This February, Midnight Social Distortion will be celebrating Black History Month by honoring Black horror characters, in particular Black horror survivors, throughout the twenty-eight day period. Each day will feature one black male and one black female survivor in horror and sci-fi to bring light to the positive, albeit still problematic, black champions of representation in horror. Some disclaimers first: obvious spoilers ahead, and not all horror survivors will be featured this go round, but will appear in later posts down the line.
Joel Jones (Duane Martin)
Character Arc
Joel Jones was a cameraman on assignment for Gale Weathers as she covered the slayings of Maureen Evans (Jada Pinkett-Smith)and Phil Stevens (Omar Epps). Corn the outset, this was a simple task for his budding career. Then Joel got a hold of Gale Weathers’ book, The Woodsboro Murders, and the game suddenly flipped for our boy Joel. Sensing that he was quickly becoming the sole black man surrounded by dead bodies dropping almost every hour on the hour, our career cameraman did the one thing any sane black person would do: he got the fuck outta town. Before doing all that, Joel endured the icy, slick tongue of Gale Weathers (Courtney Cox) – which is a feat in itself – and had his news-van confiscated as a crime scene. But once the killer(s) were caught and the survivors were left standing, Joel came out of hiding ready to continue his career in journalism as if nothing happened. Be like Joel.
Fun Trivia
Joel is the sole black person to survive a Scream movie. He easily did this by extricating himself from the action at hand.
In earlier drafts of the Scream 2 script, Joel was written as Hallie’s boyfriend and part of Sidney’s (Neve Campbell) Windsor College clique of friends. He didn’t fare well in any of those versions.
Final Thoughts
Scream 2 served as the only Scream movie to feature and poke fun at three (problematic) paradigms when it comes to black people in horror movies, which was ironically (yet, smartly) predicted by Maureen (dying first, black best friend’s not making it, and fleeing away from danger). Joel getting the fuck out of dodge isn’t necessarily one of those “problems,” but it is expected for black people to run at the sign of trouble, so that connotation has a catch-22 effect to it. Also another fun tidbit, it was Duane Martin who suggested to Wes Craven that Joel left, because it was the most logical thing for him to do, which helped with some of the script changes due to the plot being leaked by an extra during filming. IMDB
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