On this week’s episode I talk about why Blacula, seemingly just a disposable Blaxploitation film from the 70’s, is a landmark in respect and dignity for the depiction of Black characters and especially Black characters of African descent. No, seriously.

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Here’s the transcript:

Welcome to the White Meat podcast. I’m your host, David Dylan Thomas. I’m the writer and director of white meat, which is a film with the following premise underneath Washington Square Park, an urban park in Philadelphia are buried the bodies of hundreds of enslaved people. What if one night they all come back from the dead as zombies, but they only eat white people?

So we are working on a short to kind of help launch this film. And on this podcast, we are kind of alternating between talking to people who can speak to some of the influences on this movie, including Black history, Black horror, and then me just kind of like riffing on some different things I’ve been thinking about and in regards to all of that.

So this week is a solo podcast. I want to talk a little bit about why we should take the movie Blacula seriously. So Blacula comes out in the Seventies and the title alone kind of like indicates that you shouldn’t take this seriously. But it is part of the blaxploitation movement of the 1970s black cinema.

It’s kind of exploding with these movies that on the one hand are painting these kind of very stereotyped images of black people, you know, pimps and sex workers and drug dealers and all that stuff, but at the same time are also centering Black people and Blackness. And so it’s this interesting, you know tension that you get there, but part of this was horror and sci fi.

So you get instead of Dracula, Blacula. And again, by the sound of it, it sounds like sort of this cheap shot. Whatever. And honestly, growing up, that’s just sort of what I had in my head of what it is. After watching the documentary Horror Noire, which I highly recommend you all see I kind of got a different take on it, and I went to go watch it.

And the thing, a lot of things stand out about it. One is that it’s William Crane, the director, is the first, I think, Black director of a horror film ever, if not one of the first. And So he is able to kind of exhibit a lot of control over this again, sort of centering Blackness, and one of the ways that shows up is that the main character, right, the very opening scene of this movie is in like, I think like maybe the 1700s, you have a Black prince, an African prince, visiting a European count to try to persuade this count to help fight and abolish the Atlantic slave trade.

And just think about that for a second, right? How many movies can you think of that have an African prince at all, right? That depict Africans as princes, as on a level with European royalty, right? And of that batch, how many are from actual countries, right? So we’ve got Zamunda and Wakanda, but like actual African countries, like, so just as a level of dignity that you don’t usually see afforded to black characters in film, this is already starting out scene one way way above the rest and there are other examples of this in black cinema of the time cinema of the time. But this is one of those things it’s like, okay. And then the movie itself sort of goes on to tell this very tragic tale that kind of hews more or less to the sort of you know tragic Dracula like this person seeking this lost love. He sort of shows up again in modern day and one of the nice things about that so not really spoiling anything ‘cause this happens in like, the first five minutes. The count that he goes to visit is Dracula and Dracula, you know, being the white colonialist bastard that he is, you know, just like betrays him and curses him and literally gives him the name Blacula, right? Like, no brother’s gonna call himself that. So, so he’s cursed with that.

And then he sort of wakes up in the modern day, the modern day at that time being the 1970s. And kind of goes on to kind of terrorize, I think it’s New York. And but in doing so is sort of trying to find his lost love. So you get that kind of tragic Dracula backstory as well. But one of the other neat things about that is the New York he’s introduced to and that he kind of inculcates himself when his name is Mamuwalde is the, the prince thing he goes by that name. In this sort of new New York that he’s in is that he kind of enters into the Black middle class, right? Which again is something you don’t see depicted that much at home. Certainly not the urban Black middle class. Usually it’s sort of like this sort of more suburban. So again, in the 1970s, getting to see that there is a Black intellectual middle class that he’s kind of circulating in.

It’s just a new thing. So again, like, All the caveats of like sort of like this is a 1970s sensibility around things like homosexuality and like all these pieces like are all kind of like tied in there in, in, in, in uncomfortable ways. But, but that idea of, hey, here’s a time period where for like maybe 10 years and a good documentary to watch about this is Is That Black Enough for you from Elvis Mitchell kind of covers this time period really well.

For this time period, you have this opportunity. Where you see Black people being centered and the complexities of a nuance of, yeah, we actually have black intellectuals living in the city, but he says, we actually have African princes. That’s like a thing. And they’re just as refined and cultured as your European princes, right?

Like all of that stuff gets foregrounded in a way that honestly hasn’t really been done since like you don’t see a lot of that anymore. So or since, right? So, so I think those are some of the reasons to actually take Blacula and this whole kind of period of black exploitation more seriously. And it’s one of the things that, you know, I think about and that kind of informed the making of the screenplay for White Meat is this sort of like rethinking of how we think about black people in cinema and especially in horror.

So anyway go check out Blacula and honestly the sequel Scream, Blacula, Scream has Pam Grier and is again the title may make it seem like really exploitative and like kind of dumb, but it’s actually really good And pam Grier’s kind of amazing in it and she plays this sort of voodoo priestess. But again, it gives you this less token version of African religion.

It’s actually very respectful, like compared to the way you’d expect. Anyway, definitely check those out. And we will see you next time for the White Meat podcast, which by the way, you can check out, learn more about the movie at whitemeatmovie.com. For the White Meat podcast, I’m David Dylan Thomas, and we’ll see you next time.