| UNFAIR RACIAL |
 |
CLICHE ALERT |
!SPOILERS AHEAD!
101 COINCIDENCES AND COUNTING
URCA:
UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHÉ ALERT
Deadicated to Scatman Crothers
1900 - 1960 - 1970 - 1980 - 1990 - 2000 - 2010
The Unfair racial Cliche really got moving in the 1980s.
Read HOLLYWOOD RACISM
For a complete explanation of what this page is about, please go to the
UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHÉ ALERT
main page.
| HORROR/THRILLER | HOLLYWOOD THRILLER | NON-HOLLYWOOD HORROR |
Be Alert for These Titles of the
2010s
THE BOOK OF ELI -
2010 Except for Denzel Washington, there are no other minority actors with any leading or even character roles. There are a few minority actors in silent extra and walk-on roles, playing no race in particular * and Denzel's character of Eli makes short work of them. As the star and producer of this movie, there can be but one black man in the future and he is it. Also, only white people, good or bad, are portrayed as leaders of any group. Then Denzel's character dies, having nobly sacrificed himself so that the remaining white people - one hell of a lot of white people - can have an apparently better, minority free future. Um... okay then. You go Denzel, I guess. *with their faces so covered up by clothing, and the choice of lighting in this movie, it's impossible to tell much about them at all. |
Despite any love you may have for the work of Rudyard Kipling, there's really no need to have an East Indian manservant living in 19th Century England, but if that's what you want, Okay. There's also no reason why there can't be minorities among your Gypsies. Especially since their "mixed blood", "mongrel" aspects are one of those things that white supremacists of that era railed against concerning their many issues with Gypsies. But hey, an all white band of Gypsies makes perfect sense too. What doesn't make sense is why you would insist on only a single minority in your movie, and then INSIST that the minority dies while a bunch of white characters survive to the end. This is what the UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHÉ ALERT is all about. Whether you have one or many minority characters in your movie, you kill them all leaving only white survivors. And since 2000, the number of Horror Thriller movies like this coming out of Hollywood has only increased. |
THE WOLF MAN
You know the body count by now. And speaking of body count, the only minority in the whole movie, Deputy Fallon (Ving Rhames) gets chewed up by Piranhas. Now does this happen by freak accident? No. Deputy Fallon knowingly gets right into the water with the hungry piranhas, grabs an outboard motor, and props all of the piranhas in front of him. NOT behind him, where they are busily EATING him. No, just in front of him. He's not saving anyone, least of all himself. But they had to do SOMETHING to keep the UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHE ALERT thriving! |
PIRANHA 3D
There are only two non-whites in this movie. Despite the many speaking characters in CENTURION, white people and only white people are capable of beating the odds to survive through to the end. The African character of Macros (Noel Clarke) and the Middle East character of Tarak (Riz Ahmed), were out of place amidst all of the caucasians. They racially served no purpose within the setting, and from the start their sparsely drawn characters seem there only for purposes of body count. |
CENTURION
Of the cast of THE RIG, some folks were cast as those whose characters would die, while others were cast as those whose characters would live. Some characters got to die in acts of heroism. Some characters got to be the heroes who lived! "That's for my brother you son of a bitch!" Non-white actors Carmen Perez, Marcus T. Paulk, and Eric Bivens-Bush were not cast as the characters of heroes or survivors. |
SUPER 8 - 2011 It's a fair sized town, and it's a fair-sized group of friends. There are only two minorities in this whole picture who have any screen time. So guess what happens to them? They die. And they die in two ways which are both part of the racist lore that the Unfair Racial Cliche Alert encompasses High School Science Teacher, Dr. Woodward (Glynn Turman, also the high school science teacher who dies in GREMLINS), nobly dies while trying to save the (apparently all-white) town as well as the monstrous alien - who is really a good alien if only the evil General Nelec would stop torturing him for a minute! Nelec's obedient, towering and silent evil henchman, Overmyer (Richard T. Jones: EVENT HORIZON, PHONE BOOTH, TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES [TV]), dies while in the act of being evil. Unlike earlier Spielberg productions, the kids in this group of friends are all white. I guess a Goonies racial mix wasn't good enough in 2011. Here we are, into the second decade of the 21st Century, and among the top A-list people in Hollywood, the UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHE ALERT rolls on. |
RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES - 2011 You know, there are an awful lot of characters in this film and many among them could have been pretty much any race but white. But in the true mode of the Hollywood RACIAL CLICHE, unless the minority is a woman who is romantically involved with the lead white actor (THE OMEGA MAN, TOTAL RECALL, THE RUNNING MAN, ERASER - Arnold Schwarzenegger did a lot of these), she is going to die. In this case, there is only a single minority woman Caroline Aranha (Frieda Pinto), who is merely a romantic cypher, doing nothing for the plot, the story, the anything except stand there and be Exposition Gal ("Why did you make the ape so smart?") or Reproachful Gal ("You shouldn't have made the ape so smart.") Otherwise, who is she (a zooworker)? What does she do (works in a zoo)? What does her part have to do with the story or anything in this movie at all? Well actually without her, the entire movie is one big sausage party. Will's boss, Steve Jacobs (David Oyelowo) is the only other minority in the movie with any screen time (there are a few scenes of minorities looking terrified but that's it). Steve isn't romantically involved with Will and as it turns out, he's evil to boot. So because he is evil (and black?), he is the only human that the apes kill with full intent. |
JOHN DIES AT THE END - 2012 In fact, this is the most draconian RACIAL CLICHE ALERT I've ever seen in a film since Dean Koontz: PHANTOMS. No URCA has ever left me rating a movie less, but I'd sure enjoy them more if they didn't have these things. The URCA for JOHN DIES AT THE END is virtually completist, which makes it even weirder since that has never been Don's Method of Operation as a filmmaker. Don Coscarelli never earned the URCA before, and as an indie filmmaker who has had few cinematic brushes with studios, he remains an indie filmmaker. Is Hollywood finally having an effect on him? Because every non-white in this movie with a speaking part dies. There are plenty of white people who live, but all of the non-whites die. The minority actors were all cast as "You're going to be one of the characters who dies." I wonder if a casting director for a Horror Thriller ever gathers together all the actors in and says, "Okay, all of the survivors over here and all of the dead over here." And then looked at the result. Hmm... |
OUTPOST 2: BLACK SUN - 2012 Only one minority / black actor with a speaking part and a name and, yep, the kind and noble Abbot (played by actor Gary McDonald) dies while protecting the white person. |
JURASSIC WORLD - 2015 From 2011 to 2015 I stopped writing the UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHE ALERT. Month after month and year after year it all just got so damn depressing. That's not to say that the URCA stopped. Not in the least. So I took my niece and nephew to JURASSIC WORLD where they got to see... everyone who shares their skin color die. They are still young kids and asking them how they liked it afterwards? They loved it. They are still at the point where kids are kids and, this being a Stephen Spielberg / Frank Marshall movie, the children live. That doesn't change the fact that all of the non-white characters with speaking parts die and only white people survive to live happily ever after. |
THE PREDATOR - 2018 I did it again. From 2015 to 2018, I stopped writing the UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHE ALERT. Why? Because this racist shit doesn't stop and I'm getting sick of it. This is not to say that the movies where the URCA appears are not good movies, many are. THE PREDATOR not only kills off every last minority in the movie, but the last black man to die does so in such an unnecessary gratuitous manner. Then, with mere seconds left in the movie, they introduce a minority character with about a five second speaking part who has nothing to do with anything in the movie but anticipate the sequel. Oh sure, that excuses everything. |
GLORIOUS - 2022 The URCA is always unnecessary but GLORIOUS has one of the most egregious I've ever seen. Thanks to the public rest room demigod Ghat and its dire warning of what it will do if Wes tries to leave or get help, we know as soon as we see Rest Stop maintenance worker Gary (Andre Lamar: DONORS, THE GETAWAY), that he is only in the movie to fulfill the URCA. See actor Ryan holding that leg as a weapon? That's comedy relief for this movie because that leg belongs to the only black character in GLORIOUS and he is killed so his leg will provide that alleged comedy moment. Ho! Ho! I was hoping they would tease an URCA with Gary and then provide a twist that wouldn't follow it, but Director Rebecca McKendry (ALL THE CREATURES WERE STIRRING, PSYCHO GRANNY), along with writers Joshua Hull (BEVERLY LANE, CHOPPING BLOCK) and Ian David McKendry (ALL THE CREATURES WERE STIRRING, PSYCHO GRANNY), didn't have it in them to make the attempt. Whether or not story writer Tod Rigney (FOUND, HEADLESS) had it in his original tale I don't know. |
So that's 102 movies and the count continues. All the Schwarzenegger, ALIEN and JURASSIC PARK movies have only white survivors - well into the second decade of the New Millennium.
