Black as Night – review

Director: Maritte Lee Go

Release date: 2021

Contains spoilers

When I’ve watched a film, I like to avoid other reviews until I’ve written my own. In this case the film seemed to have garnered such low scores on Amazon that, feeling I would score considerably higher, I couldn’t resist taking a peek.

Oh, but what stupid reviews – each and every one attacking the film for being ‘woke’. The trolls were out in force. Firstly, what is wrong being woke – it is hurled around like an insult, to me it is a badge of pride. But what is wrong with making films that reflect the whole of society, that look at things from other perspectives and that recognises that the privilege of white, cis, hetero is not the only show in town? To those reviewers I say – check your privilege and grow up, diversity adds to and does not detract from.

vampires

So, this is a vampire film, set in New Orleans with a predominantly black cast and not only was it good fun (if overly simplistic on a vampire plot level) but it touched on issues within it that are rarely explored in the genre. It starts with a homeless man pushing a shopping cart through a project, collecting cans. There is rushing around him, figures in the dark and then he is surrounded by three vampires. He is concerned about them taking his cans – they attack him.

on the rooftop

Shawna (Asjha Cooper) has snuck onto a hotel roof with best friend Pedro (Fabrizio Guido) and is both our primary character and also sometimes narrator. Within their banter he asks where *they* have appeared from, referencing her breasts and, in her narration, she says it was the summer she developed breasts and fought vampires – which reaches to the vampire/sexual awakening linkage common in the genre. He asks why she doesn’t sunbathe and she mentions getting darker – this is an on-running theme that I’ll address later but is an example of issues that having a different perspective allows exploration of.

Shawna and Pedro

There is a party that night and he wants Shawna to go, we also discover that he (an openly gay and Latino young man) has been offered a scholarship to a prestigious college in Texas but is very resistant to accepting – making excuses but primarily down to the way he might be treated. Shawna visits the Ombreux Project – where the homeless man was attacked and which is frequented by dealers and junkies, but where a protest tries to keep it open. Shawna’s mother (Kenneisha Thompson) is living there, struggling with her addiction and, despite a moment of mother and daughter love, she still manages to get Shawna to give her money and rushes off for her fix. The film purposefully explores her reason for addiction later and it is tied to the Katrina disaster and humanises her rather than makes her a 2-D junky. Shawna passes a boarded door on her way out and sees red eyes within.

attacked

At the party Shawna (who is dressed in a way that makes her look homeless, says Pedro) tries to talk to Chris (Mason Beauchamp) an older boy she crushes on, makes a bit of a fool of herself and leaves without Pedro. Walking home she sees a homeless man attacked, shouts out and is attacked herself by vampires. The attack stops as a red sporty looking car goes past. What I liked about this was the pop culture recognition – Shawna doesn’t know actual vampire lore but she knows enough to know she has been attacked by a vampire, that having been bitten she might turn and that sunlight will be deadly (so she puts paper on the windows). As it is she does not turn (though the wound stubbornly weeps blood) but we never get a full turning rules explanation (just options).

exposed to sunlight

She tells Pedro what has happened – he is sceptical of course, but realising who they must be targeting (homeless and addicts) they go to the Ombreux to find her mother, who is in a darkened room and covered with a sheet. With Shawna’s bite still open, and the blood it weeps, her mother (who has addiction issues anyway) attacks her but there is an exposure to sunlight and she crashes through the window whilst burning. Shawna decides to get revenge on the one who turned her mom. She finds Granya (Abbie Gayle) online, a vampire fan whose knowledge is drawn from fiction books, and also gets Chris involved. However they may not have got the identity of the head vampire right. In terms of lore what we do get definitively is a violent reaction to sunlight (baring circumstances discussed below), staking works (and the vampire screams and then puffs into dust) and both garlic and silver burns. The vampires can use eye mojo but it can be fought.

Asjha Cooper as Shawna

So, I mentioned the issue of Shawna worried about sunbathing and her skin becoming darker, and this was a theme through the film – her brother calls her Wesley Snipes due to her skin tone (and in doing so masculinises her), there is a feeling that Creole girls are deemed more attractive and at one point she looks at skin lightening cream, and when getting close to a vampire she is told, “I usually don’t like my girls as dark as you… What you lack in beauty you more than make up for in youth.” This plays into the colourism often recognised in the film industry (amongst others) that suggests, whilst casts might be getting more ethnically diverse, it is those with lighter skin tones that get the primary roles and are deemed more attractive. This attitude toward skin tone is, of course, discriminatory and the film counters this by not only explicitly commenting on Shawna’s beauty but also, from a genre perspective, suggesting that older vampires can daywalk but only when they have higher levels of melanin in their skin (intertextually connecting this to the book Fledgling). This assures Shawna, and through her the viewer, that darker skin tone is both beautiful and desirable, plus, if you happen to be a vampire, it is preferable.

the Hunters

The other thing this does is touch on civil rights – the primary vampire has become disillusioned with the lack of movement forward, seeing the moments of activism that improve civil rights die out and white supremacism try and (successfully) take hold of territory lost and so is building a vampire army. The civil rights issue is weaved into the dialogue, for instance whilst torturing information out of a vampire with garlic Shawna asks “What’s it feel like?” and the reply is “You been tear-gassed by the police?” What the film also does is decidedly not make Granya a white saviour – her vampire knowledge is limited and inaccurate, she sits through an attack on the vampires unable to fight like her friends, and literally walks away from the finale. It is a nice touch (she is not vilified at all for this) as one of the stumbles with, the otherwise excellent, black focused film The Transfiguration was a white saviour moment. Yes Pedro is in the finale but being Latino and LGBT+ mitigates that.

staked

So, what we have is a very strong central performance from Asjha Cooper, who pretty much carries the film with some excellent support from Fabrizio Guido. The vampire story is a bit light, the miles of tunnels mentioned, for the finale, is three underground rooms and there is a foreshadowed but still a tad Deus ex Machina moment that could have been handled better. However the film tackles some important social issues but manages not to get bogged down in them and is a quality production. 7 out of 10.

The imdb page is here.

On Demand @ Amazon US

On Demand @ Amazon UK