Eddie Murphy’s Maximillian draws Angela Bassett’s Rita Veder into a world of seduction, fear and transformation in Vampire in Brooklyn (1995). Images: Paramount Pictures, via the official Wes Craven website.

Eddie Murphy Did Dracula His Way

Was it horror? A comedy? A romance? An Eddie Murphy character showcase? A Wes Craven film with jokes? A Gothic tragedy with Kadeem Hardison’s ears falling off? Yes. That collision of tones was treated as a weakness. But viewed through the history of Black horror—and by audiences comfortable laughing in the presence of danger—it looks like the point.

Eddie Murphy plays Maximillian, the last member of a Caribbean vampire lineage. He arrives in New York aboard a ghost ship, dressed like darkness has a tailor and searching for Detective Rita Veder, played by Angela Bassett. Rita does not know she is half vampire. Maximillian does. He is not merely inviting her to become his eternal bride; he is awakening a history her modern life has buried.

Bassett gives Rita strength without sacrificing vulnerability. She trusts what can be observed and proven until Maximillian arrives carrying a supernatural inheritance that refuses to fit her understanding of herself. Maximillian glides through rooms in double-breasted suits, sculpted overcoats, high collars and a cape that knows when to catch the wind. He has been alive long enough to know rushing is for mortals.

The traditional European vampire is an aristocrat: cultured, mysterious, commanding and dressed for the occasion. Vampire in Brooklyn gives that visual tradition to a Black man without asking him to surrender his Caribbean identity or imitate Count Dracula.

Black Vampires Were Never Just Vampires

In William Crain’s Blacula from 1972, Prince Mamuwalde is an African royal who asks Count Dracula to help end the slave trade. Dracula refuses, curses him with vampirism and locks him away. When Mamuwalde awakens in 1970s Los Angeles, he is an African man carrying a curse imposed by European cruelty. William Marshall plays him with such dignity that even the title Blacula—designed for the blaxploitation market—cannot make him a joke. Mamuwalde is regal, romantic and tragic. The horror begins with what was done to him.

A year later, Bill Gunn took the genre somewhere stranger with Ganja & Hess, a hypnotic meditation on blood, addiction, Christianity, desire and cultural dislocation. Dr. Hess Green, played by Duane Jones, becomes addicted to blood after an ancient ceremonial dagger wounds him. The film moves through ritual, fractured memory and dream logic, asking viewers to feel the curse before explaining it. Together, Blacula and Ganja & Hess established two freedoms: Black filmmakers could enter familiar genres and make them ours—or tear up the rules completely.

Brooklyn Has Its Own Monsters

By the time Def by Temptation arrived in 1990, the Gothic had moved comfortably into the Black city. Written and directed by James Bond III, Def by Temptation places a seductive predator inside Brooklyn nightlife. Bars, churches, bedrooms and brownstones become a battleground for temptation, faith, masculinity and fear during the AIDS era. Vampire in Brooklyn follows that principle. Wes Craven wraps the borough in harbor fog, blue shadows and amber streetlight, transforming familiar spaces into a Black neo-Gothic kingdom without forgetting that Eddie Murphy is Eddie Murphy.

Murphy also appears beneath layers of makeup as Guido, a loud Italian criminal, and Preacher Pauly, a pompadoured evangelist with gold teeth and a glorious yellow suit. Pauly’s sermon about evil being good—and good being evil—is Murphy at full comic voltage. Kadeem Hardison’s Julius begins as an unlucky hustler and becomes Maximillian’s rapidly decomposing servant. Body parts fail. Skin deteriorates. Julius keeps trying to hold himself together long after that is no longer realistic. This is where Vampire in Brooklyn understands something essential about Black horror: the monster can be terrifying, funny and frequently both.

We Laugh Because We See It Coming

We laugh during frightening movies because somebody is making an obviously terrible decision, because the danger is absurd and because humor helps us metabolize what might otherwise overwhelm us. The comedy does not cancel the fear. It gives the audience a way through it—and occasionally arrives because a man’s ear has fallen off at the worst possible moment.

Jordan Peele understood this perfectly in Get Out. Lil Rel Howery’s Rod Williams is funny, but he is also the only character who reads the situation correctly. He sounds outrageous because the truth is outrageous; everybody should have listened sooner. Get Out turned liberal politeness into a mask for bodily theft, while its Sunken Place captured the terror of being conscious but unable to control how the world uses your body.

