TWO FROM WILLIAM CRAIN: A FOUNDING FATHER OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HORROR CINEMA BY EDWARD M. ERDELAC

Jordan Peele’s Get Out led to a welcome resurgence in African American created horror movies, giving us Antebellum, the Hoodoo-heavy Spell, the criminally underrated and underseen Bad Hair, as well as Peele’s own Us and forthcoming Candyman revisit.


70’s black cinema is often characterized in popular culture as an era of strutting, jive-talking pimps, kung fu toughs, natural-haired ladies, hustlers, and larger than life gun-toting black P.I.’s stomping through the Nixon era ghettos, sticking it to whitey and rolling over adversity in chromed-out Cadillacs to the funky tunes of Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Bobby Womack.


But as Shudder’s indispensable documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror explores, in the long shadows cast by indisputable blaxploitation classics like Shaft, Superfly, Black Caesar and Foxy Brown, the golden age of black horror cinema quietly arose.


They varied wildly in quality and execution, from the innovative pinnacle of Blacula and the arthouse classic Ganja and Hess, to the mostly atrocious failures of Blackenstein and various Filipino-produced Marlene Clark excursions like Night of The Cobra Woman. Solid entries like J.D.’s Revenge and Sugar Hill never quite arrested the wider public’s imagination in ways the Universal Horror films of the 30’s and 40’s did, or attained mass crossover appeal, but the waves they made continue to be felt in popular entertainment, detected or not.


Above them all, there stand two exemplary entries, both directed by the same black filmmaker, an unsung master of horror, William Crain.

Dead center and the jumping point for the whole genre is Blacula. If you’ve been dismissing this movie your whole life based upon the title and the notion that this is some 70’s cheese fest, you’ve been misinformed. African prince Mamuwalde is turned into a vampire by Dracula himself and walled up in his castle for daring to oppose the count’s interests in the slave trade. There is an element of camp in Bobby and Billy, the two flamboyant gay antique dealers who buy his coffin as part of a consignment lot and ship him to modern day Los Angeles where he breaks loose, but honestly, the tragedy of their fates and the genuine regard with which the other characters hold them negates their role as comic relief as the story progresses.


Every performance is played with indie-spirit earnestness (maybe Ji-Tu Cumbuka as Skillet picks up a bit of the comedy relief slack Bobby and Billy drop off with his appreciative takes on Mamuwalde’s wardrobe – “Say Mamuwalde, lemme borrow that cape from ya, brutha….”), from Thalmus Rasulala’s Dr. Thomas, the movie’s Van Helsing/Harker equivalent, to a quirky Elisha Cook Jr. as a hook-handed coroner. Hands down though, the gravitas William Marshal brings to the titular role, anguishing over the loss of his beloved wife Luva (and seeing her again personified in Vonetta McGee) can’t be understated.


It’s been said elsewhere, and I agree, that if this movie was named Mamuwalde, it would possibly be better regarded, though less well known. If you haven’t seen it, you don’t know it like you think you do. It genuinely entertaining and has a couple of legitimately creepy sequences. It’s also quite possibly the earliest cinematic depiction of the sympathetic vampire antihero trope which has gained such widespread popularity in subsequent years in the works of Anne Rice, Coppola’s Dracula (and numerous other reiterations of that tale), the Twilight series, and everywhere on television from Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel to Being Human and True Blood. As far I can tell, in the arena of visual entertainment, Blacula did it first.

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​William Crain followed up Blacula with Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, a Blaxploitation take on Robert Louis Stevenson, starring Bernie Casey as an accomplished African American physician working to develop a cure for liver cirrhosis which has the unfortunate side-effect of turning him into a bestial, unstoppable albino maniac with a penchant for murdering prostitutes and pimps.


Like Blacula, this movie is anchored by a fantastic performance by Bernie Casey. Ji-Tu Cumbuka shows up again, here as a tough talking police lieutenant. Respected cinematographer Tak Fujimoto brings his artful expertise to bear as well.


On a surface read, this may come off on paper as silly. It certainly has all the funk, gratuitous nudity, and violence Blaxploitation audiences expected. However, a closer look at its themes of black sense of self and pride (Dr. Pride is the name of the central character) reveals a deeper, more nuanced work.


Pride is a self-made man. Born in a brothel to an alcoholic mother, he has fought his way up to attain professional, wealthy status, yet is seen as a sell-out by Linda, one of his patients (who accuses him of dressing and thinking ‘white’). Pride, desperate to cure the pervading ills of the community from which he stemmed, tries to compel his low-income patients to submit to his experiments, and when his murderous id takes over, he takes the form of a white man. The age old symbolism of black as evil and white as good is cleverly reversed. The racist tropes of King Kong are also homaged and subverted when, in the climactic scene, he scales Rodia’s Watts Towers in apparent anguish and self-loathing and is assailed by circling police helicopters.


By all rights, for these two landmark Blaxploitation horror films, William Crain should be remembered and lauded as a grandmaster of African American horror cinema and included in the pantheon of James Wale, Todd Browning, and Robert Siodmak in terms of his contribution to the horror genre as a whole.

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Edward M. Erdelac is the author of thirteen novels, including Andersonville, The Knight With Two Swords, and The Merkabah Rider series. His stories have appeared in dozens of anthologies and magazines, including Star Wars Insider Magazine.


His latest book, a collection of supernatural stories starring an occult detective in 1976 Harlem, Conquer, inspired by his love of Blaxploitation, Brother Voodoo, and Ernest Tidyman novels, is now available at

                                                        https://smarturl.it/4rp54d

Born in Indiana, educated in Chicago, he now lives in the Los Angeles area with his family. News and excerpts from his work can be found at

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http://www.emerdelac.wordpress.com , 
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https://www.instagram.com/emerdelac/
https://www.amazon.com/Edward-M-Erdelac/e/B00354P9ZY/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1 ​​

In 1976 Harlem, JOHN CONQUER, P.I. is the cat you call when your hair stands up...the supernatural brother like no other. From the pages of Occult Detective Quarterly, he's calm, he's cool, and now he's collected in CONQUER.

From Hoodoo doctors and Voodoo Queens,
The cat they call Conquer’s down on the scene!
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Wherever the brothers find trouble is brewin,’
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Call the dude on St. Marks with the shelf fulla books,
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Can stop the black magic Big John’s got on hand!

Collects Conquer Comes Calling, Conquer Gets Crowned, Conquer Comes Correct and four previously unpublished stories – Keep Cool, Conquer, Conquer Cracks His Whip, Conquer And The Queen of Crown Heights, and Who The Hell Is John Conquer?

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