Scary Black Man / Live-Action Films

"Say what again! Say what again! I dare you, I double-dare you motherfucker, say what one more goddamn time!"

By Actor

• Michael Clarke Duncan:
  • John Coffey from The Green Mile is more of a subversion of this trope; despite his massive size and spooky healing powers, he's a Gentle Giant who was wrongfully convicted of murdering children.
  • Manute the mob enforcer from Sin City.
  • He also played a race-swapped Kingpin in Daredevil (2003), precisely because he was the best actor with the size they wanted, and later reprised the role for Spider-Man: The New Animated Series.
• Tiny Lister played this as his standard character type:
  • Friday has him playing Deebo, the Big Bad bully who causes many problems for Craig and Smokey.
  • No Holds Barred has him playing Zeus, the utterly brutal Monster Heel that Hulk Hogan's character Rip has to take down, and The Dragon for Brell, the Big Bad.
  • Little Nicky has him playing Cassius, one of two Big Brother Bullies to the title character.
  • The Dark Knight has him playing the hulking prisoner Ginty, who convinces the prison guard captain to give him the explosives detonator to do "what he should have did 10 minutes ago," presumably blowing up the other boat and saving everyone on his own boat. Instead, he tosses the detonator out the window, choosing to make a principled sacrifice rather than be coerced into murder.
  • In Circus, Lister is the hulking Moose, Big Bad Bruno's chief enforcer who towers over everyone else in the cast. Although normally a Punch-Clock Villain, even the sadistic Bruno steers clear of Moose when his Berserk Button has been pushed.
• Tony Todd:
  • Candyman and its sequels combine this with Vengeful Ghost, crafting one of the most terrifying horror antagonists to exist in the process.
  • Jack the Reaper: Mr. Steele must be the most terrifying museum curator in history, and delights in telling the kids stories about all the horrific ways you can be killed by a train.
  • The Rock has him as the knife-wielding Captain Darrow, who between the quote "I'd take pleasure in guttin' you, boy..." and betraying and killing his superior when he won't go through with the attack, no matter if the government didn't pay the ransom money, is very much this trope.
• Basically the entire oeuvre of Ving Rhames. Oftentimes, this will be subverted, as in the Mission: Impossible movies, where he turns out to be a Genius Bruiser and a very nice guy. But just as often, it's played straight. Fully half of his film roles seem to be as violent criminals with names like "Animal" and "Diamond Dog."

By Film

• Captain Dickson from 21 and 22 Jump Street, portrayed by Ice Cube. Domingo, the leader of The One-Percenters, also qualifies from the first film.
• Lieutenant Mailer, the Infected soldier in 28 Days Later.
• Discussed in 42, where General Manager Branch Rickey insists that Jackie Robinson must avoid being provoked into this trope no matter how many taunts and jeers he'll get for breaking baseball's color barrier.
  Robinson: "You want a player who doesn't have the guts to fight back?"
  Rickey: "No. I want a player who's got the guts not to fight back."
• 300 has Persian king Xerxes reimagined as a giant dark-skinned man covered with golden jewelry, with Brazilian actor Rodrigo Santoro's skin having been darkened for the role. The real Xerxes was much lighter-skinned, and whether the Unreliable Narrator justification works for this is open to interpretation.
• In The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T has the bare-chested elevator operator in the executioner's hood. Those EYES! And the song was freaky, too, as he talked about the "assorted simple tortures" awaiting the prisoners in the dungeon. Even the normally unflappable Mr. Zabladowski was visibly unnerved by him.
• Absolute Power (1997): Agent Collin (played with chilling serenity by Dennis Haysbert) will serve his President, even if that means committing cold-blooded premeditated murder. His partner Agent Burton at least admits his disgust with what they've been forced to do openly, but Collin seems to have no such compunctions.
• Alien: Resurrection has the quietly intense Christie, who also has much expertise in small arms.
• Terry, the stuntwoman in Angels Revenge is a Scary Black Woman (especially when she's helping con Jim Backus' militia group).
• The stewardess in Anger Management has one to back her up, and he has a taser.
• Quinton (Rampage) Jackson playing B.A. Baracus in The A-Team.

• In Batman The Joker employs one of these guys, and he's the only henchman to give Batman trouble during the final battle at the Gotham Cathedral.
