Can movies set in 2020 be COVID-free?

I saw what may be my favorite new 2021 horror on Wednesday night. It's the latest in the Welcome to the Blumhouse series on Amazon that began last October with four entries, and has another four this October. I don't know that I'll get around to seeing and reviewing all four like I did last year, but Black as Night encourages me that maybe I should give the others a chance.

I won't go into too much detail about it since I plan to review it and link my review to the right as I always do. However, I'll tell you that it's a vampire movie set in New Orleans, but with a welcome twist: Unlike the vampire Lestat and his cohorts in Interview With the Vampire, almost all the characters are Black.

What I do want to discuss is that the film is quite clearly set in 2020, yet COVID is nowhere to be seen.

Of the new movies that appear to have been conceived in toto since the pandemic began, they tend to fall into two categories: they're either set in an indeterminate time period, or they are about COVID itself. Now, I can't say for sure that the origins of Black as Night don't go back further than the start of 2020, though I can say that parts of 2020 make their way into the plot.

The movie has a lot to do with race, more than you might expect, but also carried out without a particularly heavy hand. And Maritte Lee Go's film knows its history, as Hurricane Katrina is a touchpoint discussed a couple times, particularly the effect it had on the local Black population.

Another reference to race, albeit brief, is by one of the more powerful vampires, though I won't tell you which in order to keep the surprise and because it's not necessary for the current discussion. In rattling off a list of years in which racial intolerance reared its ugly head, this character finishes with the year 2020. He doesn't go into specifics, but we in the audience know this was the year that several deaths of Black Americans at the hands of police galvanized the Black Lives Matter protest, most prominently the death of George Floyd.

We in the audience also know that this was in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, an improbable but powerful diversion of our attentions from the thing you would have thought would be the only thing anyone was talking about in 2020. 

The New Orleans in this film, though, is not one where anyone is wearing masks. There's no social distancing. And the only people who are sick are those who have been bitten in the neck.

If you want to know when in 2020 it takes place, it's the summer, because our main character, who also narrates -- Shawna, played by Asjha Cooper -- talks about it as if she's looking back on it from a future date, referring to it as "the summer I killed vampires." We also know that she visits the tombstone of a character who dies early in the movie, and the tombstone lists the date of death as late July of that year.

No COVID though.

Does this matter?

I'm thinking no. That may especially be the case a few years from now, when we'll still obviously remember that 2020 was the first year of COVID-19, but when maybe we'll be lucky enough not to have that fact be the first thing that jumps to our minds.

It's an interesting question though. The other surrounding years may blend into each other, and we may have difficulty remembering whether something occurred in 2017 or 2018. At the very least, those years were not defined by the most radical change to our daily lives probably since September 11th. But filmmakers will always have to consider how they choose to portray 2020 on film, and whether they acknowledge the elephant in the room if they do.

Of course, there's always the argument to be made that vampirism itself is a metaphor for COVID. Like COVID, it's contagious, though unlike COVID, it does require actual physical contact. 

I think this might be a stretch though. If Black as Night is about anything from 2020, it's about social justice, and far be it from me to suggest that COVID has to worm its way in there to get an equivalent level of the viewer's attention, even if only for the sake of "realism." If you are making a movie about vampires, "realism" is probably not your first consideration anyway. 

It may be that this is only a "problem" right now, when movies are being set in "present day," and that encompasses the year 2020. A few years from now, a movie will only be set in 2020 if someone specifically wants to evoke that year -- which would probably be because their subject is either COVID, Black Lives Matter or the presidential election.

I suppose if Shawna is remembering 2020 in a future year, the fact that she spent it fighting off vampires will certainly be the most memorable part to her.