
The Reverend Dr. Martin King, Jr.
was killed by an assassin's bullet
tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
- And I can't imagine
what happens in that car, what that feeling is like,
the crush, the blow, the sinking,
and I want to believe that they know what they have.
"Night of the Living Dead" becomes what it is
exactly because of what's happening in this country
while he's filming it.
- I think the tenseness of the time
and the turbulence that was going on in society
and the political drama all fed into people
all of a sudden having a need to wanna see themselves on screen
and that gave birth to the blacksploitation period.
- We call 1970s film
"blacksploitation" and it's really a portmanteau
for "black" and "exploitation".
Blacks are on the big screen.
Black audiences are really joyful for the inclusion
but the representations are sometimes just not right.
We went from maids to pimps and hos.
At that time, we didn't use that word
profile... - No, no.
- But we were horrifically profiled.
I like to wear hats and I bought me a new hat
and some white boy yells at me, "Hey, pimp!" you know,
and I think he's thinking
that he thinks he's complimented me.
The big hats and collars
and they were images that were perpetrated by white people
who exploited these images for their own gain.
Sam Arkoff owned American International Pictures, AIP,
they were the great producers of films
that fell under the blacksploitation period.
There are studios who get in
on the blacksploitation craze.
And AIP's business model was, "We're not going to lead.
We're going to look, see what's happening out there,
what might be popular,
and then we're going to get on kind of the back side of this
and produce more of it."
Theirs was a strictly for-profit budget model,
investing as little as they could
and hoping something stuck.
Their films would go on just a few screens in some cases,
often in black neighborhoods, very low investment,
very low quality.
- At the time, I was astute enough
to look up AIP's budget,
but they weren't making any money at all.
I mean, the rumor was, was that they were in deep water,
and then "Blacula" brought in a lot of money for them.
- The name is Blacula!
Starring William Marshall,
a black actor,
directed by William Crain, a black director.
And so here's where you see
how knowledgeable black directors and actors
can have an extraordinary impact on a film.
- They wanted to do "Count Brown's in Town".
- "Brown's in Town"? Really? - Yeah.
It was really...Yeah. - "Brown's in Town"?
- So, we decided we were gonna do something else.
I wasn't the favorite person there for them...
- No, of course not. - ...because we had
something else in mind.
- The movie opens with him with his queen
trying to argue with Count Dracula
to end the transatlantic slave trade.
- To totally cease the slave trade?
When is the last time
black audiences had seen themselves
expressed visually in the 1700s as erudite and intelligent
and holding court and trying to discuss world affairs?
- Slavery has merit, I believe.
- Merit? You find "merit" in barbarity?
- But it was a big deal! - It was a big deal.
I just remember right out of school
everyone say Black Dracula.
- Vampires, I think they're possibly
the most fascinatin of all.
- That's all I remember.
"What? A black Dracula?"
And it gave you a sense of something I can't even explain.
I wanted to be an actor. Something opened up
'cause I think that affected me in a way
that probably I don't even understand.
- I was still in high school
and I had dreams of being the first black Dracula.
-
- But when William Marshall, who came out with it,
I was like, "Who could be mad about that?"
I mean, it was-- because he was...
I've loved William Marshall.
- When I was a kid,
the vampires and the Draculas that had been going on
were these really soft, metrosexual white guys
who didn't really have an energy to them for me,
and then, Blacula.
Okay, so he's this yummy, yummy chocolate, dark, sexy man
and so it was sort of,
it was this really confusing thing as a child
because I'm like, "Oh, my God, I'm scared!
But I'm excited. But I'm scared.
But I'm interested. I think I wanna kiss him."
And I hadn't really experienced that with a "villain" before,
so I would say Blacula scared the fuck out of me.
- I was proud that a black man
was kicking some butt. - Was eating people.
- Kicking butt, yeah. - Hi, what'll you have?
- Make is a Bloody Mary.
- He was having a Bloody Mary!
I found a lot of tangible resistance
and maybe even tangible resentment...
- Racism? - Yeah. Well, for racism,
I mean, nobody... - Because I'm sure your crew
was predominantly white.
- Everybody was white. - All right.
- Right now, I can't remember
anyone else black that was on that set.
There was something of a resentment
on the part of many producers
who didn't want our voices to ring resonantly about
and create a new kind of genre.
Remember the night club scene?
And the 150 actors in that club scene, right?
- Right, right, right.
- And so, there was a mix of white and black.
Right. Beautiful.
It really worked.
And once the music was supposed to start,
kids were supposed to be dancing and I watched the AD,
the assistant director, he had the black couples
and he had white couples, so I had this...
- He didn't mix it up? - No, he didn't. He didn't.
They didn't have gloves to throw down but I said,
"Hold up, we're not gonna do this.
This is what you're gonna do.
You're gonna mix these people up."
And it went all the way up to Sam Arkoff.
- He got some resistance
but his pushback helped even the higher-ups
doing this film understand that he was making
something really meaty and meaningful.
It makes the film so memorable and impactful even to this day.
We're sitting in this wonderful
old police station, and I saw this long range
of about at least 20 yards,
and then I asked them
for a high-speed camera. - Okay.
- Which would be a slow-motion camera.
- Right. Okay.
- They didn't wanna do it. I wasn't gonna get it.
This went on for at least a week.
- Right. - And so, I was waiting
for this camera to show up.
Never did show up.
On the morning that we got ready to do that,
this extra van pulls up...
- And they gave it to you? - And these guys come out
with this high-speed, slow motion camera.
- Okay.
- They decided to give it to you.
- I bet they did after they start seeing
those dailies, right?
- People are still talking about that shot.
And it created kind of a cultural shift
and to have that awareness to say, "Me, too,"
and then to come back with "Scream Blacula Scream",
Pam Grier and Richard Lawson's first role.
"Scream Blacula Scream"
I did with William Marshall, Pam Grier, Don Mitchell,
and a host of other wonderful black actors.
I'm a Pam Grier fan.
She ends up becoming the lead of the film
which to me is fun because, in my opinion,
it's one of the only times they let her act,
like she really got to be a real person
and not a sex symbol.
- Stay away! Who are you?
