Greetings, beasts! Creatures that walk the night and day alike, gather ye ‘round the fire and dance, for we continue to live, for better or worse. 

This week has been a test. A trial. The universe is staring us down and saying, “What will you do now?” It’s daring us to make moves towards our own happiness and the happiness of others. Innocent people are suffering, and people are continuously making excuses as to why it’s okay. I feel like I’m going insane every single day I look at the news. The dozens of people that defend the heinous actions of the state truly baffle me, but we can’t worry about them. People need us.

I’m giving you this week’s mission up front: Protest. Write to your elected officials. Write your think pieces. Don’t be afraid. It is our bravery that will change the world. Take on the murderous injustices that accompany the death penalty. Hold a psychotic colonial regime responsible for their barbaric actions. Use your voice. The time for standing by and letting politicians lie to you about the actions they might take if elected is over. We’ve outgrown them.

We’re the ones with the power here. All of us. Together.

Scream, Politics, and when Liberals Reach their Activism Limit

In the summer of 2020, this country did a song and dance that we’re all very familiar with. George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin, a police officer who knelt on his neck for almost 10 minutes, resulting in his untimely death. Chauvin was eventually found guilty (since they needed to sacrifice someone in lieu of making actual changes to our justice system), but when it was fresh, that wound bled.

People took to the streets en masse, screaming at the top of their lungs behind masks in an effort to bring about justice and avoid falling victim to an ever-worsening plague. People changed their profile pictures into black squares, everyone’s least favorite uncle practically burst a blood vessel trying to justify a Black man’s murder, and the Democrats did this:

What you might not have seen is that most online periodicals also put out calls for Black perspectives. They wanted to elevate Black voices and were eager to accept pitches for articles that conveyed their specific experience. The world came to the doorstep of Black writers and asked them to introduce themselves, which was a call I eagerly answered. 

My specific writings have always gravitated towards horror and writing about the genre from a Black, queer perspective. On my personal blog I’ve written Black horror roundups, film reviews, and takedowns of H.P. Lovecraft, and I’ve been paid to write similar articles for outlets like The Black Youth Project and Afropunk, so if the big horror outlets were looking for voices, it was time to pipe up.

Tweeting out my articles and introducing myself opened a lot of doors for me. I was followed by major horror journalists and publications, retweeted by big name horror directors, and made a whole lot of friends. I didn’t end up walking through many of those doors due to my mother becoming ill and eventually passing away, but it was nice to know that I had been seen. That these publications that I had admired for years and day dreamed about working for had finally seen me. Maybe they’d have a place for me in the future. Maybe they wouldn’t. Whatever ended up happening was fine by me. I was content in the knowledge that these people and publications I admired cared about confronting injustices and elevated the voices of the oppressed.

Then, years later, ‘Scream 7’ came along. 

There’s been a lot of controversy around Scream 7 that all began with the abrupt firing of Melissa Barrera by the Spyglass Media Group, which claimed that several of the reposts she’d made on social media in support of Palestine were in violation of its policies against “antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion, or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.”

As you no doubt know by now, the hate speech is not in the room with us. It never has been. No one has been able to produce a single post she made that comes close to antisemitism. All things said and done, it appears to be another case of zionists attempting to conflate Jewish heritage with the zionist colonial project in order to snuff out critisism of Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Regardless of Spyglass Media’s true aim in the firing–which we can only speculate on unless someone comes out and explains it to us directly–Melissa Barrera is out, and Scream marches on without her because we gotta keep the money-printing horror franchise going.

For the record, I am a DIEHARD Scream fan. I wore out my VHS copy. I saw every sequel the moment I was able, and I still hold a tiny bit of resentment towards one of my childhood friends for spoiling ‘Scream 3’ (he didn’t mean to, but that’s not how forgiveness works). My office is positively covered in Ghostface masks, art prints, and even a flag depicting the famous Tatum quote, “Oh, please don’t kill me, Mr Ghostface. I wanna be in the sequel.” I care for this franchise. I’ve watched the movies in that series more than any others. I don’t want to have to stand against it, but when it’s a horror movie franchise versus people’s lives, the choice should be clear. 

‘Scream 7’ stays in production, but now everything is up in the air. Zionists fired their lead actress two-thirds of their way through what was supposed to be a trilogy and that doesn’t look good for their bottom line. Where do they go from there?

Back to the beginning.

In any other timeline, I’d have been excited about Neve Campbell returning to the role of Sidney Prescott. She was the final girl. She was my final girl! Theft tried to lowball her to appear in Scream VI which never sat right with me, so I’d have been glad to see her getting what she was owed as living horror royalty. Unfortunately, her casting highlighted a lot of what’s wrong with celebrity, Hollywood, and horror journalism.

Many people were excited by the return of Neve. Maybe they hadn’t liked Scream 5 or 6, or maybe they just loved the prospect of their favorite final girl coming back. Either way, the energy was there. Many Scream fans hopped online to voice their opinions on the casting and the news that Kevin Williamson would be writing the new feature, and I was one of them. I was there to voice my displeasure with the situation because at the time, I was deeply disappointed. I still am. 

