Blacula Was About the Respectable Monster Haunting Us All

William Crain’s 1972 horror classic used the vampire legend to tell a story about Blackness and power.
By Charles Pulliam-Moore

In director William Crain’s original Blacula from 1972, an 18th-century Nigerian prince named
Mamuwalde (William Marshall) meets his untimely first death at the hands of the Dracula (Charles
Macaulay), who scoffs at the mortal man’s earnest pleas for assistance dismantling the transatlantic
slave trade.
Though this incarnation of the Transylvanian count makes clear that he himself would love to own
African enslaved people, and sees beings like himself as inherently superior, he takes sadistic joy in
transforming Mamuwalde into a vampire in a twisted final act of retribution. The horror Mamuwalde
and his wife Luva (Vonetta McGee) experience is all too real as Dracula and his minions seal them both
away in a tomb—where she’s fated to starve to death while he, bound and unable to feed, is driven mad
by hunger. But as Blacula’s core plot kicks in, the darkness and violence that turn Mamuwalde into the
eponymous protagonist become some of the most fascinating elements of the movie’s ideas about
power.
As Blacula awakes in the present day after his entombed coffin is unearthed and subsequently
purchased by a pair of American antique buyers, his disorientation quickly gives way to a powerful
hunger that opens his eyes up to the multiple worlds he now exists in. Whatever apprehension
Mamuwalde might have had about vampirism evaporates when he rises from his coffin as Blacula and
sets himself upon the antiquers, Bobby (Ted Harris) and Billy (Rick Metzler), in their LA warehouse.
While Bobby and Billy, whose professions and characterizations both heavily code them as queer, both
die by Blacula’s fangs, their presence in the film is one of the first ways that Blacula telegraphs its open
ideas about sexuality. Their queerness is of little concern to Blacula because to him, they’re merely a
means to the first leg of his recovery as he sets out to get the lay of the strange land he finds himself in.
It’s while Blacula’s lying in wait for Bobby during his funeral—presumably anticipating his
reanimation—that he encounters Bobby’s friend Tina (McGee) whose resemblance to Luva convinces
the ancient vampire that she must be the reincarnation of his wife. As Blacula becomes fixated on Tina
and begins plotting how to be with her, his swag and debonair ways become lethal weapons that he
uses to disarm the unsuspecting humans he comes across and murders. Of course, the murders prompt
LAPD pathologist Dr. Gordon Thomas (Thalmus Rasulala) and Lt. Jack Peters (Gordon Pinsent) to
launch an investigation.
Much of the film’s mythos borrows heavily from the larger vampiric lore, but the movie is very careful
to frame Blacula’s status and name as a curse inflicted upon him by a white man seeking to conflate
Blackness with savagery and animalism. Rather than making grand proclamations about Dracula being
a racist ghoul, Blacula takes ownership of his name and presents an alternate idea of what a foreboding,
mysterious, otherworldly being with undeniable sex appeal can look like and be. And what makes
Blacula such an iconic part of the Blaxploitation and vampire canons is how the movie uses his
displacement in time to illustrate how the legacy of anti-Black racism reaches into the present to inflict
harm on people in different ways.
Blacula’s yearning for Tina, and his willingness to kill anyone who dares get in his way as he pursues
her, is part of the still-strong love he feels for Luva even centuries after being made to watch as she
withered away to nothing. The conflicted, but decidedly romantic feelings Tina begins to develop for
Blacula as he inserts himself into her life under false pretenses suggests that the love Luva felt for him
was every bit as everlasting and that she genuinely might be the woman reincarnated. But Tina is also
her own woman with a life and deep connections to her present-day family; they embody a distinct,
era-specific kind of Blackness that, subtextually, clashes with Blacula’s.
Though Blacula very knowingly works to disprove and subvert the denigrating ideas Dracula cursed
him with, he does so with a kind of respectability that reads as both vampire-accurate and true to the
ideas about Black respectability that have often been the sources of pain and trauma for Black people.
He’s a vintage throwback to a bygone era in a very literal sense, but Blacula heightens the concept of
respectability being weaponized against Black people by turning it into a core part of how Blacula
operates.
The vampire’s innate allure and his desire to remake the world as he sees fit makes him a dangerous
villain, but Blacula makes it hard—even up until its final moments—for you not to see him as a
sympathetic figure worth cheering for. What’s fantastic about watching Blacula now is knowing how
the sequel expands on these ideas, and seeing how much of its story holds up in an age where genre
fiction focused on delving into Black experiences is once again in the spotlight.
It’s going to be fascinating to see how MGM’s upcoming reboot draws from the original as it brings
the famous Blacula back to the big screen once again. But before the new movie, the original is a classic
you definitely need to make some time to check out.