• Black Dynamite, played by Michael Jai White, is a parody of Blaxploitation heroes, being both an irresistible womanizer but also a Kung-Fu fighting Sociopathic Hero who you DO NOT want to antagonize with, as he becomes quite the scary black man (especially when he chases after a terrified Cream Corn) when his buttons are pushed. His animated counterpart even more, since his default expression is an intimidating scowl.
• Blade, a ruthless and very intimidating Dhampyr Anti-Hero played by Wesley Snipes.
• The Blind Side: Despite his intimidating size, Michael is actually a Gentle Giant. He's plenty scary if you're lined up against him on the football field, though.
• Deconstructed in Blindspotting. On the one hand, Miles views it as an enviable mark of authority and authenticity. However, Collin himself is increasingly fearful that being seen as such will land him swiftly back in jail, or even dead.
• The film CB4 parodies the scary black man stereotype by having suburban young black men — born and raised — fake like they're gangsters from the hood in order to sell rap records. MC. Gusto even steals his rap name from the Big Bad in the film.
• Kynette of Cliffhanger is an evil martial artist who dispassionately guns down a helpless teenage boy for just having seen his face. This lets us cheer when Sylvester Stallone shoves his evil heart into a stalagmite.
• In The Color of Money, when Eddie takes Vincent and Carmen to a pool hall filled with black men, Vincent urges Carmen to return to the hotel, worried that she could get raped. Street Smart Carmen's insistence that she can take care of herself gets ignored.
• Diamond Dog in Con Air. He's a Malcolm Xerox without the glasses or the soapbox. Strangely, he's one of the most well-spoken characters in the entire movie and wrote a best-selling book. And was interviewed by Geraldo. And there was talk in-story about a movie being made about him, with "Denzel" being cast to play him.
• Conan the Destroyer:
  • A Gender-Inverted Trope, as Zula's a fierce black warrior woman who is introduced fending off several men at once and is a skilled Screaming Warrior. She's tall for a woman, and bares her teeth too when fighting. Zula's on the good side, however previously she'd been part of a raiding band.
  • Bombaata, a tall and formidable black man; in the climax especially, where he demonstrates his brutality to its fullest.
• In Cube, Quentin — a police officer — starts out as the apparent hero and leader of the victimized group. However, he suffers Sanity Slippage from the terror of the situation and ends up becoming the film's biggest threat, besides the dangerous Cube itself.
• The Dark Knight: Played straight by Gambol, the black gangster, at least until Joker crashes his party.
• Django Unchained:
  • The titular protagonist, Django (Jamie Foxx), becomes quite a formidable One-Man Army of a gunslinger during the course of the movie, and is very ruthless towards anyone who dares to mess with him or those he cares about.
  • Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), a sadistic black slave overseer (technically Calvin Candie's "Head House Slave", but still the second-in-command and above the other slaves). How much scary is he as a scary black man? To the point of bringing Django's enslaved wife to tears and say out loud that she's scared of him.
• District 9 has the Nigerian gangsters, especially the leader Obesandjo who is confined to a wheelchair but is still scary as hell.
• Dr. Terror's House of Horrors: The male members of the voodoo cult who silently surround Biff without his noticing in "Voodoo". In particular, the hulking priest of Damballah who appears without explanation in Biff's home in London to take revenge and retrieve the stolen music.
• The Duke, portrayed by Isaac Hayes, in Escape from New York, is a villainous Scary Black Man. He's the Duke of New York! He's A-number one!
• In the film Fly-by-Night, the rap duo King and Eye try to make it on the local rap scene. Problem is, while King is a decent all-around good fellow, Eye is a scary black man who gets off on control and starting trouble. Needless to say, he's the film's Big Bad.
• The Black Panther cell in Forrest Gump has a handful of Scary Black Men, and one Malcolm Xerox ranting about The Man.
• Corky from Fresh. He tells Jake to "shut the fuck up" in one scene, and the way he and his minions exit a van in one scene is very menacing.
• Game of Death: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's character is 7ft 2in tall, has Super-Strength, and is very intimidating.
• Hackman from Gamer (played by Terry Crews) — a black inmate and Slayers participant who's easily the largest, most dangerous, and most sadistic character in the movie.