- This is when you start to see women really emerge.
Women are now starting to take the center stage.
- How about that?
- She got to use her mind. - Change her wardrobe,
she used her mind,
of course she saves the two guys
at the end. - Yes.
And she's like an historian of black antiquity,
you know... - Exactly.
That whole diaspora.
- In the white horror movies,
the voodoo is always like the evil force.
- Yeah. - And the villain.
But in like "Scream Blacula Scream"
it was like the force of good, it was kind of...
- Exactly. - They relied on that
to conquer his curse basically.
They were using it to remove his curse.
The cross horrors history voodoo
is explicitly a sign to black people.
All black people know voodoo!
And it's really helpful if they're in Louisiana.
- How do you kill someone with voodoo?
- You often see black women
associated with voodoo on screen.
Commonly, we've seen black women be voodoo priestesses
and things of that nature, and always use it for ill-will.
- A is gonna growl, and rain is gonna rain.
- Black women were very much centered
as frightening because they wielded power.
"Abby" the blacksploitation era film, is a really good example
of both fear of black women in general
but fear of black women's sexuality in particular.
-
You're mine now! Mine!
- Abby. - That's Abby.
This scared me so much when I was a kid
because she was pretty, but then she went crazy.
- - Yeah.
- What do you think of my powers now?
- Black women, of course, have always been depicted
as highly sexualized.
This is definitely something that came to the fore with Abby.
On the one level, you could say she's sort of
resisting her defined role as sort of a church wife,
becoming possessed by a sex demon
who basically attacks men through sex.
It's a silly film,
but what's not silly about it is it does point to this fear
of black women and black womanhood.
- There is this one, I think,
kind of cool movie. It's called "Sugar Hill".
-
- Sugar's community is under siege
by some corrupt white gangsters.
-
She conjured this voodoo god
to get revenge on these gangsters
who killed her boyfriend.
- I want the power to destroy my enemies.
It was one of the early films
where a black woman was the lead.
- Remember me?
- She had made her own determinations,
was not suppressed by men and the system.
She was smart, powerful, she was sexy,
she was intelligent, and she was willful.
- Show us what big man you are.
This is a narrative
that isn't entirely unproblematic.
It does resurrect these early notions of black men
lusting for white women.
-
- And so, for female audiences to watch
these movies on the big screen,
certainly came with a bit of conflict.
- So, the blacksploitation era
probably gets mixed marks in terms of, you know,
overall how black life was being portrayed,
but you can see in even just these horror films
that there's an effort to do more.
- One movie from the '70s
that gets lumped in with blacksploitation
is "Ganja & Hess".
It's really cool and it's from a black director.
Bill Gunn is his name.
- Bill Gunn is a guy
who a lot of people don't know about
because he was a playwright, a screenwriter.
He wrote the screenplay for a movie called "The Landlord"
that Hal Ashby did.
Bill Gunn was in episodes of "The Outer Limits",
"Man From U.N.C.L.E.", you know,
they just wanted him to make
a horror film. - Right.
- You know, with black folks in it.
And the story is that he just,
I think the producers were out of town or something,
and he took the whole cast and crew
up to some place at New York and rewrote it and shot it.
- Wow. - You know, to talk about
the history of blood, the history of African blood,
and how it's passed down to the ancestors.
- This is a film about a very erudite scholar
who struggles with addiction,
so he's using blood as an addiction metaphor
which is something that spoke to this director
and in his mind, I'm sure spoke to his community.
- He was recently turned into a vampire
and he falls in love with this woman
and he kinda has to decide whether to turn her
and that sort of thing.
And it's very slow and meditative.
Throughout the movie, Hess,
no matter how wealthy he is, no matter how educated,
is still very fearful of the police.
- There's no possible way for you to know this
but I'm the only colored on the block, you see,
and if another black man washes ashore around here,
you can believe
the authorities will drag me out for questioning.
- The police still remain a threat
to even this very wealthy, well-educated black man.
- It got like a standing ovation
at the Cannes Film Festival. - Yeah.
- It played at Cannes and got a lot of awards there.
When it got to America, not so much.
- Hollywood hates this movie
because it doesn't look anything like
the blacksploitation films of this period.
Frankly, it's a little too smart.
It's a little too stylistic.
The characters are really a bit too developed and realized.
They wanted something cruder.
- They recut it. before years, you know,
I used to go some video stores and it was recut as a movie
called "Blood Couple".
For the longest time,
it was sort of in this netherworld
where the true version of the film
was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
- It was a film that I heard about for years
before I was finally to see it.
- Hmm-mm.
- Actually, Bill Gunn, when I was at Howard, came.
He didn't come with a print of the film.
- He just came to talk about it?
- Yeah, 'cause the only print was available,
the only print in existence was at the Museum of Modern Art.
He was an interesting cat,
and "Ganja & Hess" was his chance
to elevate a vampire story into something more meaningful.
"Ganja & Hess"
is like this beautiful, artistic film
but it wasn't the only film during that time
that was making these broad stroke statements
about what was going on in society.
There's a lot of blacksploitation horror films
that kind of deal with kind of involuntary experimentation
and it doesn't feel like a coincidence.
The Tuskeegee Experiment was this medical experiment
that spanned a 40-year time.
There were these tests done on Southern men in the South,
some had syphilis, some didn't,
but they all thought they were being treated
for what was called "bad blood".
They were promised free healthcare, free meals,
free burial, but they weren't even treated.
They were pretty much being tested
to see the effects of syphilis over a lifetime.
Some of those men lost their lives
without knowing what they were fully consenting to,
and there was this big investigation
and it came a halt in early to mid-1970s.
- You wanna use me for some type of human guinea pig, is that it?
"Dr. Black & Mr. Hyde",
"Blackenstein",
those are films that were lackluster in quality
and maybe even story, but they are centered around
medical experimentation on black males.
And so, you couldn't help but notice
those two things coming together and kind of converging.
- This could be a good chance to try out that serum.
- No, you can't try that serum on a human.
That's not right.
Since blacks were brought here
during slavery, we were treated as lab rats
and for various, different medical purposes,
they treated us as inhuman, as we were seen,
and so, you see a lot of that even today
with movies like "Get Out".
