The Black Guy Dies First by Robin R. Means Coleman & Mark H. Harris

Author:Robin R. Means Coleman & Mark H. Harris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gallery / Saga Press
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

Jesus, Take the Wheel

Lacking the ominous mystique of voodoo/hoodoo, the Black Christian church doesn’t have as prevalent a place in horror, but when it does play a significant role, it’s primarily in Black horror. In fact, Christianity and horror have made strange bedfellows since the early days of Black cinema. While Oscar Micheaux, the preeminent Black director of the first half of the twentieth century, focused largely on Black social class aspirations, other early Black filmmakers were more concerned with spiritual aspirations and used horror trappings to convey their point. Husband-and-wife team Eloyce and James Gist’s Hell-Bound Train (1930), for instance, is a cautionary tale in which Satan drives a train full of sinners straight to hell: robbers, gamblers, murderers, rapists, alcoholics, fornicators, false preachers, and worst of all, those degenerate jazz dancers. A decade later, Spencer Williams’s The Blood of Jesus (1941) and Go Down Death (1945) delivered similar horror-tinged scare tactics foretelling what stabby things the devil has in store for evildoers.

Def by Temptation (1990) is a direct descendent of those old-timey tales, taking its sermonizing to a literal level in what actor-director James Bond III termed “spiritual horror.”8 Bond stars as Joel, as aspiring preacher who finds himself targeted by a vampiric female succubus (Cynthia “No Relation” Bond) intent on tempting him into abandoning his faith. She almost succeeds in seducing him away from his calling, but when he’s reminded by his Bible-thumping granny (Minnie Gentry) that “the power is in the Word,” he’s able to cast out the demon with a killer left cross—that is, a cross in his left hand.

Like the pioneering Black films of yesteryear, Def by Temptation draws a line between “wholesome” rural and “wicked” urban values, as the virtuous, innocent Joel travels from small-town North Carolina to visit his childhood friend, playboy actor K (Kadeem Hardison), in New York City. Joel doesn’t cuss, drink, have sex, or, well, do anything fun, so he’s not the easy target for the temptress that other city men are. She zeroes in on her victims, it seems, to punish them for their “sins,” which sometimes adhere disturbingly close to conservative Christian dogma: not only promiscuity, but also adultery, abortion, and homosexuality.

Black filmmaker Joshua Coates’s But Deliver Us from Evil (2018) features a similar setup of a twerky succubus (Alice Rose) seducing and killing men, only to come upon a “chosen one” who resists her booty-shaking charms (BUTT Deliver Us from Evil?). Taking a deep dive into Biblical lore, the movie reveals the creature to be Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who balked at being subservient to him and was banished from the Garden of Eden, transforming into a man-hating demon. Despite its (many) faults, the film manages an appreciable level of religiosity without coming off as preachy or prudish and even delivers a rare denunciation of corruption among high-profile church leaders. (The less said about the troublesome scenario of the villain being an evil Black woman and the hero being a pure-hearted White man from a blessed bloodline, the better.

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