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.
Reese Wilson (Loretta Devine)
Character Arc:
Before TSA Rod Williams and Denise Hemphill-Campus Security, there was Officer Reese Wilson, Pendleton University security guard extraordinaire. Channeling her inner Pam Grier of Coffey, Reese helped stop not one, but two psychotic slashers at two different universities hellbent on killing students based on urban legends, talking shit along the way. She also had the common sense to have a loaded gun on her at all times, because you simply wasn’t going to catch her slipping (on that particular point cause she did bust her ass on some spilled blood). Reese is a legend and must be treated as the National Treasure of Black Horror Survivors that she is.
Fun Trivia
Reese survived both movies and manages to have a big hand in taking down both slashers. She also is one of the two black women to appear in the Urban Legend Trilogy and survive.
On the Scream Factory release of the movie, actress Loretta Devine said she used her experience as a dorm director at a college to help prep for her role as Reese. Devine also played a dorm director in the first season of A Different World.
Final Thoughts
While Reese was the savior of the final girls/guys of the first two Urban Legend films , she was still smart enough to know when to strike and when to run. She’s one of the few black people (to my knowledge) to make it to the sequel and still survive a second round of carnage. That, in itself, is a feat. Sorry, Kincaid…
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