‘The Black guy dies first’: A Northwestern provost is our leading expert on representation in horror movies

CHICAGO — Robin Means Coleman has heard it all. Cliches like: Maybe we should split up and look. Tropes like: I didn’t get bit, I’m fine. Also: That sound — it’s probably just the wind. And: My uncle owns a cabin in the woods. Plus, of course, the evergreen: I’ll be right back.

Robin Means Coleman has watched a lot of horror movies.

Way more than you have.

By day, she works out of an extremely uninteresting office tower in downtown Evanston, Illinois, where she serves a sobering, indispensable professional function: She is Northwestern University’s vice president and associate provost for diversity and inclusion. She also doubles as the school’s Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett Professor in Communication Studies. Her office is as you imagine: Walls papered in framed honors and degrees, muted colors, tidy furniture, academic studies spread across a bookcase.

But the rest of the time, for at least a decade now, she’s also been known by a far more unusual distinction: Coleman is our preeminent scholar on Black representation in horror movies. Her 2011 book, “Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films, From the 1890s to authoritative study of the subject. But it’s not exactly hilarious, and as Coleman notes, one defining characteristic of Black horror is a sense of humor, an unsinkable irony, an underlying sense that, as she puts it, “no matter how bad things get, you have to laugh.”