National debates on immigration often replicate Hollywood's childlike vision of the world, ignoring the fact that not all immigration to the United States was voluntary. In AIP's Blacula (USA 1972; dir. William Crain), figurative slavery of Satanism from Hammer's films is reworked as actual slavery of the Middle Passage and enduring slavery of institutionalized racism in con¬temporary Los Angeles. Set in Transylvania during 1780, Blacula opens with African prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall), requesting Count Dracula (Charles McCauley) end Europe's slave trade. Count Dracula refuses, enslaves Mamuwalde with an insatiable thirst for human blood, and locks him in a coffin outside of which he leaves Mamuwalde's wife Luva (Vonetta McGee) to die. The sensational story redirects attention from US racism to eastern Europe's so-called backwardness and fall to Communism. The film acknowl¬edges chattel slavery as part of US history. Mamuwalde is renamed Blacula, carrying two markers of racialization: ownership and color. Not inheriting an aristocratic title, he becomes Blacula, and not Count Blacula. He is sold as the property of Count Dracula's estate. His involuntary immigration as cargo evokes the colonial connection between immigration and commerce in the transatlantic slave trade. By contrast, Count Dracula becomes legend—“la crème de la crème of camp,” in the words of a queer-identified antiques seller. Blacula conveys how afterlives of race encumber Mamuwalde's assimilation in ways about which Count Dracula remains unaware.

In addition to foreign immigrants, Los Angeles is marked by the second Middle Passage, the exportation of millions of African-descended slaves from the Old South to the Deep South and West between 1790 and 1860. As late as the 1950s and 1960s, African Americans were considered “immigrants from the South,” requiring assimilation to the North (Omi and Winant 1994: 19). Blacula performs a type of historiography. With 10 per cent of the US population descended from African slaves, fictionalized and semi-fictionalized histories satisfy a hunger for black history because substantive primary docu¬ments are often nonexistent. Blacula recovers a violent and inhumane moment, erased in pre-Civil Rights comedies like I'm No Angel (USA 1933; dir. Wesley Ruggles) and Just Around the Corner (USA 1938; dir. Irving Cummings), with Gertrude Howard and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in stereotyped supporting roles. Like Christopher Lee in Hammer's films, Marshall portrays the vampire as soft-spoken, articulate, dignified, and polite.