• Ghost Note: Eugene Burns was a blues musician who wrote and played songs that caused anyone who heard them to turn violent and/or suicidal. And he could certainly have gained some scariness from all the metal attached to his body.
• Heavy Duty from G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. The man totes a .50 cal. machine gun as a sidearm.
• Subverted in Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. The title characters crash their car into a fire hydrant, which floods the street and interrupts a basketball game. When several black men pick up tools and approach the car, Harold and Kumar run off. Turns out the black men just wanted to help them fix the car. They then call the water department to report the damaged hydrant. Oh, and one of them's an orthodontist.
• Invoked in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas by a pair of black Christmas tree sellers. One acts nice while the other acts like a Scary Black Man in order to sell Christmas trees.
• Jagged Mind: Papa Juste appears to be a tall, menacing black man with eyes which turn blank when looking at Billie. She's understandable scared when first seeing him (being black herself, this isn't due to race). However, it turns out he's a benevolent Creepy Good vodoun priest who helps Billie to stop dark magic being used on her. It doesn't help that he only speaks Haitian Creole, which Billie doesn't understand, so his trying to help her at first isn't obvious (along with his air of unintentional menace).
• James Bond:
  • In Live and Let Die, Bond goes up against an African-American drug ring and thus meets quite a bunch of them. Baron Samedi (especially scary as it is implied that he cannot be killed, even by Bond — he's the voodoo god of the dead, after all. Played by Geoffrey Holder), Tee Hee (fella with the metal arm, played by Julius Harris), Mr. Big and Dr. Kananga (main antagonists, played by Yaphet Kotto) and Adam, one of their henchmen, all fit this trope.
  • May Day (Grace Jones) from A View to a Kill is a female example of this trope. When she's not throwing scary Death Glares, she kills people ruthlessly.
  • Steven Obanno (Isaach de Bankolé) in Casino Royale is the armed leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, who call on Le Chiffre to provide banking services for them. You don't get much scarier than someone like him wielding a machete and threatening to mutilate Le Chiffre's girlfriend after Le Chiffre loses their money to a foiled terrorist attack.
    • Also from Casino Royale, there's Mollaka, the Parkour bomber Bond chases down in the beginning.
• Kick-Ass has a muscular and imposing black guy playing Frank D'Amico's dragon. As if that weren't scary enough, he grabs a bazooka during the final battle.
• Kidulthood has Uncle Curtis, a cruel and terrifying Jamaican crime boss.
• Tanya "The Terminator" Tessaro in Knockout is a Scary Black Woman. She's the world lightweight boxing champion, is relatively tall and completely jacked, and fights dirty (including headbutting and hitting after the bell). She also leaves one of her opponents comatose and paraplegic.
• From The Last Dragon, we have a subversion! Sho'Nuff! Shogun of Harlem! He kicks ass because no one fears him.
• The Last King of Scotland: Idi Amin, as portrayed by Forest Whitaker. Also Masanga, his security chief.
• The Last Sentinel: There is Tallis' superior, Colonel Norton as played by Keith David, an eager Blood Knight (along with his sapient gatling gun) so fond of violence it's pretty creepy. Downplayed with Tallis' Token Black Friend Anchilles, who kicks quite a bit of ass but is rather affable and not really scary.
• Living Dead Series:
  • Land of the Dead had Eugene Clark as a scary black dead man.
  • Diary of the Dead. The teenaged protagonists are captured by what appears to be black gang members led by a softly-spoken badass who is the embodiment of this trope. The group is visibly nervous, with the Ms. Fanservice of the group pulling her coat across her cleavage for the only time in the entire movie. It turns out they're ex-National Guard who end up (after some aggressive negotiating) giving them the supplies they need — which ironically enough are stolen by a group of white National Guardsmen.
• Rory Breaker from Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels is an unconventional variant. He's a Yardie who dresses stylishly, loves an Umbrella Drink, and enjoys murdering people who interfere with his main pleasures in life. He's also five foot nine, considerably smaller than most of his massive bodyguards, and not a normal height for most candidates on this list, but this doesn't affect his willingness to be the first on the scene for a murderous shoot-out. And just listen to his Tranquil Fury when threatening Nick the Greek for information on who stole his cannabis:
  Rory: If you leave anything out, I'll Kill You!. If you bend the truth, or I think you're bending the truth, I'll kill you. If you forget anything, I'll kill you. In fact, you're going to have to work very hard to stay alive, Nick. Now do you understand everything I've said? Because if you don't, I'll kill you.
