Shortly after watching Bird Box (Susanne Bier, 2018) one of my homies angrily texted me: “Why did Tom (Trevante Rhodes) have to die? And why did Malorie (Sandra Bullock) get to live?” While I knew exactly why he was so mad, I didn’t share his sense of surprise. Early on, after recognizing that the film alternated between the apocalyptic past and the post-apocalyptic present, and that Malorie was all alone with those children on that raft, my first thought was, “How many characters in this story will need to die to earn this white woman the empathy she should already have?”
This might seem like a cynical or reductive question from an admittedly jaded, black horror fan, but the implicit demand for Malorie’s salvation calls it forth. As I watched Bird Box with my family and they began to speculate about which of the characters might live, particularly the black ones, I felt sad already knowing that no one else in Malorie’s group (save the kids) would get out alive: I knew that making Malorie into someone capable of empathy was a call for blood.