- Why us, huh?
Why black people?
Also "The Girl with All the Gifts"
and even "The First Purge".
- Should you choose to actively participate,
we'll implant a tracking device.
After that, you'll be all set, as they say, to purge.
- As sort of bad as
some of these blacksploitation films were,
they just simply got worse.
-
- "Blackenstein" is so bad,
literally, you can't see the film.
I mean, you're like,
Did they purposefully shoot it in shadow
or just completely in the dark?
In addition to that,
civil rights groups are protesting these films
and saying that they're not good for black culture,
they're not good for black representations.
- We may not have liked necessarily what we saw.
-
- It was stereotypical,
but those doors slowly started to open.
So, as all things in life, there's a double-edged sword.
- We're finally seeing a number of movies
where black people are on the big screen.
And so, you think, "Okay,
the momentum is going to continue
and maybe in the '80s,
we're going to get these representations right."
Exactly the opposite happens.
-
- I always knew that if there was somebody black
in the horror film, they will be the first to die.
MIGUEL A. NUÑI remember one of the first things I did
was when I got the script
was count the number of pages before I died.
- If we're not dead in the first 15 minutes,
we're certainly dead by the last 30 minutes.
- It's like the red shirt phenomenon
in "Star Trek".
You know you can't kill Spock, you can't kill McCoy,
you can't kill Captain Kirk or Uhura,
so this poor crew member with the red shirt
is the one who's going to die.
And I think that's very much
where blacks were kind of stuck in horror for a while.
It became such a joke about first to die
that there were these sort of tongue-in-cheek
references to it.
Snag one.
- Snag one? - Yeah, snag one
and put 'em in the bucket.
- I seen this movie. The black dude dies first.
You snag it.
- So, let's talk about black people
always die first in horror movies.
It's not entirely true.
- Well, in "Alien", Yaphet is actually
the last male to die, you know? - That's true. He is.
Yeah, he makes it aways.
- Get out of the room!
- Sometimes they do die first.
-
- But I wanna kinda dispel a little bit of that myth.
It often happens.
-
- But then, at the same time,
it can't always happen because black people
play a particular role in horror films.
For example, if you have a really horrible, big,
kind of badass monster, how do you evidence
that that creature is as bad as it can get?
You need a black guy.
- I'm Sergeant Buford Brown, but my teammates call me Buba.
- If the monster beats that guy,
then that monster must be a true badass.
- You believe any of this voodoo bullshit, Blair?
- Well, you know, my first,
my very first movie was "The Thing".
- Yes! Yes, yes. - I lived to the very end.
I survived. - Yes.
In my next movie, I did die but not till the end.
- Their roles are tokens,
and so, they show up as sidekicks,
incidental characters.
- Which would be fine
except that often, they don't exist
for any other reason in the movie.
They don't have wants, needs of their own,
their only concern
is the welfare of the white protagonists,
and that's where it becomes problematic.
- I looked at it as I was the chosen black person
for the film. - I know, that's right.
- I didn't look at it in a negative way.
I looked at it like I was chosen.
- I didn't look at it in a negative way, either,
'cause I was getting a check. MIGUEL A. NUÑAbsolutely.
Everybody who had said anything about it,
I'm in "Friday the 13th", you're not,
so I didn't look at it like that.
But it was really a good thing to be black
and, in any film, in the '80s,
not much less a horror movie, but any film.
- I was like, "Hey, we're in this movie!"
We're dying first.
-
- Or we're sacrificing ourselves.
-
Or we're just a sidekick or we're just being sassy.
- Dan keeping you up again?
Girl, you gotta put a lock in that window.
- Or we're not gonna appear after the first act or whatever.
But we were in it. We were in it!
It's such a powerful validation of your existence
and I think it's really difficult for a lot of whites
to even imagine what it would feel like
if you were surrounded by entertainment
that was nothing but black people, right?
- I got on set and I read the script,
and there was several little racial things in there.
- I see you!
Chocolate man.
- And so, I, you know, I said,
"Okay, you know, I'm gonna be alone on this."
- Scary, isn't it?
- Back when I was doing "The Craft",
I definitely was really nervous
about how to portray this character.
Like Bonnie has burns, or what's her name?
Sarah! scars.
And the other one is poor and very angry
and probably bipolar, right?
So when I first auditioned,
I had a big monologue about being anorexic
and then I think once they decided to cast me,
that is when they made race her issue,
but for me, I was like, "I don't have an issue."
I didn't think it was a big enough problem
for her to have.
Although, in retrospect, I actually think it's fantastic
they had it in because that is the kind of racism,
whether it was subtle or big, that I went through,
I'm sure you went through, and everyone went through,
but isn't it interesting that I was able to
compartmentalize it and be like, "What?
She doesn't have a problem," because it's so ingrained in me
that that's a part of me that I'm gonna go into a store
and someone's gonna be horrible to me
or somebody white's gonna say something terrible.
- Why are you doing this to me, Laura?
- Because I don't like Negroids.
- To this day, people come up to me
and tell me how much it meant.
I was getting off a train, this little girl was getting on
and she would,
"Yo... yo.. you were in the Crafts movie!"
And I realized, "Oh! Oh, oh!"
I wasn't even thinking that like I'm now in a movie,
so these girls don't have to go through what I did
which was, you know, watching "Pretty in Pink"
and going, "There's no one who looks like me,
or acts like me, or sounds like me."
I am going to be that for these girls.
- I drink of my sisters
and I ask for the ability to not hate those who hate me,
especially racist pieces of bleach blonde shit
like Laura Lizzie.
- I think what Rochelle did was she gave us...
she gave us a way to kind of talk about our own experiences
and be comfortable with them
because a lot of us were in like all-white spaces.
- I live in a white world.
I mean, most of the time, all I'm around is white people.
A lot of times, when you're living in the world,
so you don't think of it being, "Oh, I'm a token,"
or anything like that.
You're just thinking, "Oh, I finally got a position in this
and it'll bring me other positions,"
so I think you think positively about what you're doing.
It didn't really matter to me
because we were working.
