- Chloe-Kaleah Stewart
- Oct 21, 2025
The “black guy dies first” line has become shorthand for a long-standing, maddening expectation in American horror: Black characters show up, they warn us of danger (or crack a joke), and then, too often, get dispatched before the final credits roll. That shorthand isn’t just a punchline; it’s a pattern with roots in Hollywood’s representational habits, and it carries cultural meaning about expendability, narrative function, and who is allowed to survive fear on screen. Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris’s book The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema from Fodder to Oscar traces how that pattern evolved, how it persisted through decades of genre filmmaking, and how Black filmmakers and writers have worked to contest it as horror itself changes.
What the trope does (and why it matters)
At first glance, the gag, “the black guy dies first”, reads like a lazy shorthand for a disposable side character. But Means Coleman and Harris show that the trope operates on multiple levels: it’s a symptom of industry casting and storytelling economies that limit the emotional and narrative investments audiences are allowed to make in Black characters, and it’s also a recurring cultural signal that mirrors broader social hierarchies. When a single demographic is repeatedly positioned as expendable, the pattern reinforces assumptions about whose lives are narratively (and sometimes literally) less valued. The Black Guy Dies First situates this trope historically, from early low-budget genre pictures to contemporary Oscar-winning works, and explains how Black horror has been both shaped by and resistant to those conventions.
A turning point: Black horror, agency, and survival
Means Coleman and Harris chart a Black horror lineage that moves from “fodder” roles to films that insist on Black interiority, agency, and survival. The book argues that when Black filmmakers claim horror spaces, they can rework the rules: survival, sacrifice, and resilience come to mean different things when viewed through the lens of Black lives. Rather than accepting the function of Black characters as setup or comic relief, recent films insist on complexity and on whom the camera treats as central. The book employs close readings of numerous films to demonstrate how representational shifts in horror cinema reflect broader social and cinematic developments.
Enter The Blackening: a subversive joke that trusts its fear
Tim Story’s 2023 horror-comedy The Blackening (written by Dewayne Perkins with Tracy Oliver) is an explicit answer to the trope: it stages a classic “cabin in the woods” slasher scenario populated almost entirely by Black characters, then asks, in effect, “So who dies first now?” The film was conceived from a sketch about Black horror logic and expanded into a movie that both honors the mechanics of slasher films and pulls the rug out from under genre expectations. Story and the writers intentionally built the film around Black cultural knowledge games, jokes, and references, and then made those things matter for survival. Critics and interviews with the director/writers stress that the point was to flip the expectation and to celebrate Blackness rather than allow it to be shorthand for expendability.
How The Blackening does the work (mechanics and tone)
Several choices in The Blackening make the subversion work on screen. First, the cast is predominantly Black across a range of personalities and archetypes, which denies the film an “other” to kill off for easy stakes. Second, the movie makes Black cultural knowledge part of the plot. Questions about who “really” knows certain cultural touchstones become matters of life or death, so Black identity isn’t a background trait but the engine of tension. Third, the film blends genuine scare mechanics with comedy in a way that both honors horror’s beating heart (real stakes, real peril) and allows the audience to relish recognition rather than grief. In interviews, Story explains that he wanted to remain respectful of horror’s scare imperative while using the film’s comedic voice to interrogate and invert old tropes.
Where the book and the film meet: critique and possibility
Means Coleman and Harris’s historical frame helps us read The Blackening as part of a larger corrective arc. The book documents how representation in horror has grown from disposable roles to films that foreground Black life, fear, and agency and The Blackening performs one such corrective by using genre mechanics to make the audience question why they expected a Black character to be expendable in the first place. The film doesn’t simply laugh at the trope; it stages a narrative test that forces characters (and viewers) to reckon with assumptions about knowledge, authenticity, and survival, the very assumptions Means Coleman and Harris map across horror history.
Limits and tensions: parody vs. politics.
Subversion by satire is powerful, but it’s not a total cure. Means Coleman and Harris emphasize that representational change requires structural shifts in casting, authorship, and industry power; one clever movie won’t erase decades of patterns. The Blackening pushes back effectively by centering Black joy, humor, and competence, but the book reminds us to look beyond single texts: are Black creatives consistently given the chance to shape horror’s center? Are Black characters allowed complex survival arcs across mainstream cinema? These are the longer-term questions that link the film’s playful subversion to the book’s deeper intervention.
Conclusion
The “black guy dies first” trope survives as a cultural shorthand precisely because it was never just about one character’s death; it was about who filmmakers assumed audiences would care about. The Black Guy Dies First gives us the vocabulary and history to see why that matters; films like The Blackening show one way storytellers can flip the script literally and figuratively. By centering Black experience as integral to the story’s stakes rather than incidental to them, contemporary Black horror both honors genre traditions and makes space for a new rulebook: one where survival, irony, and satire are tools for rethinking whose stories get to matter at the end of the night.
