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.
Michelle Williams (Denise Nicholas)
Character Arc:
After after her friend Bobby McKay was found dead, Michelle Williams and her sister Tina gained a suspicious new figure in their lives: Prince Mamuwalde, who Tina takes a strong liking to and her own boyfriend, Dr. Gordon Thomas, doesn’t care for. Seeing Gordon become obsessed over the string of deaths in the area being of supernatural origin, Michelle balked when he suggests that there’s a vampire loose in the city, but she became a firm believer in his claims after they exhumed the body of Bobby’s lover Billy, who was a baby bloodsucker. Michelle increasingly feared for her sister’s life once it was confirmed that Prince Mamuwalde aka Blacula was the head honcho, and that Tina was now fallen madly in love with him. In the end, Michelle watched in horror as her sister, now a vampire, was staked by Gordon’s friend after the trio and the cops closed in on Blacula’s whereabouts. The mixture of Michelle’s screams of sorrow and her undead sister’s death screams still haunts me to this day.
Fun Trivia
This was Denise Nicholas’s first film.
Final Thoughts:
It seemed as if Michelle was the only voice of reason in some areas of the film, and she was also the lynchpin that tied all the characters together. While she only had two small encounters with the vampires, Michelle was still a viable character and, again, her scream at the end went straight to this blogger’s heart.
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