I was so happy that I had a check but, on the set,
it was absolute... I was the only black there.
And I think minorities all over the world
felt that Kincaid was their hero.
Let's go kick the motherfucker's ass
all over dreamland.
Every script that I read
and the leading man,
that was my part!
That's the part I shoulda played!
But I understood where it was.
There was no resentment.
It was like, "In due time."
- Perhaps the quintessential,
although it pains me to say, token character,
is Scatman Crothers in "The Shining".
- No problem, Mr. Urban,
I was just getting to the ice cream.
- It pains me to say it because he's a terrific performer.
The character played by Scatman Crothers
who is a psychic in the book survives, but in the film,
to set up a danger for the important characters,
meaning the child and the wife,
Scatman Crothers got an axe to his chest
the minute the brother walked through the door.
-
- Always bothered me 'cause I was always thinking,
"Oh, if he's shinin', how come
he didn't see it coming?" - He should see that.
- He shoulda ducked that axe.
- At the time, I mean,
I thought it was an unusual choice
because I knew it hadn't happened that way in the novel.
I didn't understand that I was seeing a trope called
the sacrificial Negro.
- The sacrificial Negro
is just the character who literally just like
puts themselves in the face of danger
and dies in order for the white character to survive.
- In the first "Annabelle",
poor Alfre Woodard has no investment in the film
other than helping the white characters...
- No, no! -
And I was like, "That's a little retro,"
because you don't see that so much anymore.
- It was literally Alfre Woodard saying,
"Oh, I have lived my entire life just to save you."
And it's just like,
"Oh, my God, that drove me nuts!"
- I'm over that.
I've seen that in almost every movie
I grew up with as a child where, you know,
the desexualized black woman mammy figure
gives her life so that the little white girl can live.
That's noble, I guess, but I just feel like,
Why can't everybody live? Or everybody die?
- I think it really honestly goes back
to that era of the "Birth of a Nation"
where you have the faithful servant trope.
That faithful servant trope is a really important image
for a lot of races because it shows them
that slavery and Jim Crow weren't so bad!
Sometimes those secondary characters
are just gonna have to die because if they don't,
the audience won't believe
something scary is about to happen to the real characters
who are not the black characters,
which is what I think gives birth to this other
horrible trope which is the magical Negro.
- Molly, you in danger, girl.
- They have super wisdom
that helps like these white characters kind of thrive.
- It's one of those boxes that black people get put in,
the sort Uncle Remus thing,
where we're somehow afforded some mystical wisdom.
- Alex, your friend's departure shows
that death has a new design for all of you.
- Then you have the other side of a terrible coin
which is invisibility.
- I remember being when I was younger...
- Yeah. - Like around that age,
like seven to eight grade and like discovering scary movies
like, "You know what, I'm not gonna die
'cause I'm not even in this." -
It's like all my friends at the sleepover
should be scared 'cause they're all white
and no one's coming for the man who looks like me!
- No one's coming for us. Exactly.
- 'Cause I'm not even in it!
It's the Reagan era
and black people become the face
of what is bringing this country down.
The nation is led to believe
that their good, hard tax dollars
are being put into these young women
who are having babies and collecting welfare checks
and it's a propaganda message
that really encourages the nation
to turn its back on social programs.
Black people become monstrous in a real way in the political.
Horton fled, kidnapped a young couple,
stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend.
- On the big screen then,
what is encouraged is that white, fleety urban.
"A Nightmare on Elm Street", "Amityville Horror",
"Halloween", all have pushed us out
into the suburban, away from the urban,
and so we have to imagine new monsters.
-
- Take a movie like "Poltergeist",
"Our homes are built on Indian burial grounds
and somehow it's radiating up and affecting us in awful ways
not because we're inherently evil
but because black and brown people
were still the source of evil."
- One horror film with a lot of black faces in it
that stands out from the 1980s is
"The Serpent and the Rainbow", directed by Wes Craven,
and Wes Craven, I would say, was one of those filmmakers
who really did try to be inclusive in his films.
He also did "Vampire Brooklyn"
and he did "The People Under the Stairs".
"The People Under the Stairs"
you had a young black kid
leading a major film for Universal.
It was ahead of its time.
- I remember seeing it on the VHS and I'm being like,
"This movie has a black child actor as the lead?
What's going on here?"
- I don't wanna kill you
but I will 'cause I don't like you much, anyway.
- One of the things that movie really captures is,
you know, black fear of white spaces, you know,
this thing we're talking about.
And this particular white space, you know, this is stereotypical
but like, you know, this idea of like sadomasochism
and leather like psychosexual shit,
like this torturing stuff.
It all seemed very white, you know?
- There's no community here.
All I see you are a couple of n...
ass bitch. You can.
- What are you gonna do?
Shoot us all?
- They had Roach in there,
in the walls, as a victim, and that, I think,
was the most powerful
and terrifying part about that movie.
You look at "Get Out",
it's clear that my deepest, deepest fears
come to this idea of confinement.
- And then we get this beautiful renaissance
called the '90s.
- I actually am not afraid to say Candyman.
- Candyman.
- Candyman!
- No, no.
- I'm a really hard person to scare
and "Candyman" was like
one of the first things in a while that got me.
- That really got to you?
- Yeah, I mean, that shot with the open mouth
inside the vacated apartment.
- I guess we kinda knew that we had something
but we didn't know what.
We had Tony Richmond, was our DP,
who did "The Man Who Fell to Earth",
we had Philip Glass
whose incredible score kicked off the film,
we had the beautiful city of Chicago as our backdrop,
and we had a interracial conflict.
Tony Todd is such a powerful actor
and brings such gravitas to that role.
- Be my victim.
- Candyman is Tony Todd,
and Tony Todd is Candyman, for a lot of us.
- Out of the blue, I get a call from my manager
at the time, saying there's a script on their table,
it's called "Candyman" and I kinda...
in my cockiness, I hung up the phone because I said,
"What are we talking about?
Is this Sami Davis, Jr.'s story we doin'?
I'm way too tall."
- Do I know you?
- No, but you doubted me.
- Tony's got a great screen presence.
- He does. - Candyman" was, you know,
it was obviously unique
because that was the first black supernatural killer.
