Sleepy Hollow: a diverse cast makes for diverse Gothic.

BF: The show does a good job of inverting the theme that minorities die first in horror. Was that on purpose?

HK: It was not a conscious effort, but it was a conscious effort to have a diverse cast just to represent our world. I don’t think it’s realistic for the whole cast to be white. I also think when you are developing a show and casting it mostly Caucasian and you get down to the bad guy and the network is like, “You have to have some diversity,” then all of the sudden…that’s why the person of color is always killed. And because we have so much diversity in our cast and we’ve had the freedom to cast our villains and victims however we want, so we can kill as many white people as we want.

Heather Kadin, producer of Sleepy Hollow, in an interview with BuzzFeed (source).

The casting on this show is amazing, and having a diverse cast from the get-go is the only way to actually represent properly and accurately and really push the envelope in terms of diversity, especially in the Gothic/Horror genre where the concept of the Other is such a huge component of the narrative.