Black Vampires

I am accustomed to vampire movies with a white protagonist. It’s refreshing to see Black people play roles that were not meant for them. Black people’s role in fiction is important because why can’t they exist in a world that is only imagined? The short film “Suicide by Sunlight” written by Nikyatu Jusu and Robin Shanea Williams, is a vampire film about a Black daywalker. The story explains how Black Vampires can survive during sunlight because of their melanin. As the story unfolds you see how fiction and reality intersect.
The importance of the subtle blackness shown throughout the film is what makes the story relatable. Representation matters even in fiction. The main character Valentina is a nurse who has long locs and she blends right in with the rest of civilization. In this film, we see black couples, all different shades of black but the film focuses more on darker complexions. Within this story, we see the value of melanin to these vampires. Their ability to survive and thrive is due to their skin while white vampires can only come out after dark. In my opinion, I take this aspect of the film to represent Black people’s capability to adapt since in the movie, they often hide their bloodsucking identities during the daytime.
I have a fascination with the concept of vampires. The first vampire movie I ever saw was Vampires in Brooklyn, which starred Eddie Murphy. I dreamt the most vivid dream I ever had of him chasing after me in my own home. He was trying to feed my sister and I to his long-lost love and I wasn’t going to let him have me. I remember that dream as if it were a memory. As I got older I encountered a plethora of vampire movies, which in hindsight were my favorite genre of horror movies other than zombies. There were shows and their franchises of movies that were released in the early 2000s. Blade movies, Twilight Saga, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Queen of the Dammed. All of them fascinated me and I got lost in the story of everlasting life.
How would I behave if I knew I could never die? This question never came paired with the fact that I was a Black person and if I wanted to stay who I was, within these fictional characters that meant it came with conditions. So, I could never fully understand the vampire love stories or the vampires themselves. They were always killed and turned in a time which my ancestors were slaves. And even if there are black vampires in this white world they either die quickly or their relationships with their counterparts seem very unrealistic. Representation in fiction should be relatable because there’s been too many stories that are written without us in them.