• Lorenzo, portrayed by Gbenga Akinnagbe, in the movie Lottery Ticket.
• Serrano from the Major League movies starts off as an example, then subverts it all to hell after becoming a Buddhist in the second film.
• Malibu's Most Wanted contains a faked version: Taye Diggs and Anthony Anderson play a couple of straight-laced drama school-educated black actors hired to play scary ghetto gangsters to knock some sense into a Pretty Fly for a White Guy senator's son.
• Louis Fedders (played by Keith David) in Men at Work (1990), a Vietnam vet with a penchant for hurting the two main leads over things like French fries. He later plays this image up while looking like he's about to kill the pizza guy despite holding a pellet gun.
• In Mississippi Burning, the FBI brings in a professional Scary Black Man to intimidate the corrupt mayor into revealing who committed a hate crime.
• Mission: Impossible III has Laurence Fishburne as Brassel, who really means well and isn't one of the corrupt agents but he's quite abrasive to Ethan considering the circumstances, constantly chewing on him with death threats and badass boasts. Though ultimately he turns to be a Benevolent Boss, who once Ethan does his job clears his name and allows him to go on honeymoon.
• Mortal Kombat (2021) offers a female version in Mileena, who is given a Race Lift (in the games she's Asian) but remains violent and Ax-Crazy.

• Sgt. Foley (Louis Gossett Jr.) from An Officer and a Gentleman. Justified as it's his role as Drill Sergeant Nasty.
• Parodied in Pineapple Express by Matheson. He is strangely effeminate and in touch with his feelings. He is still a stonecold killer, however.
• Pirates of the Caribbean:
  • Captain Barbossa's Bo'sun in The Curse of the Black Pearl — he's even got ritual scars and terrible teeth. Also, one of Blackbeard's zombie officers in On Stranger Tides.
  • Tia Dalma becomes a female example in At World's End, when she is revealed to be the sea goddess Calypso trapped in human form. When restored to full power, she grows gigantic and speaks with the Voice of the Legion, before conjuring a huge storm for the final battle.
• Moses Hightower in the Police Academy movies seems to belong to this trope, but ONLY in appearance. He does get in a good scary look in at times, such as his first appearance. (Lining up for their first day at recruit school, the recruits are ordered to stand each with his right hand on the next person's left shoulder. We're looking at a white supremacist who finds himself surrounded by blacks, and who can't help but make a racist remark. A giant black hand falls upon his left shoulder. The racist looks left and up...and up...and up...)
• Predator has two black men, but while Dillon is quite amicable, Mac gives bad vibes between his cold demeanor and increased distress as the Predator continues his slaughter. According to Roger Ebert, the Predator itself is subtly modeled after this trope, particularly in the dreadlock-like appendages.
  • Predators has Mombasa, a death squad officer more than willing to tell about the atrocities he and his troops would commit in Sierra Leone.
• Pulp Fiction:
  • Jules Winnfield (again played by Samuel L. Jackson), a hitman who likes to terrorize his victims before killing them, just for kicks.
  • Jules' boss Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) doesn't exactly look like a bitch, and he can be REALLY scary.
• Agent Carver in Push. Don't look him in the eye unless you want to eat your gun.
• Played with in Raising Arizona:
  Prison Counselor: Why do you say you feel "trapped" in a man's body?
  Scary Black Convict: Well, sometimes I get them menstrual cramps real hard.
• Revenge of the Nerds pulls out a whole squad of 'em, when the Tri-Lamb head gives Gilbert the support to speak out in front of the Alpha Betas.
• In RoboCop (1987), the black gang member Joe Cox is The Hyena of the group who takes a really unsettling sadistic glee in mocking Murphy as he's being tortured to death.
• Rocky III has Clubber Lang played by Mr. T. Brutish and aggressive, Lang actively torments Rocky and taunts him in the ring and out. Not that he actually hates Balboa, but he pities the foo'.