I loved Clive Barker, and Candyman being
sort of like the patron saint of urban legends.
You know, I thought that was just such a beautiful invention,
such a beautiful monster.
- Candyman is not a bogeyman.
He was an artist who was happily doing his thing.
He happened to fall in love with a woman that wasn't his race
and he was lynched because of it,
and not only that, they cut off his art hand.
Bernard Rose directed "Candyman"
based on a short story set in the UK by Clive Barker.
They changed the original story
from sort of a class conversation
to one that is rooted in American racial history.
- It dealt with the social things.
You have this white woman, you got this black guy,
you got this backstory about this black guy
and this white woman and kind of, you know,
how he is attacked because of this relationship.
- It was a very terrifying film,
a film that I loved but a film that, you know,
is kind of problematic.
We shall die together in front of their very eyes.
Here again, we have a movie
that echoes what happened in "King Kong" in the '30s.
There is this black bogeyman
and he's in pursuit of this blonde white woman.
- He becomes obsessed,
recirculating the same tropes.
- I don't think that character
would go after poor black people.
- Right. - This is where you can tell
that "Candyman" came from the mind of a white person.
He chooses to haunt,
to disrupt the lives of blacks in Chicago
in the Cabrini-Green Projects.
When really, right across the tracks,
are essentially the representatives,
the sort of, the folks who would have been responsible,
their ancestors, for his lynching.
- He is a personification of racism in the United States,
like what it looks like and what it can conjure,
like all that negative energy,
like what does it look like, and what does it do?
- Keep away from me!
For me, it's a character.
I don't live and breathe and die by it.
I'm happy that I was able to do him
and hopefully I did him right.
- It was very empowering to me
to feel like we could... like black people can do anything.
We're not in this box.
We can be the Freddie of a movie.
- No!
- I remember Vondie Curtis-Hall
who was married to Kasi Lemmons who was in the film.
In the original screening, he shook his head, he says,
"Man, you realize," and I said, "What?"
"You gonna be Candyman forever."
Candyman, Day of the Dead.
- Unfortunately, I think the sequels
kind of get overlooked.
It gives Candyman a sympathetic backstory.
He is the spirit that's conjured from the history of racism
and white supremacy in the United States.
-
- I feel like the sequel
helps you understand the original
a little bit better maybe.
The '90s were a renaissance
not just in film, I want to point out,
but also in literature.
This is the era that Spike Lee helped give birth to.
Spike Lee was like the Terry McMillan in film
as what Terry McMillan was doing in publishing.
You know, black people are going to see movies.
There was a push for black filmmaking
started by like Spike Like and John Singleton
and people like that,
and I think it was kind of a response to the '80s
where black people were kind of marginalized.
- In the early 1990s,
you kind of saw like a lot of black filmmakers
kind of come into the fold and not just make comedies
and dramatic films but also horror films,
and I think what they were doing
with the horror films at the time,
they were making movies that were kind of
socially conscious and more directly in tune
with what was going on in the outside world.
- What you saw today, young brother,
were victims of economics,
environment Reganomics.
Joel as the main character,
this up-and-coming and soon to be minister.
He goes and visits his cousin that lives in New York City.
It really centers around Joel and his crisis of faith.
"Do I stick with kind of like my Bible
and Christian fundamentalism,
or do I kind of stray a little and have a little fun?"
- No, I wouldn't. Fornication is a sin.
- It gets even more extreme than that
because his, literally,
his soul is at stake with a demon who is like
looking to immediately kind of eradicate him.
-
- It is super biblical, now that I think about it,
'cause she's basically the parallel of the devil.
- No!
- "Def by Temptation"
is all about that battle between good and evil.
So, this is also a morality tale.
These are the lessons that mirror so closely
to what Michaeux and Spencer Williams
were offering up in earlier decades.
I love that connection
that "Def by Temptation"
has with those older films from the 1940s.
It was unique for the time because you weren't seeing
a lot of black horror films made in 1990, if any.
That's what makes it a real landmark.
I feel like "Tales from the Hood"
did more to kind of cement black horror for the '90s.
- Welcome to hell!
- "Tales from the Hood" was groundbreaking.
- Oh, the shit!
"Tales from the Hood"
was this anthology horror film.
There's four short stories with one wraparound story.
- My dad used to drag me to march after march
if it had black, colored, or Negro in the title,
he was a member.
So, when I, you know, started to look at horror
as something to do myself, I'm like,
Well, I gotta have something in there to...
we gotta do, we gotta mix it up.
Not just have horror for horror's sake.
It deals with spousal abuse
and then child abuse in the home.
It deals with gang violence.
It deals with racist politicians.
- Can't we all just get along?
It deals with police brutality.
So, all of these things kind of intertwine
and create this kind of supernatural tale
about revenge and retribution.
-
It deals with a lot of different things.
The anthology format is actually really good in terms of
you can address a lot of different issues
with short stories.
- You have a racist politician.
An original American.
Isn't it about time?
- That's great. I'd even vote for me!
- Is it really that farfetched
that someone would have that as a campaign slogan today?
- I always tell my kids,
I'm like, you know, people in grave...
the dead people and the spirits are not gonna mess with you.
It's livin'...
- It's living people you gotta worry about, yeah.
- Yes, that's what we gotta worry about.
That's how we kinda twisted when we started to do "Tales",
we gotta turn the tables and make the horror redemptive.
- No!
- This movie is kind of like
helping us see justice happening when we're not seeing it happen
outside of a movie screen or a movie theatre.
There's cops being acquitted and there's LA riots
and it just seems like things are so hopeless
but then you kind of like exercise retribution
in a horror film for, you know, for justice,
for racial justice, and I think that's super dope.
- You tackled, you know, subjects that are horrific.
- Right. Right.
- We're running around
looking for ghosts and vampires
when the vampire is, you're married to him.
- You're married to him. Exactly.
- You know, he's sucking you dry,
you know, and beating you,
and also hurting and destroying your child.
That, and I was so young, I learned a lot on that set.
-
- I always liked David Alan Grier as a comedian--
- Yeah.
- --but realizing what he could do as an actor.
