Although slasher cinema is one of the most academically scrutinised subgenres of horror (Hart 43), one of its most notorious tropes, that Black characters die first, remains underexamined. Along these lines, the chapter on 1980s horror films in Robin R. Means Coleman’s Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present is titled “We Always Die First” but offers no examples of Black characters dying first. Instead, she duly notes the deployment of the magic negro trope in The Shining (Kubrick, 1980), the continued stereotyping of Vodou in The Serpent and the Rainbow (Craven, 1988) and Grace Jones’s appearance in Vamp (Elias, 1986) as one of the few horror films to star an African American woman (145, 151–52, 155–56, 165–66). Her brief discussion of slasher cinema notes the subgenre was “extraordinarily grisly” and “very White”, leaving the trope that inspired the title of the chapter unexplored (158). Later, in the 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, Coleman clarified the Black-characters-diefirst trope, suggesting that it is not entirely true. Instead, Black characters, particularly Black males, can demonstrate the formability of the villain by serving as victims (Burgin). Do these observations pass empirical scrutiny? Prevailing literature gives no clear answer.

Several authors make glancing reference to the Black-characters-die-first trope. Here, in line with Coleman’s “very White” assessment, Isabel Cristina Pinedo argues teen slashers exclude “racial minorities altogether or relegates them to the status of victims, largely undeveloped expendable characters” (111).