Keywords

Introduction

Blaxploitation film history, as posited by Harrison M. J. Sherrod, is, in part, “a vampire story”; that is, the “pervasive discourse surrounding the movement has hinged on a contentious debate over precisely who was getting exploited or, put differently, who was getting the life sucked out of them” (2016, 110). Sherrod’s observation is noteworthy because the film that spawned the blaxploitation horror genre and America’s departure from the vampirism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is Blacula (William Crain 1972), the first Hollywood-produced film featuring a Black vampire (Jenkins 2019, 4). According to Leerom Medovoi, Blacula’s critique of Hollywood’s depiction of slavery and its blaxploitation-like representation of the Black urban present make it an “unusual film,” since it “represents the rare issue (for a popular film) of black historical change” (1998, 7). To appreciate the impact that Blacula had on blaxploitation horror, vampire films, and the rise of the cinematic Black vampire, a brief overview of blaxploitation history will be presented that will help to explain the selection of Black vampires discussed in this chapter and the politics of Black historical change that facilitated their emergence.

In his seminal work, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, Ed Guerrero contends that while blaxploitation refers to “the production of the sixty or so Hollywood films that centered on black narratives, featured black casts playing out various action-adventures in the ghetto, and were released roughly between 1969 and 1974,” it is also the product of the film industry “targeting the black audience with a specific line of cheaply made, black-cast films shaped with the ‘exploitation’ strategies Hollywood routinely uses to make the majority of its films” (1993, 69). A succinct version of Guerrero’s definition is provided by Novotny Lawrence, who defines blaxploitation cinema as “movies made by black and white film-makers in the attempt to capitalize on the African American film audience” (2016, 1). Similarly, Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin note that the term blaxploitation implies that “these films exploited African American audiences in that they took money out of African American communities to fill white Hollywood’s bank accounts” (2009, 89). Moreover, exploiting the pocketbooks of African Americans meant exploiting their desire to see nonstereotypical depictions of themselves in Hollywood films. As Mikel Koven eloquently puts it, blaxploitation films “must be films that exploit our desire to see black people, especially African-Americans, on screen, doing presumably what one expects or wants to see African-Americans doing” (2001, 7). Given that Hollywood was near economic collapse in the late 1960s, blaxploitation films were viewed as solutions to its financial problems. As Josiah Howard reminds us, “Columbia, Fox and, in particular, MGM – who held an infamous yard sale of celebrity props and costumes – were teetering on the verge of bankruptcy” by 1970 (2021, 10).

In addition to its economic problems, Hollywood was also attempting to solve its tense relationship with Black audiences via the blaxploitation film. Hollywood’s political problems were created by its history of degrading depictions of Black people and the rise of the Black Power movement in the late 1960s (Harris and Mushtaq 2013, 30), yet one of the reasons why the blaxploitation era lasted less than a decade was due to the class differences in what African Americans expected or wanted to see Black people doing in these films. For instance, many middle-class African Americans and non-Black Americans believed that blaxploitation films were providing negative images of Black people, images that will influence how Black people are viewed and treated in the world outside the screen and whom inner-city Black youth view as role models (Benshoff and Griffin 2009, 89). For example, Junius Griffin, former president of the Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch of the NAACP, who coined the term “blaxploitation” in 1972, stated the following at a press conference: “The transformation from the stereotyped Stepin’ Fetchit to Super Nigger on the screen is just another form of cultural genocide. The black community should deal with this problem by whatever means necessary” (qtd. in Guerrero 1993, 101). While some of the criticisms of blaxploitation films were valid, these films were also, as Lewis Beale puts it, “utterly empowering, gobbled up by African American audiences desperate for strong, and recognizable, working-class heroes” (2009, par. 3). For the young working-class audiences who supported films such as Sweet Sweetback’s Baaadaasss Song (Melvin Van Peebles 1971), Shaft (Gordon Parks 1971), and Superfly (Gordon Parks, Jr. 1972), blaxploitation films were captivating because of “their ghetto style, talented casts – Jim Brown, Richard Roundtree, Pam Grier, Rosalind Cash, Paul Winfield, Bernie Casey, Robert Hooks – and their willingness to take on contemporary social issues” (Beale 2009, par. 10). While the debates about blaxploitation films would contribute to the genre’s demise, these debates would initially make the films more popular, providing the ideological and economic conditions that will give birth to Blacula , the blaxploitation horror genre, and the cinematic Black vampire.

According to Robin R. Means Coleman, “Blacula was the decade’s gold standard for recreating a (White) horror classic in the image of Blackness, while also tackling issues of Black pride and empowerment” (2011, 120). The film’s box office success not only led to the production of Bill Gunn’s Ganja and Hess (1973), the Black vampire film whose “philosophical musings” on the vampire would become the “cornerstone” of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, but it also helped shape the Dracula adaptations by John Badham and Francis Ford Coppola in 1979 and 1992, respectively, by making the vampire more human than monster (Benshoff 2000, 45). Indeed, Hollywood was so impressed with Blacula’s box office success that American International Pictures, the studio that released Blacula , announced its plan to remake all classical Hollywood horror films with all-Black casts (2000, 32). In addition to Ganja and Hess , the box office success of Blacula led to the production and release of its sequel, Scream, Blacula, Scream (Bob Kelljan 1973), as well as AIP’s Abby (William Girdler 1974), (The Zombies of) Sugar Hill (Paul Maslansky 1974), and J.D.’s Revenge (Arthur Marks 1976). Other film companies also sought to capitalize on the economic potential of Black-cast horror films such as Exclusive International’s Blackenstein (1973), 20th Century Fox’s The House on Skull Mountain (Ron Honthaner 1974), Bryanston Pictures’ Lord Shango (Raymond Marsh 1975), and Dimension’s Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (William Crain 1975).

