'The genre never valued black people!' Why Antoinette Robertson couldn't watch horror movies

Antoinette Robertson “never felt able” to watch horror movies.

The 29-year-old actress stars alongside the likes of Melvin Gregg and Grace Byers in the upcoming movie ‘The Blackening’ – which sees seven friends trapped in a cabin with a killer – but felt when she was growing up that black people were “never valued” in the genre of horror.

She told The Hollywood Reporter: “To be perfectly honest, because people of color — and black people specifically — weren’t valued in the horror space, it never made me feel like it was a space I wanted to veer towards. But I also had some pretty cruel cousins that liked to scare me a lot. So it put me in a world where I was a little bit of a fraidy cat, and I stayed away from the genre anyway.”

The ‘Block Party’ star went on to add that it was in high school she noticed that the black character tended to be killed off first in horror movies so jumped at the chance to override that particular “trope” with her latest role.

She said: “I’ve never been one to watch a lot of horror movies. Somewhere around high school, people would have conversations about horror movies, and they’d be like, ‘Y’all ever notice that the black person is the first person to die’ And to be perfectly honest, it wasn’t until someone said it that I started to really pay attention, and then it became like a bet. We’d all be like, ‘Okay, how far into the movie do you think this person is gonna die?’ And I would say, ‘I give her ten minutes,’ and then somebody else would give her fifteen minutes.

“So, once I got older, I understood that these characters really never got a chance to show you who they were. They were either a sidekick or something that was a little disposable. So, when the opportunity to take on that particular trope came across my desk, I was more than happy to participate.”

‘The Blackening’ is set to be released in the UK on August 25.