That really, that really...
and then I found out that he was Shakespearian...
- Shakespearian trained. - Shakespearian trained.
- Yeah, I, you know, I used to do standup,
so I kinda knew David from the comedic thing
but I also knew that he had this Shakespearian background,
and when I was thinking of who to play that part,
I purposefully wanted someone
that everyone looked at as a nice guy.
There was an interesting thing that happened
when we screened that episode.
- I'm gonna teach you and that boy some respect.
When David Allen Grier
was first hitting Paula, these kids were laughing.
- Wow. - And you know what happens,
particularly I think as a black teenager,
as someone that goes through the world,
you're always on the lookout
for how something is gonna mess with you.
You're not trying to show your vulnerability.
- Right.
- And the easiest way to do that is to
- Laugh it off. Yeah. - laugh at something.
And laugh at something.
-
- As the beating went on,
it got quieter and quieter and quieter
until it felt like they were about to cry.
- When I rewatch this film,
it really stands head and shoulders above
a lot of black horror up to that point
because in those four segments, what Rusty Cundieff is doing
is using that metaphor to tell stories
that were about real-life problems
facing the black communities.
- It kind of became more kind of
a genre classic or something that, you know,
the black community kind of like talked about
and it was kind of a word of mouth thing
but maybe it is because of "Get Out" that it got
this kind of resurgence and then got a sequel.
- This shit ain't over yet, bitch!
- "Tales from the Hood 2",
you know, Darren and I have been trying
to get this thing made forever.
- I think it's gonna be quite amazing!
We're back to telling
...back to telling stories
that hopefully deal with some issues that people have.
This one I think is,
there's some stuff that's a little headier.
It's a different kind of "Tales" story,
touches people in a different way,
though it is scary.
-
- You start to see more women on screen in the 1990s.
"Eve's Bayou", Kasi Lemmons,
which is one of my favorite.
Some people don't consider it horror
but I do because it's just,
really, it's one of those great interchanges of human horror
and hints of the supernatural.
During the time,
it was still super rare to see black women be directors,
so Kasi Lemmons really pushing to direct
was really groundbreaking and really important.
It has that beautiful cinematography.
The whole thing is like a poem, really,
it's just so beautiful.
The script by Kasi Lemmons is just fantastic.
I've taught it in my black horror class at UCLA
and when I teach it,
I like to tweet out lines from the script.
It's just so beautifully written.
- That opening scene and the first thing you hear...
The summer I killed my father,
I was ten years old.
...it's just brilliant,
and it was a different kind of scary movie.
- Bad girl.
It's a movie about what memory means
in the eyes of a black young girl
and how she tries to help keep her family together
and also kind of heal any wounds that are kind of lingering
within, her father's, you know, infidelity,
and also maybe that kind of like touchy subject of,
"Is he being inappropriate with one of his daughters?"
- That Debbi Morgan character,
you feel so... so much strength from her.
But you feel so much pain because of what she's lost.
- Sometimes I feel like I've lost so much,
I have to find new things to lose.
Magic steps in to sort of take the place
of those harder questions
about what's really happening in that house.
I think what Kasi Lemmons does
and what she kind of inspired
for a lot of the black women horror filmmakers that I talk to
is we do have a story to tell and don't be afraid
to kind of like, you know, "Oh, because a studio exec
or higher ups may not like seeing an all-black cast
or a film centered around black women,
then I can't do this."
And I think what Kasi Lemmons' film did,
she says, "No, we can do this,"
and to not be afraid of any pushback,
to keep pushing for your story, your voice,
which she did for a generation is tell them
that their voice really does matter.
- Horrible, isn't it?
- There's Billy and there's Jada.
- Billy and Jada.
- Do we have a deal?
She did surprise me, though.
She called me up, "Ernest, I colored my hair."
"What?"
"I hope it doesn't mess you up too much.
I made it kind of like platinum."
I said, "Oh, Jada, Jada."
-
In 1995,
something really groundbreaking happens
because we kind of see this like first like contemporary
black final girl, and it's Jada Pinkette.
The final girl is this term coined by Carol Clover.
She wrote this book called "Men, Women, and Chainsaws,
Gender in The Modern Horror Film"
and the final girl is basically the last girl standing
and the common theme was that they were all white.
- I know that the producers wanted
another actress, a white actress, for that role
but I had just seen Jada in "Menace to Society"...
And I just said, "Oh, she's my Jeryline,"
so I had to campaign hard to get her in there.
I said, you know, it's the perfect setup
because everybody's gonna think, "Oh, she's gonna die."
- Right.
- She's dead already, you know? We know that.
And she winds up being the sister
that winds up saving the world.
-
- That was just like, "Oh, crap."
You wouldn't have seen that in '80s.
Fearless women on screen have been on the rise
ever since Kira in "The Invitation",
Aaliyah in "Queen of the Damned",
Sennia Nanua in "The Girl with All the Gifts".
They're black women and they're survivors.
Seeing Saana Lathan side by side with the predator
and just killing aliens was just like,
"Wait a minute, so her and this predator
are gonna start like..."
That was so cool
because I think she was like the last person alive
and like he made her kind of a tribeswoman,
like she was a part of their crew now.
Right around the turn of the 21st century,
hip hop-inspired horror films started to come out.
- Then it's just add Z.
So "Wolvez" with a Z,
"Vampz" with a Z, "Bloodz VS Wolvez",
so there's just Zs exploding all over the place
but the Zs are there to indicate
that it's kind of a hip-hop kind of thing.
You have rappers just showing up in horror movies.
LL Cool J is in "Halloween H20".
- Yeah?
What's going on, baby?
- I don't know.
- You had "Anaconda", you know, Ice Cube.
- Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff
and it's a send-up to the film "Nightmare on Elm Street"
and the "Geto Boys" who are from Houston
who have really significant horror themes.
It's kind of a natural pairing.
They're fans, they're rapping about it,
and eventually, they end up on set.
One highlight from the early 2000s was "Bones"
which was this kind of this blacksploitation throwback.
It comments on what drugs did
to the black community specifically.
We had Snoop Dogg as this title character.
