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This week's creepy post explores what's new in paranormal pop culture, including books, webseries and films! Curated by myself and
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logladyBOOKS
This week, we feature a recent Graveyard Shift Sisters interview with indigenous author Rebecca Roanhouse, whose new novel Trail of Lightning is released on June 26. You may recall that the novel was featured in the June 2018 speculative fiction books post. We also have casting news on the upcoming Lovecraft Country adaptation, and we're acknowledging the author Octavia E. Butler.![]()
Trail of Lightning is a supernatural fantasy about a Native woman who hunts monsters, and is the first book in The Sixth World Series.
Roanhorse discusses her award-winning short story,
Welcome To Your Authentic Indian Experience, which is
available to read at Apex Magazine. On
Welcome being translated into multiple languages and gaining recognition, she says,
“My story speaks to the specificity of the Native experience, but it is an experience marginalized communities all share in various ways.”Roanhorse talks about how important it was for the cover of
Trail of Lightning to depict the Native American characters: “
Writing this book and being very aware of how little representation Natives get in SFF (or any popular culture), I really pressed to have input on the cover. My agent agreed and we pushed for that in the contract.”
Her next book is
Race To The Sun, which will be published by the Rick Riordan Presents imprint.
Race to the Sun will be about “Navajo mythology starring a seventh grade Navajo girl, her little brother, and her best friend (who will be Native and Black) battling monsters to save the world.”
You can find Roanhorse at these upcoming cons: BookCon, The Nebulas, WorldCon and Indigenous ComicCon.
Please check out the source interview for more on Roanhorse and her novel Trail of Lightning.CASTING NEWS!!Lovecraft Country is currently being developed in collaboration by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot and Warner Bros Television, to be aired on HBO.
NEWLY ADDED: Aunjanue Ellis (Hippolyta Black), Courtney B. Vance (George Black) and Elizabeth Debicki (Christina Braithwhite)
PREVIOUS ANNOUNCED CAST: Jonathan Majors (Atticus Black), Jurnee-Smollett Bell (Letitia ‘Leti’ Dandridge), and Wunmi Mosaku (Ruby Dandridge).
SYNOPSIS: Based on the 2016 novel by Matt Ruff,
Lovecraft Country focuses on 25-year-old Atticus Black. After his father goes missing, Black joins up with his friend Letitia “Leti” Dandridge (Smollett-Bell) and his Uncle George to embark on a road trip across 1950s Jim Crow America to find him. This begins a struggle to survive and overcome both the racist terrors of white America and the malevolent spirits that could be ripped from a Lovecraft paperback. The goal is an anthological horror series that reclaims genre storytelling from the African-American perspective.
REMEMBERING OCTAVIA E. BUTLER…You may have noticed the Google doodle of Butler on June 22, in honor of the brilliant and groundbreaking sci-fi author’s birthday.If you're into podcasts, you might want to check out ALOUD's podcast dedicated to Butler.WEBSERIES
This week we chose to highlight three webseries of diverse voices in sci-fi and horror.Upcoming afrofuturism web series Resistance: The Battle of Philadelphia has been officially selected for the BlackStar film festival!Continuing the theme of diversity for this SciFi Sunday, here’s a staff pick featuring Let Them Die Like Lovers, available to watch at the source:And let's focus on women in horror. The webseries LA QUINCEAÑERA will be shown at the upcoming Fantasia International Film Festival as a feature.FILM
There is a lot to share this week. First of all, HAPPY PRIDE! We have an article discussing the LGBTQ inclusivity of the horror franchise, Child’s Play. There’s also a lot of indie horror news, including not only Gags the clown (the one who went viral in 2016), but also a werewolf… If you like movie previews, we got em here this week, including Blackstar Warrior at the newly launched Brown Sugar streaming network. Find out what the Dear White People creator is up to next... If you hate the horror trope where the black character dies first, then we have a short film you may be interested in. Lastly, find out what k-pop star may be starring in an upcoming horror movie!INDIE HORROR TRAILERS!!!To save space, the three trailers are under a spoiler cut.Film Threat recently shared the trailers for the upcoming slasher, Minutes to Midnight:
FilmThreat also shared the trailer for what looks like a really bad werewolf movie, Bonehill Road. Oh my god, that acting… that costume!We were all rooting for you!America’s Next Top Model alum Analeigh Tipton has a new horror movie, Broken Star, coming out:Next, Gags the Clown is starring in his own film. Gags was the clown back in 2016 who appeared around Green Bay.