The distinction between “Black horror” films and “Blacks in horror” films articulated by Coleman is useful for understanding the selection of the vampire films discussed in this chapter. In contrast to Blacks in horror films, where Black people and Blackness are presented in “the context of horror, even if the horror film is not wholly or substantially focused on either one” (2011, 6), Black horror films tend to be “‘race’ films,” that is, films that contain a “narrative focus that calls attention to racial identity, in this case Blackness – Black culture, history, ideologies, experiences, politics, language, humor, aesthetics, style, music, and the like” (2011, 7). Drawing upon Coleman’s distinction, this chapter will focus on Black vampire films instead of Blacks in vampire films. In addition to critiquing the White power structure, as is the case with most Black horror films during and after the blaxploitation era (see Coleman 2011, 119), Black vampire films – Blacula, Scream, Blacula, Scream , Ganja and Hess , Def by Temptation (James Bond III 1990), and Vampire in Brooklyn (Wes Craven 1995) – offer us some insight into some of the intracommunal debates within Black America. Indeed, unlike Blacks in vampire films (e.g., Vampira [Clive Donner 1974], Vamp [Richard Wenk 1986], Blade [Stephen Norrington 1998], Blade II [Guillermo del Toro 2002], and Blade: Trinity [David S. Goyer 2004]), which are indicative of the “multiculturalism in Hollywood vampire films” where “the persistence of whiteness as a normative definition of ‘Americanness’” is centered (Hudson 2008, 149), Black vampire films can shed light on the debates about the meaning of Blackness in Black America during the last third of the twentieth century. While there are several themes and ideologies under interrogation in these films regarding the state and future of Blackness, questions about Black America’s relationship to foreign Blackness and the state of its sexual politics are the ones that consistently appear in Black vampire films.

Foreign Blackness and the Black Vampire

The Black vampires discussed in this chapter are similar to what Hudson refers to as classical Hollywood’s “immigrant-vampires.” Hudson points out that the cinematic immigrant-vampire played by Béla Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) not only established “an iconography for Hollywood’s vampires,” but it also represented a White ethnicity that was racialized as not White or off-white: “Appearing ethnically different yet racially same by today’s definitions, the Lugosian immigrant-vampire was nonetheless an unmistakable ‘foreigner’ in the 1930s” (2008, 128). Thus, what made the Lugosian vampire’s foreignness terrifying for White American audiences during the 1930s is that it embodied the realization that there is more to being “White” than having a White body and the subsequent fear that White-looking people, Black and non-Black, were passing as real White people. As Hudson argues, if we situate Hollywood’s vampire films within American debates regarding immigration and assimilation, we find that “the fears and anxieties over miscegenation and passing that are expressed in the films come into focus symbolically as legacies of the forced immigration of slavery and indentured servitude” (2008, 128). Like the Lugosian vampire, the Black vampires of Black vampire films are Black foreigners or Black people who embody a foreign Blackness, and they speak to the legacy of slavery and the notions of Blackness after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (i.e., the Hart-Cellar Act), which “lifted quotas based on race and nationality and established new preferences for family reunification and those with desired professional skills” (Halter and Capozzola 2014, 1). Indeed, Blacula , Scream, Blacula, Scream , Ganja and Hess , Def by Temptation , and Vampire in Brooklyn suggest that African Americans viewed Black immigrants coming to post-1965 America as family members whose foreign Blackness is simultaneously welcomed and shunned.

Blacula begins in 1780 with African royals, Mamuwalde (William Marshall) and his beloved Luva (Vonetta McGee), visiting Count Dracula in Transylvania to discuss strategies to end the African slave trade. However, the Count tells the African royals, as he lustfully stares at Luva, that he will not use his influence to stop the slave trade because he finds it “intriguing and delightful”; therefore, it has “merit” (Blacula). While Mamuwalde demands that he and Luva be taken elsewhere for lodging after the disgusting comments, the Count is so offended by Mamuwalde’s criticism of him that he curses the African prince with his vampirism: “You shall pay black prince. I shall place a curse of suffering on you that will doom you to a living hell… . I curse you with my name. You shall be Blacula: a vampire, a prince of darkness, a living fiend… Blood will become your only desire” (Blacula ). As implied by the Count’s curse, “[Mamuwalde’s] desire for blood will conflict with his desire to free people of African descent from the legacies of slavery” (Jenkins 2005, 61). Although Mamuwalde’s desire for blood overrides his concern with the plight of African Americans in 1972 Los Angeles, his bloodlust does not override his desire to reunite with Luva, who appears to be reincarnated as Tina. In his attempt to be with Tina, Mamuwalde courts and turns her into a vampire. However, Dr. Thomas and his wife Michelle, who is Tina’s sister, mistakenly kill the vampirized Tina. Distraught over Tina’s death, Mamuwalde kills himself by walking onto the roof of a warehouse during daylight.

In Scream, Blacula, Scream , Mamuwalde is raised from the dead by Willis Fortier, a voodoo practitioner who is upset that his adopted sister Lisa Fortier (Pam Grier) was chosen to be the group’s new leader. However, after resurrecting Mamuwale, Willis is transformed into a vampire servant of Mamuwalde, who believes that Lisa has the power to rid him of Dracula’s curse. While Lisa agrees to help exorcise Mamuwalde of his vampirism, they are interrupted by the police and Justin, an African art collector and Lisa’s former boyfriend, so Mamuwalde begins killing the policemen and eventually threatening Justin’s life. Lisa becomes horrified and seizes the voodoo doll of Mamuwalde, which she created for the exorcism, and repeatedly stabs it with a wooden arrow as the former African prince screams in pain and eventually dies.

