I Have Never Seen Blacula; Maybe I Should

 I remember when Blacula came out - I was a kid living in Indianapolis. Back then, my mother would take us to musicals, not movies. Her opinion was that movies will come to television, and so plays were a better place to spend what little money she had. I know she loved movies, but I think she was trying to give us a cultural education, too. I will not deny there was an element of snobbishness involved, too.

I do not recall seeing Blacula being shown on TV. Then the older I got, the less patience I had with horror movies. The last one I recall seeing at a movie theater was 1989 when I visited my ex-fiancee TJ in Orlando and a group of us went to see Pet Cemetery. She loved horror movies.

Still, when this headline came through on a LitHub newsletter, I knew its subject and could not resist reading:  How America’s First Cinematic Black Vampire Subverted Stereotypes. I found several reasons to see the movie and I found an Indiana connection.

In January 1972, at the same time Warners was making Super Fly in New York City, director William Crain was in Los Angeles to begin production on the first monster film to feature a Black vampire. Of course, American International Pictures (AIP) made the title a play on “Black Dracula,” calling the film Blacula.

Inspired by the previously successful idea of casting a stage veteran like Vincent Price to class up their low-budget literary adaptations, AIP hired Shakespearian actor William Marshall to portray Prince Mamuwalde, the man who would be Blacula. Marshall was six feet, five inches tall, the same height as the white guy who held the monopoly on vampires in 1972, Christopher Lee. Like Lee, he was also a classically trained opera singer who rarely got to employ that talent onscreen.

Born in Gary, Indiana, in 1924, Marshall had already been working for almost thirty years before he was cast in his signature role. He made his Broadway debut in Carmen Jones in 1944 before being directed by Marty Ritt in Dorothy Heyward’s play Set My People Free in 1948. In 1950, he understudied the role of Captain Hook for fellow monster movie legend Boris Karloff in Peter Pan (in addition to playing Cookson) and, a year later, played De Lawd in a revival of The Green Pastures.

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When it opened on July 26, 1972, Blacula didn’t do too poorly with the critics. In addition to Siskel, Variety gave the film a good review, as did the Chicago Reader and the Miami Herald. Audiences liked it as well, bringing in $3,000,000 in ticket sales against a $500,000 budget. Along with Shaft, it was one of the few Blaxploitation films to win an award, earning Best Horror Film at the inaugural sci-fi- and horror-based Saturn Awards.

Though it featured educated Black characters and a lead that was far from a stereotype, Blacula still drew the ire of Junius Griffin. A month before he created the Coalition Against Blaxploitation, he started a beef with Marshall over the actor’s dream project, a film version of Martinique poet Aimé Césaire’s play The Tragedy of King Christophe. King Christophe was a real-life Haitian revolutionary hero, a great opportunity for Marshall, but he was outranked by Anthony Quinn’s competing project, Black Majesty. The Mexican-American Quinn had intended to play the Black lead role himself, causing all manner of controversy. To everyone’s surprise, Griffin endorsed Quinn’s project.

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