Gags is directed by Adam Krause, and the film is premiering in a couple of days at Chicago's Cinepocalypse, the Midwest’s largest genre film festival. The article/iterview with Krause is quite long, and details the history of Gags the clown from its inception in 2015 through its viral marketing campaign, and all the work that goes into making an independent horror film.
Allkpop.com is reporting that Eunji is reviewing a horror script for the upcoming film, 0.0MHz, which is apparently based on the webtoon of the same name. According to the source, “members of a group who have various supernatural experiences such as seeing ghosts” and “they meet together at an abandoned house.”
Justin Simien, who created the hit
Dear White People, will be making the upcoming horror film,
Bad Hair. In the interview, he says: “[‘
Bad Hair’] follows a girl from Compton who doesn’t have the right look. She doesn’t have the right hair, she doesn’t have the right face, she doesn’t have the right skin color. She wants to be a VJ in the late ’80s, early ’90s and she makes a bit of a Faustian bargain with this woman who takes over the network where she’s at and she ends up with this hair, this weave in her head, that may or may not have a mind of its own.”
Horror short Page One is making waves at festivals. Page One takes the trope “the black guy dies first” and turns it on its head - “Always cast as the first to die, a black actor becomes a hero when people around him start dying for real.” If you’re in Chicago, it will be playing next on June 28th.
Justice Smith, who you can see now in theaters in the new
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. In this short interview, Justice talks about his character in the latest
Jurassic World installment, and his love for the horror genre. If he could make a horror
Jurassic World, he says there would be, “A lot more blood and gruesome deaths. I love horror, but I especially love gore. That’s one of my favorite sub-genres of horror. So just gorier. No character development either, just people getting eaten by dinosaurs.”
[OP NOTE: That's the kind of movie I want to see, too!]ihorror.com celebrates the iconic horror franchise, Child's Play, by filmmaker Don Mancini.Shortly after publishing the article, Mancini responded on twitter:
For decades, the Chucky films have included characters who are LGBTQ. Mancini, who is gay, wrote, produced and/or directed the films in the franchise. With
The Bride of Chucky, the author of the article writes that the film “bring[s] a certain queer sensibility to the franchise” including “one of the first positive portrayals of a young gay man I’d seen in a horror film.” The rest of the article breaks down the Chucky films and praises them for their inclusivity, even if imperfect.
SPEAKING OF CHUCKY:The Child’s Play movie franchise will be getting a television show soon! Don Mancini officially teased the project on Friday with this tweet:
Be sure to read all the available info about the series @ the source!!
IN DVD/BLU-RAY RELEASE NEWS...![weLJGf.jpg]()
The Japanese cult classic
Horrors of Malformed Men is getting a Blu-Ray release!!
Cult director Teruo Ishii presents a nightmarish, hallucinogenic tale drawn from the fevered imagination of Japan’s celebrated pioneer ofero-guro (“erotic grotesque”) literature, Edogawa Rampo.The film is set to be released on September 17/18.
See more details here, b/c we can't embed.Finally, let’s end this post with Blackstar Warrior, which debuts today on the new streaming subscription, Brown Sugar. Directed by Matt Haley and co-written by Simon Oré,
Blackstar Warrior is an “original new blaxploitation-meets-Star Wars mashup starring Leonard Roberts (
Drumline,
Love Jones)” that’s “set in a 1970s version of the future.” “The tongue-in-cheek film follows space detective Tyson Roderick who, in his quest to discover the truth behind his origins, stumbles into-and-must defeat a cult hellbent on taking over the galaxy.”
WATCH THE TRAILER HERE!SOURCES 1234567891011121314151617181920212223Thanks for reading... if you read it all! I know these posts are a niche subject, but if you are one of the few users who read our weekly news posts then please let us know in the comments what kind of content you’d like to see featured. More stuff like this?
_clochette_ suggests that the happy couple might have already been getting friendly at that point in time, so there's a chance Ariana is already familiar with Tan's work.
Trail of Lightning is a supernatural fantasy about a Native woman who hunts monsters, and is the first book in The Sixth World Series.
The Japanese cult classic Horrors of Malformed Men is getting a Blu-Ray release!!