He's involved in gambling
and stuff like that, but he ain't somebody
who always tried to give back to his community.
But for me, one of the most interesting things
about doing "Bones" was the love story.
-
- But just the idea, you know, of reviving a love
that had been lost and it's one of the things
that the studio really kind of downplayed.
- Really? - Yeah, when they...yeah.
Yeah, I think they wanted kind of like a cheap horror film,
you know, and I think we gave it more than they anticipated.
But I gotta tell you this,
you haven't lived until you've seen Snoop blush.
'Cause Snoop, Snoop,
first day, Snoop had to kiss Pam Grier.
- For real?
And he kissed her and they were into it,
they were into it, they were into it,
I said, "Cut," and Snoop just...
I said, "You blushing, man?"
He said, "Hey, man, I grew up dreaming about this woman.
Now I get to kiss her?"
- Yeah, that's a good day.
But then, things started to change
and more black characters are starting to be centralized
or even if they were secondary characters,
they were much more prominent,
more seen, not just as window dressing,
but very integral to the story.
"Attack the Block",
I loved this film, man. This was the kind of movie
I would have loved to have seen as a kid.
- Now that you mention,
I wanna make sure I show it to my kids.
- But also growing up in a housing project
and seeing a film that says, "Yeah, we can be heroes, too."
It's a story about
working class youth in London
and literally, there's an alien invasion
that comes crashing down on your neighborhood.
Moses, played by John Boyega,
basically saves his neighborhood.
Every time I see this movie at the end, it gives me chills.
Moses is in a cop car with his friend Pest
and all he hears outside is his name being chanted
over again. "Moses, Moses!"
Moses! Moses!
- His friend looks at him,
he's like, "Hey, that's for you."
That's for you, man.
This is why John Boyega
is in "Star Wars", right?
That's why he's this big star because he looks up
and he has this smile on his face,
this innocent, pure, child-like smile.
He gets to feel like he matters in his neighborhood.
A lot of young black kids don't feel like they matter.
I think that's really the core of this film.
He gets to be the hero.
- I think something really important
happens in the 2000s.
When you have these more self-reflexive horror films
that are looking back and saying,
"That was the stereotype," or, "That was the cliché,"
or, "That's the trope we are always relying on."
So, in exposing those kinds of well-worn,
kind of well-trodden knowns about horror,
horror also had to catch up and mature
if it was going to continue to thrive.
It's all over.
It's not over. It's just not yours anymore.
Now you gotta see this film,
"The Girl with All the Gifts".
- I mean, I watched this 'cause you recommend it.
- Really well-done British horror film
with this young black girl as the main character.
It's after a disease that's hit humanity
where it's turned into everybody into like these feral animals.
-
- It's a zombie movie.
Sort of. It's terrifying.
It's an apocalyptic future where we're no longer us
but again it's probably white people's fear, right?
That they're losing dominion, you know,
that the manifest destiny thing isn't quite working
like it used to.
That character was not written as black.
That happened during the casting process.
It's a very similar process as to what happened
in "Night of the Living Dead".
She just killed the audition, so she got the part,
and it creates such a difference in the film
to have this black child.
- I read the book before I saw the movie,
so when I saw the movie
and they had cast a little black girl,
I was like, "Oh, my God, this is amazing!"
- We're alive?
- Yes.
- Then why should it be us who die for you?
I talked to Mike Carey,
the writer/screenwriter.
This is a sharper social commentary
even maybe than that he had intended.
You see a story about a character, a black girl
who faces some insurmountable odds
where it seems impossible but you come up with plans
and you execute your plans.
This is the stuff that helps us get through life.
That's the kind of opportunity
that I would have killed for in the '90s,
reading script after script after script
and wanting to read for the lead girl
but going, "Oh, no, okay, I'm the friend,
so I'm gonna say, 'Are you okay?
Oh, are you okay?
Are you okay?'"
- Are you okay?
- Yeah.
- I mean, six million different ways to Sunday,
I have to figure out a million different line readings
for the same line because whatever thing is going on,
it's not about the black people we're going through,
it's, "Are you, white person in peril, okay?"
So when I saw that movie,
I was like, "Okay, things are shifting."
We've shifted from being the focal point
of the fear, other, to being the heroes, right?
To being the icons.
To being the one that you in the audience
are looking up to.
That's been very exciting to watch unfold.
- If you have to ride in the back of the bus
for 90% of history, it takes a little bit to get in front.
- Black is in fashion.
"Get Out" I think,
is kind of like a perfect movie of its time.
It came out like the transition between the Obama administration
and the Trump administration.
- Yeah.
- So, I mean,
I remember when Obama was elected.
People were actually having debates about whether
racism is dead now and that sort of thing.
Is this a post-racial world and all that?
As Trump's campaign came along,
I think the public came to be aware like,
"Uh-oh, you know, racism still does exist."
- A horrific scene in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The hate boiling over white supremacists
and countered protestors fighting with fists and clubs,
confederate flags on full display.
I think there's blame on both sides
and I have no doubt about it.
- You will not replace us.
White lives matter!
It sort of like shows you
where the culture is right now
as far as black men are concerned.
- Yes.
- And a lot of the fears that we go through
being a part of the black race.
When I think about the fears that we deal with,
I think that anything that we suppress as people,
anything that we push down and hold deep is gonna explode.
It's gonna come out in a nasty way
if it's held on to long enough.
So, I think we need these valves for our fears.
- Sink into the floor.
- Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
- Sink.
- Floored me right to the...
I had no idea what to expect.
Is this something that we, as a people,
always talk about. - Exactly.
- Like, you know, it's like you told our secret.
- - That we do have a fear
that these people are trying to steal our souls.
It's an auction, you know.
It's an auction block
and she's disguised in a different way.
-
- What the maid to me represented in "Get Out"
is just what maids has been doing through history.
They've been trying to tell you.
- Oh, no. No. No.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
- They've been sitting at the table
with the white people and saying look,
"We ain't gonna do this. Get the hell out of here."
I think one of my favorite parts
is when the girl is smiling and crying at the same time.
- My favorite part is when he was beatin' their ass!
-
I was like, "Oh, you didn't get
that he was like picking cotton out of the chair?"