Blacula and Scream, Blacula, Scream offer us a Black immigrant-vampire in the figure of Mamuwalde whose foreign Blackness shifts in meaning from the first film to the second, a shift that suggests a crisis within Black America over the meaning of Blackness. That shift, according to Brooks E. Hefner, is reflective of Mamuwalde’s narrative going from radical to stereotypical: “The radical nature of [Blacula’s] critique seems even larger when placed next to its sequel Scream, Blacula, Scream , a politically incoherent film that returns to the stereotypes and blaxploitation tropes rejected by Blacula” (64). Yet, as Frances Gateward contends, both films depict Mamuwalde as desperately seeking “freedom and a sense of the identity he once possessed, not only for himself, but also for others caught by powers beyond themselves” (par. 13). In Blacula , the search for an authentic Black identity is critiqued because it implies that African Americans can only be African or American, but not both (Jenkins 2005, 72). As Lawrence explains, while Mamuwalde is othered by White people because of his Blackness, “his noble African background positions him as the Other amongst contemporary black Americans” (“Fear” 21). The othering of Mamuwalde by the African American characters is somewhat surprising since the film was produced during the rise of “paternal Pan-Africanism,” the belief that the so-called emasculated man-matriarchal woman problem in the African American community, as depicted in the infamous 1965 study by Daniel Moynihan, could be solved by a “cultural return” to Africa (Jenkins 2019, 94). In contrast to paternal Pan-Africanism, Blacula suggests that many African Americans during the Black Power era were not convinced that a cultural return to Africa, which tended to be imagined as a precolonial Africa, would solve the problems faced by African Americans in the present. Indeed, Blacula proposes that because the meaning of Blackness differs from place to place, group to group, and era to era, what ties Africans and African Americans to each other is not a shared cultural heritage but a shared history of oppression defined by skin color (Lawrence 2009, 21). Thus, part of Blacula’s radicalness is its use of the Black immigrant-vampire to show that Blackness is not a biological reality but a product of White supremacy.

While Mamuwalde’s foreign Blackness is the basis of his othering by African Americans in Blacula , it becomes a source of authority for the African American middle class in Scream, Blacula, Scream . Unlike Dr. Thomas, who is immediately suspicious of Mamuwalde’s presence, Justin and the middle-class African Americans at his party, which is celebrating the new pieces added to his African art collection, warmly welcome Mamuwalde into their community. The Black middle class’s welcoming of Mamuwalde’s African Blackness validates not only the Africanness of the African American middle class but also the paternal Pan-Africanist’s call for a cultural return to Africa. For instance, when Mamuwalde politely corrects the African Studies professor on the origin and dating of the jewelry in Justin’s art collection, which includes Luva’s necklace, Justin sides with Mamuwalde not the professor. In this light, what others Mamuwalde in Scream, Blacula, Scream is his assumption that Blackness in late-twentieth-century America can be purely Black. Indeed, his attempt to exorcise himself of Dracula’s curse, instead of using the curse to help with the realization of Black Power, not only leads to his death, but it also suggests that there are potential dangers to not accepting the fact that late-twentieth-century African Americans are African and American.

Unlike Mamuwalde, whose vampirism is European, the vampirism of Dr. Hess Green of Ganja and Hess is African. Played by Duane Jones, who starred in George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Hess holds doctorates in anthropology and geology, and he is known for his scholarship on ancient Nigeria. Hess’s vampirism results from his study of Myrthia, an ancient African civilization whose fall began when its Queen’s need for blood became so intense that she bled her slaves to death. As explained in Blood Couple (1973), what Kevin Bell refers to as “the ‘straight version’ [of Ganja and Hess ] that Gunn wrote and filmed to placate his producers” (2021, 84), in addition to the Queen’s blood consumption, “the entire population of Myrthia had become addicted to human blood. It was only a matter of years until an almost bloodless nation had begun to die of pernicious anemia” (Blood Couple). Thus, Hess becomes a vampire not from the bite of a Myrthian vampire but from being stabbed three times by a “diseased” dagger from the ancient kingdom (Ganja and Hess ). The person who stabs Hess is his research assistant George Meda (Bill Gunn), a self-described “neurotic” whose tripartite stabbing, according to the textual plot summary offered at the beginning of the film, symbolizes Christianity’s holy trinity: God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost. We discover after Meda’s death that he is married to Ganja (Marlene Clark), who telephones Hess in search of her lost husband. When Hess invites Ganja to his estate, they develop an erotic relationship that leads to marriage and to Hess transforming Ganja into a vampire. The film ends with Hess committing suicide because he is unable to control his addiction to blood and sex, while Ganja chooses to remain a vampire, implying that her newly acquired vampirism, as Marlo D. David argues, “enhances” her ability to maintain her status as an “independent individual” and “erotic subject” (2011, 36).

According to Manthia Diawara and Phyllis R. Klotman, Ganja and Hess “indicts Hess Green’s very wealth and class position as vampirism” (1991, 301). For example, Hess steals blood from a doctor’s office that appears to serve Black working-class folks, and the first people he kills for blood are Black, a sex worker and her pimp-lover. Hess not only feeds on the Black working-class but also on its White counterpart, as represented by his murder of a White woman who is a sex worker and mother of an infant, whose crib is next to bed where Hess has sex with and kills the baby’s mother. Yet, Luther Williams, an African American reverend who works as Hess’s part-time chauffeur and stableman, tells us that Hess is not “a criminal” but a “victim” (Ganja and Hess ), implying that he is not entirely responsible for the murders he commits. Implicit in Luther’s assessment of Hess’s moral status is that Hess’s wealth and class position are not responsible for his exploitation and murder of the Black urban poor. As David argues, Gunn’s depiction of Hess’s symbols of American success “wishes to revalue certain signifiers – wealth, intellectualism, high art – to be inclusive of blackness” (2011, 43). Thus, according to Luther, what makes Hess murder working-class Black people is the African Blackness that has infected his body, a Blackness that emerged from an African society shaped and destroyed by slavery and blood addiction. In this light, Ganja and Hess is more like Blacula than Scream, Blacula, Scream in that it is critical of Afrocentrism’s call for a cultural return to precolonial Africa. However, since Hess’s research and scholarship on Nigeria did not lead to him killing Black people, his vampirism serves as a warning about certain types of African Blackness, especially those that have not been shaped by Christianity. Such thinking helps to explain why Hess rejects the call of the Myrthian Queen, who appears in his dreams, to come with her and why he submits to the Black Church by letting the shadow of the cross cover his heart. However, while one could assume that the Black Church represents the cure to Hess’s vampirism because Myrthian vampirism is associated with the horrors of slavery and uncontrolled desire, Sherrod argues that since the “disease and undeath” of Myrthian vampirism can only be destroyed through death, one is not sure if “Hess’s conversion to Christian disciple signifies salvation” (2016, 109).

