Comedic icon Mantan Moreland, perhaps best known as sidekick Birmingham Brown in a series of Charlie Chan mysteries in the 1940s, also starred in several all-black horror-comedies with his straight man, F.E. Miller— including this one about a pair of men who win a house in a game of craps. The only problem is that the house is haunted by its former owners, who are none too pleased that their house has been turned into a casino full of jitterbugging, jiving and hullaballooing.

Blacula, the story of an African prince turned into a vampire by Count Dracula, isnt only a seminal film in the history of African-American horror; its also an important part of the 1970s blaxploitation era as a whole, being one of the first (and best) entries in the movement. The 1973 sequel, Scream, Blacula, Scream, is inferior, but still technically good enough to be on this list. To give others a shot, though, well leave it off.

The antithesis of the mainstream Dracula riff that was Blacula, Ganja & Hess is a challenging, experimental, art house experience full of rambling, deep dialogue and dizzying visuals. It attempts to show how real vampires might live—fang-less, walking in daylight, stealing from blood banks—with an artsy flair that could only be pulled off with a straight face in the 70s. Spike Lee would prove this four decades later with his inferior remake.

Although the producers decided against calling it Blackorcist, Abby was in fact a thinly veiled take on The Exorcist, featuring a kindly preachers wife whos possessed by a Nigerian sex demon (how inconvenient). The similarities were enough to spur Warner Brothers to file suit against the film, causing it to be pulled from theaters after only one month and sending it hurtling into obscurity. Unoriginality aside, Abby stands on its own as a fairly campy tale that strikes some of the same chords as its more famous inspiration: outrageous profanity, scandalous sexuality, levitation, facial disfigurement