Everybody knows that if there is a black character in a horror movie, he or she is going to die first. Some consider this to be a blatant reflection on society and how it treats black people. Life is hard enough in the real world, but in the fictional one too? Really?
Some think that it's infuriating because of the fact that it doesn't really line up with reality. In the real world, when the horror of real life slavery was going on, black people quite literally built an Underground Railroad to escape real world horror. What about that says, "Oh, hey, let's run down the stairs where the insane guy with a chainsaw is?" I remember years ago on this prank movie, the pranksters thought it would be funny to drop in through the roof above the secretaries desk of this business which had two white women and one black guy, to pretend like they were robbing them. When they did drop in, the black guy literally took off and ran down the street. He didn't even flinch or think, maybe I should at least investigate. Nope. Gone. Even while his co-workers were still screaming.
Even at work, I witnessed it first hand. One of my co-workers wanted to scare our boss because even though he was a big white dude, he was super jumpy and scared of a lot of things. So at the end of close one day, my co-worker started running down our main hall. He didn't say anything, didn't explain, just started running. He whipped around the corner where my boss was standing and I swear to God, my two other co-workers, both black, who had been cleaning up an area in the hall and who had clearly missed the memo that we were pranking the boss, took off running with the original co-worker. The boss was just looking like wtf is going on. The whole thing was hilarious. We didn't get fired by the way, but again, danger afoot, black people, and honestly, I think a good majority of people in general, aren't sticking around to find out what it is, especially not in this day and age.
But back to the original question. Do black people always die first in horror movies? Is it true? Are they the first ones to get the literal axe? Well, the answer will definitely surprise you.
Black people are NOT the first people to die in the majority of horror movies.
Matt Barone decided to watch some 50 horror movies that included a main black character or characters in them. He noted if they died first, and second if they died at all in the films. Keep in mind, these are horror movies, so yes, most did eventually die in the films, but great news, at least they didn't go first, and who wants to go first, am I right? He found that out of the 50 movies, black characters only died first in 5 out of the 50.
You can check out the article and the whole list of movies here:
http://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2013/10/black-characters-horror-movies/verdict
So this clearly means that racism doesn't exist, right? No, seriously, it doesn't mean anything like that at all. Don't be an idiot. It literally just means, they don't die first in a majority of horror films, so there's that.
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