UnMotivationalPosters

The genesis of every horror video game, movie, or story is this:

Welcome, Caucasians

This post isn’t to foment any racial tensions. I happen to love horror, and I always notice that in mainstream horror there is something terribly wrong with all the people. Let’s go down the list.

The Asshole Jock: He’s the guy who is hot-headed dickish and doesn’t listen to anyone, but who will, in the final moments of his life when he realizes that it will make him more popular, sacrifice himself bravely to save the Final Girl.

Smoochy and Moopsy aka The Lovers: These guys reek of one another’s saliva and will die gloriously, leaving people to hope that their final agonies were at least ameliorated a little bit by a really big O.

The Nerd: This guy (or gal, of late) has a body of knowledge which is really downright eerily specific to the situation at hand. The Nerd will die either shrieking in horror or reaching impotently for the one way to alert the others to the coming danger.

The Final Girl: She will live because when the chips are down and after she’s watched all her friends die one by one, in agony and terror, she finds within herself a wellspring of strength and resourcefulness that she can only now tap into to defeat her heretofore indefatigable opponent. Why she wasn’t this strong and resourceful when she could have helped organize the others and mount a better defense or GTFO if they could have, she never explains and naturally, everyone considers it rude to ask.

The Negro: Your standard-issue garden-variety black character. They may be funny (male or female), best friends/bitter enemies with The Asshole Jock (male), an ex of any of the characters except The Final Girl (female), or a sassy redshirt (female). For some reason I rarely see gay black men in horror films and if they are they’re never directly involved. This would be awesome and I want a sex change if it means I get to still like boys AND sip drinks/listen to jazz while 7 teenagers get slaughtered in a warehouse 3 blocks away without my knowledge. NOTE: The Negro may be changed, in fact, to any nonwhite ethnicity. There have been many accounts of Asians, Latinos, and even Greeks taking The Negro’s place.

What I want to know is: why is it that the black guy dies first 9 times out of 10? I know in Night of the Living Dead the black guy lived until the very end (which was AWESOME) but for the most part by the time a horror movie has reached its climax the only people left are the ones who just went tanning yesterday. I’m not accusing movies of being racist. It’s just that there are certain roles that certain types of people play. The black girl never falls down, but the white girl does. It’s also always a white girl who goes to see what that noise is late at night, in her nightgown, never stopping for a moment to ask herself what it might be if the person’s name she’s calling would clearly have answered her by now. At the same time, The Final Girl is almost always white though very rarely is The Killer black (or, indeed, any sort of “ethnic.”)

It never seems to be the ethnic friend that starts the trouble. I’m going to show my color here and say that at no time have I or any other black person I know said “Hey guys, let’s take this old book I found at a dead lady’s house and go to this crypt and try to recite this poem on this, the night of a highly coincidental full moon.” It’s not as if it’s never happened, but finding a case of that is as rare as the black chick surviving to the end of AvP.

I’m always asking myself “how did this get started?” and I still have yet to have any idea. You got any ideas, you let me know, k?

Stay tuned for Part 2 of my hard-hitting expose regarding race and the movies!