Unlike Blacula , Scream, Blacula, Scream , and Ganja and Hess , Bond’s Def by Temptation suggests that the cultural-return debate was irrelevant by 1990. Set in New York City, Def by Temptation breathes “new, scary life into morality messages” (Coleman 2011, 170), as it focuses on the religious crisis that confronts Joel, a twenty-year-old Black man taking a break from seminary school to determine if his path to becoming a minister is truly something he wants to do. Played by Bond, who is also the film’s writer, director, and producer, Joel goes to Brooklyn to discuss his crisis in faith with his older brother K (Kadeem Hardison), whom Gateward refers to as “Joel’s economically struggling older brother” (2004, par. 26). K’s economic struggle is noteworthy because he left the North Carolina hometown and the church that he and Joel were raised in to pursue a career in acting. As Coleman points outs, Brooklyn in Def by Temptation is “home to a number of corrupting influences – sexual escapades, infidelity, booze, and in one dramatic scene even television, literally, becomes deadly,” whereas Southern Black culture is “akin to decent, forthright sensibilities and in direct opposition to the North” (2011, 171). Indeed, Temptation (Cynthia Bond), a vampire succubus from hell, kills Black men who succumb to the corrupting influences of the northern city, and she derives satisfaction from seducing men like Joel, religiously devout men who are experiencing a moment of doubt. However, Joel’s faith, instilled in him by his grandmother who raised K and Joel after their parents died in a car crash, not only prevents him from succumbing to Temptation’s sexual advances, but it also gives him the power to destroy her or at least this iteration of her, since she reappears at the end of the film in the body of Dougy (Bill Nunn), a Black man who investigates paranormal events for a federal agency and discovers, along with K, that Temptation is a supernatural creature.

According to Bond’s film, the debate about the role of foreign Blackness in African American culture was replaced by debates over the role that Christianity and racial uplift should play at the end of the twentieth century. “The film’s conservatism,” as Gateward points out, “is rooted in both the exploitation film’s common definitions of sexual difference and in its reliance on the contradictory and problematic liberation ideology of racial uplift” (2004, par. 27). The religious and uplift ideology of Bond’s film can be said to represent the sensibilities of whom Angela D. Dillard refers to as multicultural conservatives, that is, African American, Latino American, Asian American, women, and LGBTQ+ conservatives who represent themselves as “poster children for the American Dream of individual mobility, proof positive that merit and determination can produce success” (2001, 3). Speaking specifically about African American conservatives, Dillard notes how they, like their non-Black colleagues, use Christian doctrine to validate their conservatism: “All invoke the centrality of religious commitment and an active faith in both American and African American culture” (2001, 9). This “active faith” in Christianity and in American and African American cultures is represented in Def by Temptation via the absence of African Blackness. For example, Temptation is a Black vampire who originates from hell, not from Africa or any other part of the African diaspora, and none of the African Americans in the film are concerned with identifying with African culture or interrogating their Blackness. Thus, like the Black multicultural conservatives, who insist that capitalism is “consistent with God’s plan for his creation” (Dillard 2001, 9–10), Def by Temptation asserts that faith in Jesus, not the embracing of a foreign Blackness, is the only answer to urban strife and decadence (Gateward 2004, par. 26). Thus, like Blacula , Def by Temptation suggests that African American are, in the words of Harold Cruse, “American products, created out of American conditions and ingredients, requiring, in the final analysis, an American solution” (1967, 421); therefore, questions of Blackness in the film are questions of American Blackness.

While Def by Temptation suggests that the debate about the role of foreign Blackness in African American culture was no longer pertinent in the 1990s, Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn implies that the debate was still relevant, but Caribbean Blackness replaces its African counterpart as the image of foreign Blackness under examination. As Kendra R. Parker argues, Craven’s film “focuses on finding one’s self and re-claiming a lost, fractured, or hidden heritage” (2020, 35). Like Bond’s film, Vampire in Brooklyn is set in 1990s Brooklyn, and it centers on Maximillian (Eddie Murphy), who belongs to a vampire race that was driven out of Egypt many centuries ago. While some went to Transylvania’s Carpathian Mountains, Max and several other vampires went to a remote island in the Bermuda triangle, where they fed on the blood of unsuspecting travelers. A group of vampire hunters found Max and his people on the island, and they killed all the vampires except for Max. Because, as Max articulates at beginning of the film, “a vampire alone is a doomed vampire,” Max leaves for Brooklyn to search for the woman who is the child of a vampire-human union and to convince her to become his companion. That woman is Rita Veder (Angela Bassett), a police detective who is unaware that she is part vampire. In competition with Max for Rita’s love is Justice (Allen Payne), her work colleague, and the film ends with Rita choosing between Max and Justice, between foreign and domestic Blackness.

