The year was 1968. Hair was big, lapels were bigger, and Hai Karate wafted through the air with impunity. Moviegoers flocked to crowded theaters throughout the summer to see the big-budget, star-packed sensation that was Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, a film whose lurid blend of sex, violence, religion, and social commentary would help to usher in the modern era of horror cinema.

But, must more quietly, two shoestring-budget independent features also opened that year that would prove to be just as powerful a harbinger of the share of horror to come: Night of the Living Dead and Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told.

Both movies were unlikely influences, given their minuscule productions, with combined budgets of less than one-tenth of Rosemary's Baby's $3.2 million. They featured debuting directors—Night of the Living Dead's George Romero and Spider Baby's Jack Hill—relying on borrowed resources and favors from friends. They were released in cost-effective black-and-white film during an age of color (1961 being the last year in which the majority of Hollywood features were black-and-white, and 1966 being the last year the Oscars awarded a separate cinematography trophy for black-and-white films).

Their old-school veneer, however, belied their new-school marrow. These films were anarchic and transgressive, undermining social mores surrounding violence, sexuality, and general decorum in bold unapologetic swaths of blood, breasts, and bizarreness. These ahead-of-their-time stories would stoke the fires of future generations of filmmakers, even inspiring the development of entire subgenres within horror. It's hard to deny Spider Baby's imprint on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and other "backwoods" horror. Night of the Living Dead, meanwhile, single-handedly rewrote the zombie mythos and "reanimated' the genre, spawning everything from sequels like Dawn of the Dead (1978) and offshoots like The Return of the Living Dead (1985) to "zom-coms" like Shaun of the Dead (2004), TV shows like The Walking Dead, and foreign films like Train to Busan (2016).

Less acknowledged is Night's and Spider Baby's role as forerunners of the treatment of Black characters in horror movies over the next fifty years, both the highs and the deep dark, Blackensteinian lows. Spider Baby's fatal dismissal of its lone Black character, played by the legendary Mantan Moreland, in its opening moments became a template for the proverbial "Black Guy Dies First" scenario that would remain a persistent punch line for the genre. Meanwhile, Night of the Living Dead's "Black Guy," Ben (Duane Jones), likewise died, but he did so as the hero and the last man standing. His heroism and almost-survival were a rarity that signaled promise for a future in which Black actors and actresses would headline horror, Black characters could save the day, and Black horror movies could be commercial and critical successes worthy of the highest accolades—like the four Oscar nominations and one win for Jordan Peele's Get Out (2017).

This book explores the wild, wicked, waggish journey of Blacks in modern horror cinema, from the fodder epitomized by Spider Baby to the cinematic heights of Get Out and beyond. It discusses the themes, tropes, and traits that have come to characterize Black roles in horror since 1968, a year in which race made national headlines in iconic moments like: the Kerner Commission indicting "White racism" for U.S. social ills in February; enactment of the 1968 Civil Rights Act and Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in April; Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their "Black Power" fists in October; and Star Trek airing American television's first interracial kiss in November.

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