With Us, Peele confronted the comfortable American family with the people forced underground so others could live above them. In Nope, he explored our hunger to capture spectacle—even when it might eat us alive. The supernatural in these films never feels separate from the world we know. The monster may have teeth; the system usually has better manners.

Our Ghosts Remember Everything

Black horror changes when the ghost knows history. In Tales from the Hood, Rusty Cundieff and Darin Scott turn the horror anthology into an attack on police violence, domestic abuse, racism and political hypocrisy. Clarence Williams III presides as Mr. Simms, a mortician whose every word sounds like an invitation and a warning. A racist politician is attacked by dolls carrying the spirits of enslaved people. Murderous officers confront the man they killed. An abusive father becomes the monster his child already knows him to be. Sometimes horror kicks down the door.

Nia DaCosta’s 2021 Candyman returns to Chicago’s Cabrini-Green and asks what happens when racial violence becomes legend, art and commodity. DaCosta expands Candyman into a legacy of Black men destroyed by racist terror. Elegant shadow puppetry depicts lynching and police violence, keeping the images beautiful without making brutality visually pleasurable. Black horror has often displayed Black suffering in order to condemn it. DaCosta stylizes violence into memory rather than spectacle.

Nikyatu Jusu’s Nanny follows Aisha, a Senegalese immigrant caring for a wealthy white family’s child in Manhattan while trying to bring her own son to the United States. Aisha’s distress emerges through water, dreams and West African figures including Mami Wata and Anansi. They are the language through which her fear, separation and submerged anger become visible. The haunting travels with her. In Black horror, the past rarely stays dead because someone refuses to speak its name.

The Daywalker Changed the Dress Code

When Blade arrived in 1998, Wesley Snipes’s half-vampire Daywalker changed the visual possibilities of the Black vampire. He did not brood in a castle, beg for acceptance or apologize for being dangerous. He hunted vampires with martial-arts precision, silver weapons and the calm assurance of a man who knew the movie became cooler when he entered it.

Blade’s black leather coat, dark glasses and armored silhouette created a Gothic hero who was part comic-book warrior, part nightclub legend and part futuristic gunslinger. Style and command run throughout Black horror. Mainstream cinema often cast us as servants in the haunted house, victims in the alley or expendable bodies gone before anyone learned their names.

Black Gothic style rejects that visual poverty with velvet, leather, silver, crimson silk, immaculate tailoring and silhouettes designed to own the night. Maximillian’s suits make him a Black dandy with supernatural authority. Rita’s wardrobe shifts as she approaches her inheritance. Mr. Simms turns formalwear into theater. Blade makes tactical clothing look like couture for killing vampires. If you are going to confront the darkness, Black horror suggests you may as well look magnificent doing it.

Halloween Gives Us Permission to Transform

That is why the Melanin Madness costume runway belongs inside this story. The clothes are part of the evening’s meaning. Halloween gives people permission to become somebody else—or reveal what daylight keeps under control. A cape changes posture. Fangs change a smile. Leather, lace, velvet and blood-red lipstick let the wearer step outside ordinary respectability.

Black audiences spend enough time being told to appear safe, professional and approachable. Gothic glamour offers the pleasure of becoming mysterious, excessive, powerful and just a little dangerous. Nobody attending Vampire in Brooklyn at The Apollo needs rescue from the darkness. They came dressed for it. When the audience talks back, it joins a long Black performance tradition. The Apollo has never been a room where opinion stays hidden. Its crowds have applauded, booed, laughed, judged and helped decide who was ready for the world. Melanin Madness brings that energy to cinema. The movie plays, but Harlem answers.

The Dark Belongs to Us Too

For years, Vampire in Brooklyn’s shifting tones were treated as evidence that the film did not know what it wanted to be. But Black culture has never struggled to hold grief and laughter at once. We can mourn at a funeral and tell a repast story that makes the room howl. We can understand a monster’s politics while admiring his coat, and take folklore seriously without becoming too solemn to enjoy ourselves.

Black horror turns colonial history into a vampire’s curse, racism into body theft, gentrification into urban legend and immigrant isolation into a water spirit rising from the deep. It also gives us a gold-toothed preacher, a wisecracking best friend and a Daywalker who clearly never met a wind machine he did not like. On October 29, a thirty-one-year-old movie will flicker across a screen on 125th Street. Some will arrive because they have loved it for years; others will reconsider it or simply dress up, laugh loudly and begin Halloween among people who know horror is better when the audience has something to say.

Maximillian may still be the last vampire of his bloodline. But he will not be alone. Harlem will be in the dark with him—beautifully dressed, fully awake and talking back.