I wasn’t into horror growing up. Being raised in a Baptist household meant that the genre was generally off-limits to prevent exposure to “spirits” and other potentially morally corrupting subject matter. This meant sneaking to watch Saw and Insidious and Paranormal Activity with friends, and praying there wouldn’t be any nightmares, because you can never be too sure.

It wasn’t until I became an adult that I started to explore horror, first as part of coursework during undergrad and then on my own through countless indie horror video game playthroughs of varying quality and pirated B-movie marathons. So, when a vampire period piece set in the Jim Crow era South was announced, Ryan Coogler’s (stingers up) fifth collaborative effort with Michael B. Jordan, my curiosity was piqued. 

But then the film actually released. I couldn’t make the Thursday night previews, and by Sunday I was sinnered the hell out by the discourse that began almost immediately online and continued throughout its entire theatrical run. Hyperbolic praise for the film that is somehow fairly standard in online discussion of any piece of media released these days (whatever), to criticisms about the film’s plot and pacing (fair), to exhausting discussions of colorism, desirability politics, and pandering, and even dissection of the actors’ personal romantic lives and preferences (who gives a fuck!). It was impossible to spend any time online and not be exposed to spoilers.

Even still, I snuck out of work early and went to one of the final screenings of the film at the Vista. I was somehow shocked that the screening I selected was sold out. I often forget that nobody in this town has a real job. I settled into the back corner of the theatre with a bubbly RC Cola and a small popcorn, turned off my phone, and suspended my disbelief.

The film was glorious in thirty-five millimeter Vistavision, and although a small part of me hates watching Black films in mixed audiences, it was a genuinely fun movie-going experience. Worth all of the nonsensical discourse online? Maybe? As I chewed on what I had seen in the Uber home and in the days and weeks afterward, I realized the film is Afropessimist.

I will preface the rest of my ranting by stating I make no definitive claims on what Coogler intended to or categorizes the film as; in interviews he’s cited his own family’s history and experiences as inspiration for the film. 

NOTE: Spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen this film by now, I don’t know what to tell you.

Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932 (69 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, 67 years after the surrender of Robert E. Lee, and 14 years after the end of World War I), the film opens with a bloodied Sammie, or Preacherboy (played by Miles Caton), seeking refuge in the Christian church led by his sharecropper father, who in front of a shocked congregation, pleads with him to abandon music.

“I been working all week… I want to be free of all this.”

Twins Smoke and Stack, (played in a dual role by Michael B. Jordan) have returned home to Clarksdale after serving in the Great War and a stint up North running with the Mafia. Using the funds they’ve earned during their travels, they seek their own “freedom” through an entrepreneurial venture: a juke joint offering live music, dancing, gambling, and of course, food and liquor, catering to the local Black community. The establishment (purchased from a Grand Dragon) is converted from an abattoir into a magical sanctuary of revelry in under twelve hours, and it appears that, although the juke joint likely won’t be as financially successful as the twins had hoped (due to the fact that the sharecroppers are paid in virtually worthless plantation money), there is at least some merriment to break up the struggle and strife of their everyday lives.

Until the white vampires show up. I mean, it’s really on the nose.

Remmick (played by Jack O’Connell), an ancient Irish vampire who narrowly survived being hunted by a band of Choctaw vampire hunters when we first meet him, arrives at the juke joint accompanied by a married pair of Ku Klux Klan members he turned earlier in the film. Attracted to Preacherboy’s ability to draw down spirits across space and time with music, Remmick seeks entry into the juke joint but is denied. Realizing that the white patrons might be the juke joint’s only opportunity for real money, however, Mary, Stack’s white-passing love interest (played by Hailee Steinfeld), ventures outside to test whether the vampires are safe or not.

Of course they aren’t.

Things go rapidly downhill from there, with Mary turned into a vampire and then turning Stack, and the vampires outside of the juke joint turning any unfortunate patron who leaves the building. There’s a stunning musical number (second to the one performed by Caton a little earlier in the film) in which Remmick attempts to recruit Preacherboy, seeking to use his musical talents to help him create some sort of vampire utopia. Denied again, Remmick threatens the daughter of Grace (played by Li Jun Li); desperate, Grace invites the vampires in, and the survivors fight literally to the death. In a final confrontation with Remmick, Preacherboy prays the Lord’s Prayer; Remmick joins him (because the Devil knows the Bible too) until finally Preacherboy busts him upside the head with his silver guitar, wounding him. Smoke delivers the wooden stake to his heart, and the horrified pair watch as Remmick and the rest of the undead burst into flames underneath the rays of the rising sun.

