Monster of the Day #440

Along with Lance Henriksen, one of the few guys who could have been a major horror star if we still had those. How has no one put this guy in an updated Blacula movie yet?

  • Gamera977

    He made a pretty good Klingon too!

  • The Rev.

    I don’t know if has quite the dramatic weight of William Marshall, but I could actually see him pulling that off.  Not a bad idea, Ken!

    Tony Todd’s one of those guys I’m always happy to see pop up in something, because I know there’ll be at least one good thing about it.  Lance Henrikson, Robert Englund, and Bruce Campbell are also on that list.  I’ll generally watch anything they’re in just because of their presence.  Hell, I watched an episode of “Married with Children” this weekend just because Englund played the Devil in it.

  • I could see it, although I’m not sure a property like BLACULA would really have legs outside of the 70’s. I mean I could be wrong, and I’d be happy to be proven so, but I’m not sure any modern studio would really have the guts to make a good Blacula movie. Unless the creative team were all black, there’d be cries of racism from the usual race-carders like Sharpton (Sharpten?) and Jackson. Yes, it’s silly, but I recall a minor fervor over 2005’s KING KONG over race because Kong was black and the girl was white!!!

  • Petoht

    I suppose it depends on how it would be handled.  I mean, Wes Craven was able to do Vampire in Brooklyn with Eddie Murphy in 1995.

  • Ericb

    If they just dropped the “Blackula” title I don’t see there being much of a fuss in terms of pc stuff.  On the other hand if they dropped the original title the film would lose its blacksploitation aura which is part of the reason many people even remember it.

  • Ericb

    Though if the film loses its the blacksploitation context it just becomes a film about a vampire who happens to be black which even if its a very good story it will be lost among the 1000 other vampire movies being made.  In other words in the early 70s the idea of a film centered on a vampire who was an African prince was a novel idea, nowadays not so much.

  • The more I think about it, I actually think someone SHOULD make a Blacula movie, provided they could handle it properly, and it could likely turn a decent profit if economically filmed. The PC picks at the film would be inevitable, but in the long run probably wouldn’t effect sales numbers. (Still, I have almost no faith that they would be able to pull off a good movie, it would almost certainly have to be independently produced.) Now, the big question is, when are we going to get BLACULA VERSUS COUNT YORGA!!!??