Or, "You didn't get, like he killed him with a buck.
Did you not know that black men were called bucks
during slavery?"
- I felt like I wanna make the movie
as answering every disappointed black person
that goes to a theater and watches, you know,
white protagonists make dumb decisions.
- No, no, no, no, no.
No, no, no, don't do that!
- And that sense of marginalization
that sense of, "Can we just...?
If there was a brother in here, that would never happen.
That would never happen.
If there was a sister, would never let this...
she would be out of the house."
Spoiler alert,
but there's no good white people in this movie.
That white savior trope always pops up.
There's always one good white person.
I saw this as obviously this opportunity
to use that to my favor.
The audience is expecting, though, you have to have
one good white person in the film, right?
- You know I can't give you the keys, right, babe?
- I couldn't believe what I was watching.
- I made "Get Out" for everybody in the audience,
you know, I didn't want anybody to see the film and not get it,
but I really made it for black audiences,
that meaning, if black audience didn't get it,
and didn't get like it, that's a fail, you know.
- Not surprisingly but kind of surprisingly,
the white guy next to me and all the audience members
who were white were cheering for Chris.
That empathy that we have so often
had to extend to characters who didn't look like us,
white audience members were extending their empathy to him.
The ending of "Get Out"
was very inspired by "Night of the Living Dead",
although I didn't necessarily know it when it happened.
You know, it was common knowledge
that my intention was to have Chris go to jail
and that the cops would come out and take him away.
- Get up here!
- Now most realistic ending is he's shot on the road.
-
- No one wants to watch that.
That's headlines, that's hashtags.
Prison would have been a little bit more of a mercy
but even so, I have seen enough black men
in prison orange.
I could go my whole life without seeing another film
or television program about black men in prison.
By the time I showed the film to an audience,
the culture were at change, okay,
so Black Lives Matter had become a presence
and there was now attention to racial violence
in a way that there hadn't been when I first wrote it.
- The lights of the car said it was the cops coming
and it was a whole another rash of fear.
It was almost like the Klan is coming.
Because it was like,
"Oh, my God, if it's the cops, he doesn't have a chance."
- Black people also were expressing this like,
"Yo, we need a hero. We need a release.
We need a cheer," and so I listened to that.
To have Rod show up and save him,
that lets you know that there will be no Chris
being speared by meathooks, being burned on a pyre.
There will be no lynching today.
That's the power of "Get Out".
- The fact that this movie had never been made,
not only "Get Out" itself, the fact that there's, you know,
a small handful of films led by black people,
to me, was the horror itself.
It's no mistake that the sunken place
feels and looks like a darkened theatre, right?
We're allowed to buy a ticket and yell at the screen
but we're never going to get that representation.
- What's going on, man?
I can't see myself.
- I'm afraid that's one of the misfortunes of the cursed.
- This really ain't hip!
I mean, a man has got to see his face!
Probably of any line in that film,
that line reverberates.
"A man has got to be able to see himself,"
is really a prophetic line
'cause it represents black people
and black people's history and legacy and journey
and the ability to see yourself today.
- It's finally dawning on the powers that be
that horror is a valid genre, right?
It's not just some little odd thing over there
that low budget people make, and make a little money on,
and we make fun of.
MIGUEL A. NUÑ Because of "Get Out"
I think black is the new green.
I think any little remaining shades of,
"Uh, if he's black, do you think it'll work?
You know, if it's a black cast, you think it'll work?
If it's a black director, you think it'll work?"
All those little bitty remaining barriers
have been completely removed.
There's some people right now, and I know this to be a fact,
that are changing some of their white scripts
to make them black now.
- There's less and less of this,
"Oh, well, black people don't like,
watch, or make horror films."
I think that's a conversation that's becoming obsolete.
A part of the work that I do that I love doing is
I get to talk to these new and up-and-coming filmmakers
who are making these really fun and funny
but also scary and introspective films.
- Just so many up-and-coming talents out there
that's, you know, that's pretty exciting
and gives me hope for the future that we're...
- We'll help other and...
- Yeah! - ...and change the game.
- We just need to all get in the door, you know.
There's so many stories and so many genres
that we belong to.
- I just have so many people like say,
"I got a horror film. I got a horror film.
I got a horror film,"
and this is way before "Get Out".
And now, maybe they'll get a chance
to actually get that out to the public.
- These are stories
by black creators for black viewers.
If whites want to enjoy it,fine,
but it's not about them, right? It's about us.
I think the entire film industry
are ready for us to open up the doors.
Just seeing black heroes and leads on screen
like the next generation won't think,
"Oh, that's weird."
They're gonna think,
"That's perfectly normal to have the black lead,
the black person save the day."
- If we can use what we've experienced,
we can tell stories that people have never seen before,
so that's what I'm excited to see coming.
- There's a draw and a connection there
in the minority experience for these horror films.
The industry's realized, "Oh, yeah,
white people will see movies about non-white people."
They will. They'll see. You just have to make 'em.
- Mic. - Thank you.
- Are we rolling?
Why didn't somebody tell us we were rolling?
No one said anything!
We just sitting here talking... I didn't know we were rolling.
No one said Action.
- That always got me up like
I don't know about the fashion of the time,
but I'm like, you know,
these murders going around, people with bites in their neck,
and no one's suspecting the guy with the cape.
- Nobody! - They did the mash...
They did the monster mash!
- Horra? Horror?
It's like rhymes with torah, right?
Horra? Torah?
I cannot horror. I love talking horra.
Oh, shit. I love talking horror.
They play the monster mash!
- Brown's in Town!
- "Return of the Living Dead" was one of my favorite films.
I didn't know anything and the entire film,
I was supposed to be walking around with a naked girl.
- Right. - So, if you watch it,
go back to the movie, 'cause when the scenes were on her,
most people lookin' at her but next time, when you watch it,
look at me and I'm gonna be like this.
- Every scene I was like that!
- So, any of you filmmakers,
if you wanna include a couple of old timers,
hey, you know, my number still works. Okay?
- Our numbers still work. - You know what I mean?
- Are we finished? 'Cause I wanna watch this whole movie.