According to Richard Iton, twentieth-century new-world Black leaders (e.g., W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey) tended to express their diasporic hegemonies in the “languages of gender and sexuality” (2008, 260). Indeed, Max and Justice’s competition evokes what Iton refers to as the “internal debate” within the African diaspora during the twentieth century that centered on “what kind of man should be on top” (2008, 261). The results of that debate were two problematic narratives of Africa that emerged among new-world Black leaders – the “feminine Africa narrative” and the “masculine Africa narrative” (Jenkins 2019, 91). The feminine Africa narrative, which dominated the first half of the twentieth century and emerged when the USA began its imperialist mission in the 1890s, imagines “an Africa that has been feminized by European colonialism, requiring black men in the West to remasculinize her” (2019, 92). In contrast, the masculine Africa narrative, which dominated the latter part of the twentieth century, posits that distance from Africa has resulted in a short supply of “normative, natural, and desirable [Black] masculinities and femininities” in the West (Iton 2008, 261). Thus, unlike the feminine Africa narrative’s positioning of Black people in the West as Africa’s saviors, the masculine Africa narrative defines African American men as less “Black” than other Black men in Africa and the West Indies. As Iton notes, “the discursive articulations of interactions between black males in the United States and the West Indies [in the second half of the twentieth century] can be seen as paralleling those between new world blacks in general and continental Africans” (2008, 263). Implicit in these articulations is a hierarchy of Black manhood in which “Afro-West Indian males are lacking in comparison to their counterparts from the continent, and African American manhood is limited, defined, and circumscribed by, and found wanting in relation to, the models provided by black men from the Caribbean” (2008, 263).

Given this context, Max represents the horrors of the masculine Africa narrative for African American men. Unlike Justice, a middle-class professional who only knows the Blackness of Brooklyn, Max is like Mamuwalde in that he represents an elite Blackness from elsewhere that African American women find attractive. Max points this out to Rita when she refuses to become a vampire after he has bitten her: “Then go back. Go back to your little shoe-box apartment filled with those empty dreams. Go back to church and don’t forget the collection plate, the preacher’s whiskey is running low. Go back to your job, where they laugh and call you crazy. Or face the truth: that you have no place to go but to me” (Vampire in Brooklyn ). According to Max, by identifying with her American Blackness instead of her vampire Blackness, Rita will continue to stunt her financial and personal growth. Moreover, as Parker argues, Rita choosing Justice, who can be read as “an agent of or mouthpiece for whiteness,” over Max suggests that she is choosing to identify with a whiten Blackness instead of an unadulterated Blackness (2020, 45–46). Thus, unlike Mamuwalde who is infected by a White vampirism and represents the feminine Africa narrative, Max embodies the logic of the masculine Africa narrative in that he views the African American community as a “feminine space” that “needs to be remasculinized by African or Afro-Caribbean men to solve its crisis of dilution and emasculization” (Jenkins 2019, 92). Indeed, Max is represented as “a foreign black man whose blackness and manhood are absent of anything white and feminine,” giving him the ability to “reblacken and remasculinize the [African American] community” (2019, 106).

The link between foreignness and vampirism in Black vampire films highlight the debate between Afrocentrics and Black conservatives over the meaning and future African American Blackness. On the one hand, the Afrocentric call to culturally return to Africa is a rational response to American anti-Blackness; thus, the presence of Mamuwalde, Ganja, Hess, Temptation, and Max suggests that many African Americans during the last third of the twentieth century felt that being African American is not paying off socially, economically, or politically. On the other hand, the Black conservative call for Black people to put their faith in American and African American cultures suggests that being “African” is not going to help Black people in America and, in fact, might harm them as symbolized by the African American victims killed by Mamuwalde, Ganja, Hess, Temptation, and Max. Thus, the Black vampire’s foreignness in Black vampire films sheds some light on how African Americans dealt with the shift from the feminine Africa narrative to the masculine Africa narrative at the end of the twentieth century .

Black Sexual Politics and the Black Vampire

With respect to their interrogation of Black sexual politics, “a set of ideas and social practices shaped by gender, race, and sexuality that frame Black men and women’s treatment of one another, as well as how African Americans are perceived and treated by others” (Collins 2005, 7), Black vampire films, like blaxploitation horror films in general, provided a space to challenge Hollywood’s stereotypical portrayals of Black sexuality as aggressive, hypersexual, or invisible. As Angélique Harris and Omar Mushtaq note, blaxploitation films “allowed Black characters to reclaim their sexuality – their femininity and masculinity” (2013, 32). While the approaches to reclaiming Black sexuality in blaxploitation films were often problematic, that reclamation project did provide opportunities to interrogate White and Black America’s conceptions of Black femininity, masculinity, and sexuality. For example, Yvonne D. Sims asserts that while blaxploitation films did little to change long-held stereotypes of Black women, 1973, when Jack Hill’s Coffy and Jack Starrett’s Cleopatra Jones were released, “marked the first time that audiences saw African American women in non-servitude roles” (2006, 8). Grier, Tamara Dobson, Teresa Graves, and Jeannie Bell are the Black women who played the “empowered, independent heroines” of blaxploitation, and they brought a new image of African American femininity to the screen: “It was goodbye to the headscarves worn by Mammy and the wavy hair of the Exotic Other, and a refreshing and political greeting to the woman with natural hairstyle modeled, according to [Cedric] Robinson, from civil rights heroines such as Angela Davis” (2006, 9). According to Sims, blaxploitation’s Black heroines “greatly influenced” the development of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley character in the Alien series (1979, 1986, 1992, and 1997), “a character that encouraged studios to begin making action-oriented movies with women in the lead” (2006, 8). In blaxploitation horror, the new image of Black femininity is whom Coleman dubs the “Enduring Woman.”