Preacherboy returns to the sanctuary, for, literal sanctuary; not finding it, he heads to Chicago. Smoke goes down in a blaze of glory, gunning down the Klansmen who (as Remmick had said) returned to the abattoir to murder the patrons and ruin the twins’ business. Fatally shot, he joins Annie (played by Wunmi Osaku) and their infant daughter in the ancestral realm.

“After we kill y’all… we gon have Heaven right here on Earth.”

The Afropessimists are right, unfortunately.

I was only exposed to Afropessimism as an adult. Growing up in relatively diverse Northern California and reaching young adulthood through two Obama terms meant that, despite some fucked up instances (like being called the N-word at seven years old, among myriad other microagressions), racial unity was… possible. Somewhere. Somehow. Somewhen.

And yet the same shit kept happening. Keeps happening. Even with integration, even with increased visibility and “access”, even with a Blackish president, the violence has never stopped. But we keep marching. Keep singing and dancing. Keep writing. Keep “achieving”. Keep intermarrying, keep conforming, keep trying. 

If the reader could stretch their imagination to fit the shoes of a Black American woman, they could possibly understand the frustration I (and so many of the rest of us) experience. I’m me, not “just” Black. Any discomfort another person has with Blackness is an issue they need to negotiate within themselves. I’m just existing. I’m not bothering anybody. Why should any of that be my motherfucking problem? 

The answer… the truth was always there waiting for me, quietly, patiently. 

But the answer hurt. It was too much to bear. It broke my heart. It collapsed the illusion.

Frank B. Wilderson III says Afropessimism is “Black people at their best… Afropessimism gives us the freedom to say out loud what we would otherwise whisper or deny: that no Blacks are in the world, but, by the same token, there is no world without Blacks.”

In the world but not of the world. Damn near Biblical.

We see this theory over and over again in the film. The sharecroppers creating the real profits enjoyed by the landowners while not having any real money of their own; the twins putting their bodies on the line in the Great War, serving the imperialist agenda of the State in an undoubtedly segregated regiment and returning home with nothing to show for their bravery and courage. Even their attempt to participate in the “American Dream” by starting a business is met with violence, both supernatural and not. A slaughterhouse turned nightclub turned back into a slaughterhouse.

Why? Wilderson says that “without Black people, Human existence would be unintelligible.” Without us, the rest of the world has nothing to compare themselves to. Nothing to look at and say, “Well, at least I’m not that. Thank God!” Because nothing could be worse than Being Black. Right?

“I am your way out. This world already left you for dead. Won’t let you build. Won’t let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.”

Coogler putting these words in Remmick’s mouth was genius because to me, it so succinctly packaged the conundrum that Preacherboy (and the rest of us) face every day. Join me and die, because they’re planning on killing you anyway. This death is better than that death. Who would not be tempted by that, knowing the truth?

It’s important to note that none of the characters had “happy” endings in the film either. Preacherboy goes on to become a blues star but is forever traumatized by his experience at the juke joint and wears a literal scar as evidence of his brush with the vampire. Stack is doomed to a waking death, an eternity of roaming the earth with Mary in darkness (in what the audience sees in a post-credits scene) in a still hostile, but now “integrated” society. Annie and Smoke are together in the ancestral realm, a fate I saw some describe online as a “happy, beautiful” ending. But they’re still dead. And the rest of the simply unlucky juke joint patrons who just wanted to have a good time burnt up in the sun with Remmick.

Hella bleak.

So what then is the solution? Many critics of Afropessimism call it fatalist, removing agency from a group of people who have historically shown the capacity to agitate for change and freedom. Wilderson himself says that Black people shouldn’t resign themselves to the social death he describes or treat it as an inevitability, which I agree with. Otherwise I would jump off the Santa Monica Pier, echoing the self-determination of the enslaved Igbo at Dunbar Creek.

The solution? Honestly, I don’t know.

Maybe like cigars, a movie is just a movie.