• Subverted in The Sandlot: Mr. Mertle (James Earl Jones) is the owner of a ferocious dog known as "The Beast" and, as one kid tells it, will sic him on any kid who dares to climb into his backyard, which is why they have to go through such wacky hijinx to get their baseball back. When they tell Mr. Mertle about it, he's flabbergasted, since he would have retrieved the baseball himself if they'd just asked him. On top of that, his dog is actually quite friendly and just has a fondness for baseballs.
• Polie in The Scavengers, who used to be a heavyweight boxer, is the largest and strongest of ex-slaves. His hulking form suddenly looming silently in front of her as she escapes the town is — combined with everything else that has happened to her — enough to cause Nancy to faint.
• The Serpent and the Rainbow: Peytraud and his men are sadistic black magic-worshipping Haitian Secret Police thugs who relish the opportunity to hurt people and menace the protagonist at every turn.
• The 1963 film Shock Corridor features an insane black KKK member who is both this and a very early example of the "black white supremacist" idea later popularized by The Chappelle Show. In case you missed it, suffice to say that anti-black rhetoric somehow sounds even more terrifying when it's coming from a Scary Black Man.
• Small Soldiers has Butch Meathook, the Cold Sniper of the Commando Elite. Though he may be just an action figure, he certainly looks and acts intimidating.
• In the 2009 version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, the trope is subverted when a female hostage asks a black man if he has a plan to fight their abductors. The annoyed man asks if she is asking because he's black, but she explains that she saw he was wearing a ring that marks him as a veteran of the elite US Airborne paratroopers.
• Thor has Heimdall, full stop. In the sequel he shows just how scary.
  • The big S.H.I.E.L.D. agent that confronts Thor.
    Thor: You're big. I've fought bigger.
• Chocolate Mousse in Top Secret! is a parody of a Scary Black Man, doing such "classically" badass things as eating a cigar, drinking gasoline, and wielding a front-loader cannon as a sidearm. He's also an impossibly good shot with a machine gun.
• In Trading Places, while jailed, Valentine antagonizes with a Brains and Brawn pair of scary black men (a fat one and a muscular one who mostly only says "Yeah" in response to whatever his partner says), who get angry at his pompous Blatant Lies and get ready to pound him right before he's bailed out. They show up again later, but Valentine successfully impresses them now that he's become very wealthy for real.
• In The Trial of the Chicago 7, Bobby Seale is put on trial alongside the seven protest organizers to play into this trope. He points out during the trial that he doesn't even know any of them and is only being thrown in to make the defendants look like terrifying revolutionaries because he's the co-founder of the Black Panthers — he himself was only in Chicago for a few hours to give a speech.^note And though it's not stated in the film itself, he only went to fill in for someone else. This backfires when Judge Hoffman's flagrant abuse of Seale's rights culminates in his ordering Seale to be shackled and gagged in open court. The prosecution asks for Seale's case to be declared a mistrial because the spectacle is so horrifying that Seale can't be viewed as anything but a victim of racism.
• Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder acts like this but he's really a white Australian who was chosen to play a black US army soldier in a Vietnam war film.
• Underworld (2003) has Raze, who's not only The Brute for Lucian, but the only notable person of colour among the Lycans. His actor Kevin Grevioux is known for his voice naturally being extremely deep and therefore enhancing the intimidation factor. Showing that Black creators aren't above having fun with this trope, he co-wrote the whole franchise. It's also averted with Kahn, the Token Minority among the vampires, as he's a Nice Guy.
• In When We Were Kings, George Foreman is this compared to implied protagonist Muhammad Ali, as he is darker, bigger, and less congenial.
• Prince Escalus (now portrayed as a policeman) in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet.
• Another Rare Female Example is Mabel King's rendition of Evilene, the Wicked Witch of the West, in the 1970s film version of The Wiz.
• Most of Donnie Yen's Hong Kong films from the '90s, including Tiger Cage (both of them), In the Line of Duty 4: Witness, Ballistic Kiss and Cheetah On Fire will have him battling a huge, muscular African-American henchman who often gives Donnie problems, in a David Versus Goliath-style fights with Yen being the David. The black henchman is Michael Woods, a friend of Donnie's from his martial arts academy days whom Donnie convinced the studios to feature him in several of his earlier films.

---