The Enduring Woman of 1970s horror films, unlike the Final Girl discussed by Carol Clover in Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1993), is a Black heroine who survives her battle against the monster. The monsters that Enduring Women fight against often embody racism and corruption; therefore, the Enduring Woman’s victory is “elusive” precisely because the battle against anti-Blackness and the corruption that comes with it is never ending: “The Black woman’s triumphant walk into the sunset promises to take her, not to toward a life of peace, but back into the midst of rogue police, sexist men, and ‘the Man’ who is exploiting her Black community” (Coleman 2011, 132). For instance, unlike Tina of Blacula , who counters the stereotype of the hypersexual Black woman but functions as Mamuwalde’s passive love interest, Lisa of Scream, Blacula, Scream is Justin’s savior and Mamuwalde’s potential savior, the one who has the power and the right type of Blackness to exorcise the evil Whiteness that runs through his veins. Thus, while the Enduring Woman, in contrast to the Final Girl who sets aside her sexuality or uses masculine names and weaponry, has “lips and hips, but no chainsaw” (Coleman 2011, 132), Lisa implies that Black women’s real power comes from their “lips,” through which ideologies are voiced. Indeed, Lisa does not wear revealing clothing or heavy makeup, and Mamuwalde implies that she is an intellectual, remarking that Voodoo is “an exceedingly complex science,” even though she defines it as a “religion” (Scream). In this light, Ganja is the vampiric version of Lisa or whom Coleman refers to as the “wicked Enduring Woman” (2011, 132). In other words, while Lisa chooses her lips as the weapon to battle vampirism, Ganja uses her lips and hips to survive it.

Ganja is, as David argues, “an intellectually erotic individual” who “destabilizes” hegemonic conceptions of Black sexuality, arguing for “a holism or dualism of mind and body regarding sexuality” (2011, 43). Such an approach to Black sexuality, especially Black women’s sexuality, threatens “a number of regimes of power because any awareness of sexuality as something more than a commodified expression of gender inequality and heteropatriarchy forces the spectator to ask new questions” (2011, 43). One of the “new questions” that the film forced Black and White audiences in the 1970s to consider is the following: Why are Black women who are intellectually and erotically beautiful alone in their struggle to survive and thrive in America? This point is captured in Ganja’s monologue about her interaction with her mother when she was a preteen living in Boston. After returning home from a snowball fight with other kids, Ganja is slapped by her mother because someone told her mother that Ganja was being chased by a boy. When the young Ganja protested, her mother called her “a liar and a slut.” Ganja ends her monologue by revealing the one compliment that her mother gave her and how it shaped her approach to the world: “The only thing she could bring herself to say was that I was beautiful. And I loathed my beauty for that. Because she found it appealing. But that was a very decisive day in my life. Because that day I decided that I would provide for Ganja, always. Do whatever had to be done. Take whatever steps had to be taken. But always take care of Ganja” (Ganja and Hess ). Thus, long before Ganja became a vampire, her mother and society had turned her into a wicked Enduring Woman, the Black woman who does not “expect a knight in shining armor to come to her rescue; as such, she has developed ways to ensure her own survival, and even to thrive” (Coleman 2011, 134).

While Coleman argues that “Ganja opts to endure as infected, and as a sexy succubus, continuing on alone masquerading as high class and cultured” (2011, 134), her decision also tells us that “her life as a vampire Other is not distinct from her status as a black woman Other” (David 2011, 36). Indeed, Ganja’s refusal to join Hess in his conversion indicates that she does not see the benefits of becoming a Christian disciple: “Ganja is a contemporary black woman. She is tired of being subservient to the church and to black men. She’s glad that Meda and Hess, the self-destructive artist and the bourgeois patriarch, are gone” (Diawara and Klotman 1991, 314). Thus, unlike Mamuwalde’s and Hess’s attempts to cure themselves of their vampirisms, Ganja’s decision to embrace the vampirism that was forced upon her implies that being an Africanized vampire is more liberating for her and other Black women who embrace their intellectual and erotic beauty than being a Black Christian.

In contrast to Gunn’s representation of Ganja, the depiction of Temptation suggests that Black women like Ganja are demons who threaten Black racial uplift. Although the deaths of the playboy, adulterer, and gay man in Def by Temptation are represented as self-induced and deserved, Temptation is the monster who must be killed to help make racial uplift a reality. As Gateward puts it, the film constructs death and destruction through gender with Temptation representing “another embodiment of the monstrous feminine as succubus, who, in this case, reveals a voracious, sadistic sexual appetite” (2004, par. 27). Indeed, Black women who engage in premarital or extramarital sex, according to the film, are not that different from a demonic vampire that uses her sexuality to destroy wayward Black men instead of helping to uplift them. For example, when K tells Temptation that he has to postpone her offer for a one-night stand because he has to meet Joel, implying that he retains some of his Black Church upbringing by choosing family over the possibility of fulfilling a sexual fantasy, she immediately loses interests in making him her next victim as indicated by the hateful glare that briefly emerges in her eyes and her immediate disappearance. Implicit in this scene is that a good Black woman would have accepted K’s postponement request, since he is a good Black man, one who, in this instance, possesses a family-first attitude, has a respectable career, and does not see Temptation as a potential sexual conquest. Thus, Temptation embodies what Black conservatives during the 1980s and 1990s identified as the causes of the social ills that plague Black urban America – “the lack of sexual repression and the loss of religious faith” (Gateward 2004, par. 27).

