CHICAGO — 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.
Robin Means 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 horror-sci-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 mashup that summarizes where Coleman and Harris are coming from: A Black Power fist explodes out of a cemetery lawn, “Carrie”-like. It’s an often funny, not especially academic survey, with stops for the horror parodies in “Key & Peele” and a litany of “ridiculous voodoo movie concepts,” but also an exhaustive taxonomy of Black character types in horror, a smart appreciation of “The Purge” franchise, a nod to 1970s cult favorite “Blacula,” a pocket history of Black actors and filmmakers in horror, a chapter on religion in Black horror ...
In general, the funnier stuff is Harris and the history is Coleman, but a larger point flows seamlessly throughout: “When the average person thinks of a Black person in a horror movie, they think of them dying,” Harris said. “It’s that ultimate marginalization. So we used the trope as a vehicle, to also show the importance of things improving today, too. You can tell a history of the subject through that cliché (of the Black character dying first). It’s important because, in horror, we often reflect the anxieties of the entire nation, and if you talk about a deep social issue like racism, a lot of people tune out. They don’t want the straightforward discussion. But horror makes social issues go down easier.”
It’s not a minor thing when, in “Barbarian,” for instance, a well-received horror movie from last fall, the typically white role of the Final Girl went to a Black woman, who escapes decades of systemic horrors (living beneath the rubble of Detroit, no less).
Indeed, the best-known examples of the horror genre offering audiences a backdoor to very real-world concerns are familiar enough to almost read like a secular liturgy: “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” was a parable addressing the Red Scare, “Rosemary’s Baby” the patriarchy, “Frankenstein” the scientific age, “Godzilla” the nuclear age, “Halloween” suburban paranoia. It’s no coincidence that Peele’s “Get Out,” a satire of liberal racism, almost single-handedly kick-started the current horror revival.
“I get asked a lot about the renaissance of Black horror as connected to ‘Get Out,’” Coleman said, “and I lean into it, but at the same time, as the title of ‘Horror Noire’ says, Black people were showing up in horror for more than a century. Not always in great ways, of course. In caricatures. But unlike ‘Get Out,’ there are those Black horror films that didn’t win an Oscar but are beloved. Like Rusty Cundieff — Black folks know him.” His “Tales from the Hood” anthology horror films (executive produced by Spike Lee) have taken on abusive policing, gangs, white supremacy and the murder of Emmett Till.
But go further back.
Coleman said you can’t really understand contemporary Black horror without “understanding a history of scrappy, low-budget films Black people have been making for ages, sometimes spooky religious-themed movies that urge a kind of respectability politics: Go down that road and you are a disservice to the race. Plus, you go to hell ...”
In Chicago, the Ebony Film Company, founded in 1915 (through white-owned), made some of the first all-Black horror films. Oscar Micheaux, whose pioneering films are often thought of as the start of Black cinema, made a handful of horror movies himself. Still, typically Black representation in horror meant broad bug-eyed caricatures, Black characters who sacrifice themselves for white characters, or more often, thinly written victims.
Coleman, in her role as a steward of diversity and inclusion practices at Northwestern, is known for drawing on this long history of Black horror in training sessions. She knows her audiences have heard of her background. She promises nothing bloody or scary.
“Incidentally, I do think of my two worlds as connected,” she said. “They’re both about social justice. One through traditional means. The other, the study of horror, by showing the distinctions between a civil space and uncivil solutions.” For instance, “Welcome Home Brother Charles,” a 1975 revenge-horror blaxploitation flick in which a Black man uses his, uh ... private parts to strangle the corrupt officials who incarcerated him, turning “a racial stereotype into a weapon against the society that perpetrated it,” she writes.
Coleman, perhaps it should go without saying, has thought deeply on this subject.
She regards her Pittsburgh childhood, she says with a smile, as a sort of “horror birthright.” Meaning, she is from the one-time home of George Romero, the legendary filmmaker whose breakthrough classic, 1968′s “Night of the Living Dead,” centered on an unknown Black actor named Duane Jones. Never mind how unusual that casting was in the 1960s, when a group of survivors fends off zombies in a besieged farmhouse, Jones takes control. He slaps sense into despairing (white) characters. And then, infamously, having fended off waves of horrors, as he emerges from the house, a passing white militia hunting down zombies shoots him and unceremoniously burns the body. We never know if they thought he was a zombie. They never check.
“Which speaks to what we see today,” Coleman said. “Think of Tamir Rice (the 12-year-old child from Cleveland shot and killed by police), and there’s a deep resonance to this day. As a young person in Pittsburgh (around which Romero shot some of his zombie pictures), it felt all too real. The militia was played partly by actual local cops. The way they just do away with Duane Jones — Black Pittsburgh could feel the blurring of fiction and reality.”
Asked how she came to horror (and broader still, pop culture through a Black lens, both of which she teaches at Northwestern), Coleman recalled herself as a graduate student:
While at Bowling Green State University in Ohio in 1990s, she planned to do her dissertation on farming practices in India, with a focus on the use of John Deere tractors there and “the ways in which it informs crop cultivation, spiral plowing as opposed to linear, what does it mean for land erosion, the safety of the water.” It struck a chord in academia, “and I started getting all this attention as a Black woman launching global projects.”
The thing is, after studying agriculture all day, she would return to her apartment and watch horror movies and write about Romero and Black representation in her favorite genre. She would make a distinction between Black people in horror movies and Black horror movies in which a Black perspective was central. She would imagine a horror genre so rich and healthy that “you could have Black American horror tales totally removed from the specter of whiteness hovering over it.” She would go to conferences and present on crops, then turn around and present at conferences of pop culture associations, “and while both subjects felt important, one felt great.” When she told her adviser she wanted to upend her focus, it didn’t go over well.
“I mean, picture it,” she said. “They’re excited because this Black woman is doing vital international research and it’s going to have a major impact and she has grants lined up, then she says ... ‘Yes, it’s great. I get your excitement. But have you seen ‘Blacula?’”
She did not go back to crop rotation.
She immersed in Black representation in popular genres — horror, comedy, sitcoms, comics, sci-fi. Years later, on the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, preparing to write “Horror Noire,” she was aligned with a university librarian obsessed with horror films. He dipped into his budgets for horror, and more horror. “People were just starting to shoot this stuff on their phones,” she recalled, “so films were flooding in.” She walked across her office and held her hand about waist-high against a wall. “I would have horror films stacked up to here. Just hundreds, hundreds, coming in from all over the world. DVDs would show up wrapped just in tin foil! This became the project that would not die. I would have three, four, five screens, playing simultaneously — just to get through it all. You could say that I found myself driven.”
She couldn’t shake a fascination with “our desire to erect borders, while still wanting to see those borders blown up.” That’s as neat an explanation of our love of superheroes, space sagas and monsters as you’ll find: Horror is just another frame through which we view our everyday, existential fear. She has never regretted leaving John Deere behind.
After an hour of chatting about horror movies, the door of her office cracked open.
An assistant whispered: Coleman’s next appointment was imminent. Her other, more stately administrative world beckoned. Outside, cubicle farms of office workers spilled out onto the sidewalks and lined up at Starbucks and Jimmy John’s for salad bowls, like zombies.
