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.
Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbathe-Raw)
Character Arc:
For engineer Ava Hamilton, leaving her husband behind on Earth to save the world was one struggle. Being the cause of the end of the world as we know it is a whole different level of fuckery.
The goal for the Cloverfield Station was to solve the energy crisis on earth with a particle accelerator. Instead, after a two years of trying, the accelerator opened multiple portals through time and space, sending the space station and crew into a parallel universe identical to ours where their space station crash landed two days earlier.
After several deaths occur, some mysteriously while others were by the hand of an alternate universe “stowaway,” Ava and a surviving crew member reset the particle accelerator and jump back into this universe. They take an escape pod home, but unbeknownst to them, their experiment has unleashed literal hell on Earth. And they were flying right into it.
Fun Trivia
Ava marks the second black woman to survive a Cloverfield movie, but both women’s statuses post film are unknown.
Ava and her husband Michael lost their kids in a house fire, but in the alternate universe their kids are still alive. This causes Ava to almost stay in the alternate universe to see/be with her kids. How that would’ve worked with that universe’s Ava, we will never know. But I’d bet money in it being a bit too cute interaction.
Final Thoughts
Most people hate this entry into the Cloverfield universe, but you have to admire the casting and the director being black and ambitious with a franchise as huge as Cloverfield. Plus, Ava is a modern day sci-fi/horror heroine.
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