I'm sure you can think of more but you get the idea. Over 55 of these movies were released in the 21st century. And I'm still counting! Which means that it is getting worse, not better.
Can you believe we are still dealing with this crap?
It's bad both on a racial level and a storytelling level. Again: this is not to say that plenty of white people/characters didn't die in these movies. What I am saying is that, in a mixed race cast, only the white actors were cast as survivors. The black or minority folk are all cast from the very beginning as corpses.
There are also Horror Thriller movies that don't count because nobody dies, like
THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN - There was a town full of bodies, sure, but not one of the characters dies. Doesn't count if there isn't a body count.
POLTERGEIST - The single minority didn't die. Then again, no one did.
TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE - Real people died on the set, but nobody died within the fictional movie.
Directors that "buck" the trend:
Paul W. S. Anderson (EVENT HORIZON, RESIDENT EVIL, RESIDENT EVIL 2, ALIEN vs PREDATOR) just like you never know when Mr. Anderson is going to actually make a good movie, so you never know just who will survive to the end in his
movies. But what Paul does as a Director is not what he does as a Producer when paired with his producing partner, Jeremy Bolt.
John Carpenter (HALLOWEEN, THE FOG, THE THING, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, THEY LIVE, MOUTH OF MADNESS, etc.) like Romero, sometimes they will and sometimes they won't. Carpenter may not always make good movies, but he never takes the lazy way. That said, some of his movies don't even have minorities in them, so they couldn't count one way or the other anyway.
Don
Coscarelli's PHANTASM movies, when they do have minority actors their characters don't become automatic victims. Some die, some survive, just like in real life.
Wes Craven's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series (the two he's responsible for) because everybody dies in those and if they didn't get it in one flick they'll bite it in the next! Of course, that's WHEN Wes Craven had any minorities in his movie at all.
George Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, DAWN OF THE DEAD,
and DAY OF THE DEAD~ and all his other movies. Maybe the "minority" will die, maybe they won't. You just never know. Few of his films were made / financed
by Hollywood, and none of his first three "Dead" movies were backed by Hollywood. Romero is largely a Hollywood outsider like Coscarelli and Carpenter.
Quentin Tarantino as a director (PULP FICTION, KILL BILL Vol. 1, KILL
BILL Vol. 2, DEATH PROOF), has never fallen into the cliché. With all of his success, he remains a Hollywood outsider: He's not even a member of the Director's Guild.
The Warchowski Brothers' MATRIX trilogy never followed the cliché. So 8 directors
out of hundreds and most of those are Independent producer/directors who operate outside of the Hollywood nest.
Producers that "buck" the trend:
Perhaps not surprisingly, these producers are racial minorities who both produce and star in their own movies. By calling the shots, they are removing themselves from the UNFAIR RACIAL CLICHÈ as they see fit.
Morgan Freeman: Thrillers include UNDER SUSPICION, ALONG CAME A SPIDER, which he produced and which his production company made.
Wesley Snipes: BLADE, BLADE II, BLADE III. Well come on! You kill BLADE you kill the franchise! D.C. Comics won't fly with that.
M. Night Shyamalan's THE SIXTH SENSE, UNBREAKABLE, and SIGNS didn't kill off the black/minority characters, even when they WERE evil! Perhaps it is because these male producers are racial minorities and no one at the studios had the gall to enforce the cliché?
Hollywood Movies that "buck" the trend:
13 GHOSTS and not one of them killed off the only "living"
black woman, the jive-talking maid.
JACOB'S LADDER: there was no minority body count to be seen. Nearly all of the minority folk, male and female lived. Then again, Carolco, which made JACOB'S LADDER, was never a major Hollywood studio. It was a short-lived independent production company created by two foreign nationals: Mario Kassar from Beirut, Lebanon, and Andrew Vajna from Budapest, Hungary.
SE7EN Not all bad guys are necessarily black.
THE BONE COLLECTOR had various people dying and not because of race, either!
X MEN: Halle Berry is the only good mutant who isn't white. Only the bad mutants get lots of non-whites. Go figure. I think its the same reasoning with The X-Men as with BLADE! You can't kill STORM! No Halle Berry, no box office.
EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING - The movie kills off an entire tribe of black Africans, but they do allow one black child to survive. Am I detecting a loophole here? The movie was also made by two small independent studios, Morgan Creek (Los Angeles based but founder James G. Robinson makes his home in Maryland) and Dominion Productions, a consortium of investors who funded the movie.
Other movies that buck the trend are:
DRAG ME TO HELL,
PREDATOR 2,
ROBOCOP,
HALLOWEEN H2O*,
FINAL DESTINATION - I dunno, you think that the fact that it was created by a non-white guy (Jeffrey Reddick) and co-wrote by three guys, two of whom are minorities, and directed by an Asian guy (James Wong) is the reason they chose not to kill off all of the minorities? I'm just wondering. Again, perhaps it is because these men are racial minorities that no one at the studios had the gall to enforce the cliché?
THE MUMMY RETURNS - made while Universal Pictures was owned by a Canadian company (Seagrams)
TOMB RAIDER - made by 9 different companies, only one of which was a Hollywood company (Paramount), and seven of which were foreign owned corporations.
and 1408.
HORROR COMEDIES
If there are exceptions within the Hollywood Race Rule to be made, it will usually be
the Horror comedy, which aren't meant to have high body counts regardless
of race:
GHOSTBUSTERS, GHOSTBUSTERS 2, HOUSE, HOUSE 2, were total comedies. Black
character in GHOSTBUSTERS is a hero.
IDLE HANDS also had the black character as a hero. But yes, high bloody body count.
MARS ATTACKS! Lots of people die, lots of people live. High body count, but survivability was not based on race.
MEN IN BLACK movies were comedies with no horror despite the monsters. BUT- they did have deadly alien monsters. Black character is a hero.
EVOLUTION was meant to be a comedy and it had a deadly alien
monster. Nobody is really a hero. This movie also referenced the fact that a RACIAL CLICHÉ existed and that they weren't going to follow it.
So there are exceptions to be sure, 22 to be exact. Raising the number of total Horror Thriller movies with minorities in them to 123. And of that 123, 102 have the URCA (so far). Curiously, this RACIAL CLICHÉ seems to have started in the 1960s: At the same time black / Afro American / Negro etc. people started showing up in Hollywood films in far greater numbers. There were hardly any black people in earlier Horror / Thriller movies. Even episodes of the TWILIGHT ZONE were nearly all white - except in those rare cases where Rod Serling wanted a storyline about minorities kept down by the man. Otherwise they rarely appear.
Some people have commented on some of the large gaps between years of the movies on this list as well as the many Horror/Thriller movies I don't include. Presumably with the suspicion that I am not posting movies that contradict my theory. Obviously that isn't the case, since I clearly DO post those contradictory flicks (DUHHH!). It's just that there are an Awful lot of Horror & Thriller movies that don't even have any racial minorities (as characters) in them at all (ROSEMARY'S BABY, THE EXORCIST, THE OMEN, THE DEVIL'S RAIN, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (both), EVIL DEAD, ARMY OF DARKNESS, THE OTHERS, FROM HELL, THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES, THE X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE, THE RING), and in addition, there are an Awful lot of Hollywood made Horror & Thriller movies that I'm sure I haven't seen.
Still ... the list grows.
*References, in the movie, that a "Racial Cliché" exists. It is rumored that L.L. Cool J (HALLOWEEN H20, DEEP BLUE SEA) has a clause in his contracts stating that his character won't die in a Horror/ Thriller/ Monster movie. When asked directly in an interview about that rumor, he laughed and neither confirmed or denied it.
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| 2022 "And for Ralph, who has quietly and steadily built a 45-year career in an industry not always welcoming of her skin tone, taking up space has deep personal resonance." Sheryl Lee Ralph put in the time and the work. Hollywood is finally taking notice |
| 2021 "Industry professionals like the one I pitched above don't think of themselves as ableist." How Hollywood Reacts to My Disability - And Why it Matters For You |
| 2020 UCLA: Does Hollywood STILL hire based on race? 2020 Hollywood Diversity Report: A different story behind the scenes |
| 2006 Does Hollywood hire based on race? LA Daily News article. Study: Whites Get Majority Of Acting Jobs |
| From The Independent in the UK Gay Rights And Wrongs: Hollywood's Biggest Taboo. |
