Black as Night

 

Amazon's Black as Night, directed by Maritte Lee Go, is monster horror in the age of BLM and black girl magic.

Asjha Cooper stars as Shawna, a New Orleans teen born during Hurricane Katrina. Her mother (Kenneisha Thompson) has fallen into drug addiction and is living among the homeless and dispossessed in one of the city's last housing units for the poor. Shawna lives with her father (Derek Roberts) and brother (Frankie Smith) and is best friends with an out-and-proud Hispanic boy Pedro (Fabrizio Guido).

One night while walking home from a party at which she tried and failed to connect with her crush Chris (Mason Beauchamp) she is attacked by a vampire who draws blood before being scared away. Shawna discovers her mother was also attacked but did not survive. She recruits Pedro, Chris and a white girl who leads a vampire lore interest group (Abbie Gayle) on a quest to hunt the blood suckers.

Writer Sherman Payne has laced throughout this fairly standard fare notes about racism and colorism, Black enslavement, empowerment and restitution, though not the sort generally mentioned these days.

These embellishments give the film, which is often moribund, some vitality but it is not sustained, even with the always-entertaining Keith David as a community activist on a secret mission. Still, it's a fairly commendable attempt to breathe life into a creaky genre.