I'm just going to guess that you've seen both Demon Knight and the House on Haunted Hill remake which both include black survivors. I feel that they have started to gain much better recognition now than they used to be. There are more black heroes in movies than ever before and yes, even in the horror genre.
True, but I don't like looking at it strictly as a "black" thing. America is a multi-cultural country. Most Americans love movies. But when it comes to casting these movies, the vast majority of the heroes do not represent our multi-cultural society. This has been going on since the beginning of movies, we're talking 100 years. And just now things are starting to change, and very slowly at that.
Horror movies are usually cheap to make, don't require name actors to make money, so that risk of casting a not white actor in the lead is low risk. But it still happens pretty rarely. How often do Latino, Asian, or Native American characters appear in a horror flick and live or get to be the hero? But at least in the case of Latinos and Asians, at least their respective countries get to make a sizable amount of films where they get to be the leads.
There is so much to be said about racism but some people are just way too touchy. I remember somebody calling John Landis racist because in "Deer Woman" (an episode of Masters of Horror) there are two policemen/officers/detective (don't remember exactly what)that were partners. The black guy died and the white guy lived. And that was the reason.
Hey, that's never gonna go away. You can swap racism with sexism when it comes to a lot of popular entertainment and you've got the same argument. Women, in large part, are still portrayed mostly as the girlfriend, wife, grandmother, person the hero goes to bed with at the end. Sure, Angelina Jolie and Milla Jovovich play kick ass heroines fairly often, but that's about it.
There are "urban" horror movies out there with an entire black cast though some of them are stereotypical.
But a lot of those movies are ultra low budget with little to no production values and they never get wide distribution. Only ones I can think of are Bones and Tales From the Hood back in 95. TFTH was actually pretty decent and cost $6 million to make and made $11 back. That's a financial success. So it took them 6 years to put out Bones, which cost $16 million and only made back $7 so they just stopped making them after that.
That there is really one famous FEMALE slasher out there? (Angela from the Sleepaway Camp series) Like I said earlier, there is so much that can be said and picked around about racism.
Agreed. But not too many people are going to be frightened by a woman with a knife. The Black Christmas remake had a female killer. Sheri Moon Zombie in The Devil's Rejects was pretty good. One of the main killers in Wrong Turn 2 was female. But yeah, big guy with a knife will always trump woman of any size with a knife.
I know the director/writer and he's a very nice guy and in no way racist. I'm pretty sure there are reasons for changes in the script and characters. We'll see when it comes out.
If you ask me, it's not so much about racism as it is leaving out one of the best things from the original. I see this a lot in American remakes of Asian horror movies. They constantly leave out the best parts from the originals and do something utterly stupid instead (The Eye remaking being one of the most blatantly stupid remakes for leaving out almost everything that made the original good).
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