Unlike Ganja and Temptation, Rita is the Black female vampire whom Black conservatives of the 1990s would call the right type of Black woman. According to Parker, “Rita’s choice between Max and Justice [i]s a product of her two-ness and of her confusion about whether she can turn from her heritage and survive” (2020, 46). Rita’s two-ness not only grapples with which type of Blackness to turn from (i.e., her American or Caribbean Blackness), but it also speaks to the duality that has plagued cinematic representations of Black women’s sexuality as either hidden or hypersexual. As Parker argues, Rita’s decision to choose Justice over Max is also a decision to choose the “Madonna” image of Black women’s sexuality over the “whore” image (2020, 46). While that choice situates Rita as a vampire version of Blacula’s Tina in which Rita’s decision counters the stereotype of the hypersexual Black woman, it is also problematic because the options offered to her are disturbingly limited. As suggested by Rita’s options, she cannot have a healthy sexuality; indeed, she can only be Tina or Temptation but never Ganja. In other words, unlike Ganja, who represents the Black female vampire as an intellectually and erotically liberated being, Rita and Temptation are opposite sides of the same representational coin regarding the Black female vampire in that both identify the right Black woman as one whose sexuality is shaped by what Coleman calls a “Christian Godliness” (2011, 181).

Like their female counterparts, the Black male vampires of Black vampire films challenge, often problematically, Hollywood’s portrayal of Black males as happily sexless or dangerously hypersexual. Indeed, Black vampire films, as is the case with most blaxploitation films, offer Black male sexualities that exist between and beyond the sexless-hypersexual binary or what Hefner refers to as the “Tom-buck binary” (2012, 72). One of the ways in which blaxploitation films counter those depictions is through their celebration and critique of the “black macho” figure. As Joe Wlodarz argues, although Black men are given “representational primacy” in blaxploitation films, these films are “marked by an equally substantial crisis in black masculinity that works to unsettle the racial, gendered, classed, and sexualized codes that appear to define the genre” (2004, 10). The figure that is often used to counter blaxploitation’s Black macho figure is the Black gay male, whose presence in blaxploitation films functions simultaneously as evidence of Black sexual diversity and Whiteness in Black skin. On the one hand, as Harris and Mushtaq argue in their examination of two of blaxploitation’s main queer archetypes – the “jester,” the “emasculated man” and the film’s “comic relief” (2013, 34), and the “scoundrel,” which describes untrustworthy characters whose “homosexuality also adds a level of perversion that prevents the audience from sympathizing with them, likely aiding in their villainous appeal” (2013, 35) – the Black gay male in blaxploitation reinforces “heterosexist ideology that separates the Black and White communities – maintaining a value-system of apartheid in that race becomes a signifier for homophillac or homophobic values” (2013, 36). On the other hand, as Wlodarz asserts, the Black gay male is “a particularly disruptive element in the genre because he troubles the supposedly rigid boundaries separating black men from the realm of effeminacy and homosexuality” (2004, 11). Although Mamuwalde, Hess, and Max are depicted as straight Black men who challenge the Tom-buck binary, their vampiric straightness informs the ways in which Black gay men are normalized or abnormalized in their respective films.

In Blacula , Benshoff argues, Mamuwalde is portrayed more as a “lover than a fighter” (2000, 37), while his unsuccessful attempt to cure himself of his vampirism in Scream, Blacula, Scream portrays him more as “a doomed freedom fighter than a monster” (2000, 38). Indeed, Mamuwalde’s actions in Blacula are motivated by his desire to win the heart of Tina so that she willingly consents to being his eternal companion, and his view of Lisa as a confidant instead of a potential companion in Scream, Blacula, Scream functions as a critique of the buck’s mythical sexual hunger. As Sarah Kent puts it, “Mamuwalde’s humanity is communicated through his love, his attempts to reclaim his kinship network, and his emphasis on consensual transformation” (2020, 749). At the same time, his role as doomed freedom fighter is reflected in his death as well as his decision to kill two Black pimps for exploiting Black women: “You made a slave of your sister. You’re still slaves, imitating your slave master” (Scream). If Mamuwalde’s humanity is defined through the film’s portrayal of him as a lover and doomed freedom fighter, how do we explain his murder of Bobby, the Black gay man who has a White partner? Bobby’s death, on the one hand, can be read as a representation of Black nationalism’s heteropatriarchal Blackness in which Black gay men are viewed as inauthentic Black men and interracial unions are viewed as threats to Black people. As Wlodarz explains, “the ideological tension set up between an Afrocentric return to one’s roots (Blacula’s goal) and black male integration and ‘modernization’ (Gordon’s reality) is never totally resolved. Consequently, Bobby – both before and after he becomes a vampire – can be read as the real ‘monster’ of the film, for he is the figure who challenges the security of both modes of black identity” (2004, 14–15). On the other hand, Bobby’s death can also be viewed as an example of Mamuwalde’s internalization of the White supremacist vampirism that flows through his veins. Indeed, Gordon’s decision to investigate the deaths of Bobby and his companion functions as a critique of “the historical ignorance and ideological fraud embodied in essentialist notions of blackness that define queer black men as white men in black skin” (Jenkins 2005, 64). According to that view, the real monster is not Bobby or Mamuwalde, but Dracula, whose curse and support of slavery explains why Mamuwalde and Bobby are in 1972 America and why Mamuwalde murders Bobby.

While White supremacist vampirism informs Mamuwalde’s courtship of Tina and his murder of Bobby, Hess’s sexual relationships are shaped by an African vampirism. Prior to his infection, Hess is depicted as a single and sexually reserved Black man. For instance, at an afternoon party held on Hess’s estate, we discover that Hess has a biracial son (Enrico Fales) who attends an elite boarding school. Although we have no information about the mother or why she and Hess are no longer together, we see that Hess is dateless at the party, implying that he is not a playboy, a wealthy man who behaves irresponsibly and is involved in several casual sexual relationships. Once Meda stabs him with the Myrthian daggers, Hess begins to search for sex workers to satiate his overwhelming need for blood and sex. Moreover, after marrying Ganja and transforming her into a vampire, Hess invites Richard (Richard Harrow), a young Black man who runs a recreational center, to dinner so that Ganja can satisfy her vampiric addiction. According to David, since Richard is willing to flirt with Ganja in front of Hess, “[he] seems to be his own kind of freak too” (2011, 36). While there are no Black gay men who are out in the film, Hess’s polyamorous marriage suggests that his vampiric addiction could lead him to having sex with men to acquire the blood he needs to live and to quench his sexual thirst. Unlike Ganja, who sees her vampiric sexuality as liberating, Hess sees his vampiric sexuality as an abomination that requires him to accept Jesus as his savior and commit suicide to overcome it. Thus, Ganja’s decision to remain undead and Hess’s decision to kill himself suggest that the sexual politics of the Black Church is not conducive to a healthy or liberating sexual life for Black women or for Black men. Indeed, Hess’s suicide puts forward the notion that Black Christian men cannot thrive in a world where Black women have healthy and liberating sexual lives or where heterosexuality is not the only normal sexuality.

