It’s almost Halloween and the perfect time for horror movies. Although we love to see them, Black characters have not had the best fates in scary movies. As we’ve said before, our Halloween costumes are often more than iconic, but sometimes, we don’t get the same reverence in cinema. For a while, the lack of representation in the writer’s room was to blame for the short lives of Black characters, and it was also to blame if there were no Black characters at all.

One of the first Black characters in a mainstream horror film was Duane Jones as Ben in Night of the Living Dead. The zombie movie premiered in 1968. Jones’s character was seen as pretty radical at the time because his character had a white onscreen wife. He survived to the end, only to be shot by a group that mistook him for a zombie.

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, we saw more color on the big screen, including actors featured in the blaxploitation horror film classic Blacula and Scatman Crothers’s role as Dick Hallorann in The Shining. One of the most famous Black horror characters is Tony Todd as the eponymous Candyman. The horror trilogy featured a Black main character, and the remake starred Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and made history again in 2021. The new rendition was directed by Nia DaCosta, making her the first Black female director to debut at No. 1 at the box office. Black cinema powerhouse Jordan Peele co-wrote the script with DaCosta and Win Rosenfeld. Peele also directed Get Out, Us, and his most recent box office hit, Nope.

Although we are glad to see Black people making it to the credits, we can’t forget the characters who may have been thrown on the chopping block a little too early.

Here are a few characters that deserved some more screen time.