While Ganja and Hess questions the Black Church’s sexual politics, Def by Temptation uses said politics to distinguish good Black people from bad Black people. On one level, Temptation represents the homophobia that demonizes Black sexualities outside the Black Church’s heteropatriarchy. Indeed, the death of Temptation’s gay victim, whose murder is the most violent scene in the film, highlights the film’s homophobic sensibility: “The gay victim, lured not by attraction, but by the vampire’s hypnotic power, experiences pleasure at the hands of Temptation, who penetrates him with an unseen object. It is at the precise moment when he expresses his enjoyment that the object is transformed into a weapon, and his prolonged suffering presented in a montage of violence” (Gateward 2004, par. 25). That scene, as Coleman astutely notes, is “a startling depiction of anti-gay violence aligning with, and giving tacit approval for, the real-life violence gays and lesbians experience” (2011, 172). At the same time, the film also demonizes straight Black men who are single and aspiring lady’s men, as exhibited by Temptation’s decision to dress in Dougy’s body at the end of the film. While Dougy is an undercover federal agent, he is also, or plays the role of, a failed lady’s man. As Temptation, Dougy is a lady’s man, while K has become his vampiric chauffeur, and we are led to assume that the vampiric Dougy will do the same to queer, adulteress, or single and sexually active Black women as Temptation did to her Black male victims. In this light, although the vampiric Dougy and Max of Vampire in Brooklyn engage in sexual practices demonized by the Black Church, what distinguishes the two from each other is Max’s pursuit of a straight monogamous relationship that is celebrated by the Black Church.

Like Rita, who is an updated version of Tina, Max is an updated version of Mamuwalde, a foreign Black vampire from the Caribbean who is looking for an African American woman to be his eternal love. Although Max, unlike Mamuwalde, has sex with a woman who is not his eternal love, sexual intercourse with Rita’s roommate does not function as evidence of Max’s hypersexuality; rather, it is part of Max’s plan to win Rita’s love. Indeed, Max’s quest for love, instead of sexual adventures and conquests, is not a warning about the dangers of Black male sexuality; rather, it is warning to straight Black women that the wrong type of Black man can sometimes behave like the right type of Black man. As Parker explains, in her rejection of Max and her sexual desires, “Rita destroys the visibly darker male, who, in the context of racist American history is inextricably linked to evil, to danger, and to illicit sexual desires” (44). While colorism functions as one way to distinguish the right Black man from the wrong one, the film also suggests that the right one will choose the Black “Madonna” over the Black “whore.” In contrast to Justice, who is attracted to the Rita who turns to the Black Church for advice about her life, Max is attracted to the Rita who is part vampire, the Rita who rejects the Black Church. In this instance, Max’s decision to have sex with Rita’s roommate to attain Rita’s love, like Hess’s decision to solicit Richard to be Ganja’s concubine, suggests that he would be willing to sleep with anyone, including men, to gain Rita’s love as well as the blood he needs to be undead. Thus, from the perspective of the Black conservative, Max embodies the following warning: Black men who want Black Christian women but are not Christians themselves are dangerous because they can convince Black women wavering in their faith to engage in acts, sexual or otherwise, that could damage their souls.

One point that seems to be clear about the sexual politics evoked and invoked by the depictions of Mamuwalde, Ganja, Hess, Temptation, Max, and Rita is that the Black vampire represents the horrors of linking Black progress and regression with Black sexuality. As demonstrated by the films in which these vampires appear, that link assumes that Black people’s sexualities dictate their place in the social universe, ignoring the fact that people who have been at the top or bottom of their societal hierarchies represent humanity’s diversity in sexual orientation. Such thinking also suggests that Black people are not allowed to be intellectually and erotically liberated, since the people whom Black people choose to have sex with magically become an explanation for their politics or why they achieve or fail to achieve the American Dream. Finally, linking Black progress and regression with Black sexuality is horrifying for Black America’s most marginalized because it ignores how social and institutional forces that are out of the control of the marginalized impact their material conditions in such a way that they tend to be the Black vampire’s primary victims. In short, the cinematic Black vampire offers us an opportunity to consider who benefits from linking Black sexuality with Black progress and regression, and how that link can be detrimental to Black life in America .

Black America and Its Cinematic Black Vampires

Because the monster is, in part, “an embodiment of a certain cultural moment – of a time, a feeling, and a place” (Cohen 1996, 4), the Black vampires discussed in this chapter, regardless of the different forms and faces in which they appear, can tell us something about the issues and ideologies that Black America associates with the life and death of Blackness during the final decades of the twentieth century. The depictions of Mamuwalde, Ganja, Hess, Temptation, Max, and Rita show that Blackness, like all racial identities, is a paradox in which it is assumed that Blackness is both real and fabricated (see Jenkins 2019, 10–11). Indeed, the Black vampires of Black vampire films can serve as important sources for examining the paradox of Blackness in African American culture and for considering why the Black vampire is the ideal monster to represent the horrors produced by that paradox .