Obviously, people were divided on this, which was absolutely expected. What I didn’t expect were the bigger voices in horror journalism taking the time to speak out against those of us who were disappointed in Neve Campbell’s decision to take on the role of Sidney once again… Voices that had once lifted people like me in previous fights against injustice. 

When I say “bigger voices”, I mean some of the biggest. Fangoria has been bringing the bloodshed to newsstands since 1979, and BloodyDisgusting is the premiere online spot for all things horror news. Both are widely respected within our community and one of my honest-to-god life goals has always been to write for one or both. I understand that in writing this piece, I’m burning that bridge. That sucks, but it’s important for me as a person of color in the horror community to push back against what they said, because not only was it ignorant, but wildly harmful. The way they phrased their responses wasn’t just irresponsible, conflict-avoidant, or cowardly, because that’s what it would have been if they’d simply said nothing. What they did say was actively harmful to activists in the horror space, and they can’t be allowed to post like they did and continue onward without taking some kind of hit.

I doubt this particular hit will amount to much, but if it convinces one person to use their voice in support of the peoples of Palestine and Lebanon, then it doesn’t matter if they feel it or not. 

“Horror has Always Been Political”

This is a regular saying within the horror community. The people who actually know horror and love the genre know that horror is a way for people to react to and explore the happenings of the world around them. However, if you use your voice within the horror space to criticize the highly political actions of a studio or an actress that certain publications may want to feature and/or interview in the future, then you get this from Phil Noble Jr, Editor-in-Chief of Fangoria magazine:

And this from John Squires, Editor-in-Chief of BloodyDisgusting:

To be clear, this is in response to people saying they didn’t support Neve Campbell coming back to Scream; a move that felt like scabbing to many since Melissa Barrera was unfairly dismissed. I have to wonder what these men would have said if an actress was dismissed from a major horror franchise while being outspoken in the Black Lives Matter movement. Would they have been just as dismissive of online activism, claiming that it accomplishes nothing in the real world? Would it have been called out as “reverse racism”, or would that have been too close to home and not worth the risk?

I’m not going to focus on the words of these men, because they aren’t important. They simply represent a problem that I feel needs fixing. No matter what they like to imagine in those heads of theirs, there are Palestinian horror fans; people that were undoubtedly following them at the time who heard their message loud and clear: Using your platform is useless, and Hollywood doesn’t care about you. People are going to show up no matter what, and if you feel some way about it, you’re being mean. 

Horror journalism needs to move past this kind of thinking. No one gets to decide what is or isn’t important to talk about, especially when it comes to an escalating genocide. These men have massive followings and their periodicals are nearly unopposed in terms of their readership and their exclusives within the horror genre. These tweets make me believe that our faith in these periodicals is misplaced. I appreciated what I saw in 2020 when these outlets called for Black submissions, but I think I may have been wrong. We shouldn’t have to sit around waiting for violent death before we’re given our shot, and we shouldn’t simply be grateful for the opportunity to share our voices when we’re only allowed to say the things that the men in charge want to hear. We’re beyond that. We’re past it.

No matter what either of these men tried to tell you in March of this year, your voice fucking matters. Speaking up online matters. It doesn’t matter when you learned about something. If you find there to be injustice, your voice should be used. Just because you only learned about the apartheid in Palestine in October of last year doesn’t mean you have to stay silent. IT MEANS THE EXACT OPPOSITE. Gigantic movements have been organized in online spaces. Huge changes have been made by people coming together in online communities, and for someone to suggest that you’re just posting into the void because they want to score future interviews is irresponsible and greedy. 

Horror is due for a changing of the guard, and it’s time that the marginalized voices of horror stopped waiting for handouts from men who would sell any of us down the river for an exclusive. When people show you who they are, believe them.

Horror is political all the time, not just when it’s convenient. I don’t want to abandon my favorite franchise, but Ghostface will never EVER mean more to me than the lives of real living people. The 6th movie was the last movie, and that’s fine by me. I’ll also never write for these periodicals, despite wanting to ever since I was a kid, because it will always be more important to speak out for those in need.

To the Palestinian horror fans, actors, writers, and creatives, we stand with you. Horror is for everyone. Period.

REVIEW: ‘Linghun’ by Ai Jiang

What does grief look like when you let it control your life? What happens to the people around you when you uproot yourself to chase the past and they’re forced to follow? When a life is lost, will you throw the life that remains into the hole it left behind?

These are the questions asked in Linghun, a horror novella about a special town called HOME which is filled with houses that let you live with your dead loved ones once again. Told from the perspectives of several different characters all dealing with different kinds of grief, this isn’t your typical haunted house story. Nothing is jumping out at you, nothing waits in the corner of your eye, and there’s no malice. It’s all about the horror of not being able to let go, even when it consumes your life.

This is a book you can read in one day that will stay with you for a long while afterward. It’s a true testament to the idea that you can tell an incredible, impactful story while not overwhelming people with needless explanation and countless pages. We learn the world through those who live in it, and we feel their struggles and longing because they’re feeling it. It truly shows the power of effective storytelling. This kind of writing leaves me in awe. 

What do you think you’d do? Would you drop everything to move to a town where you can live with the dead, no matter the cost? Would you wait on the lawns of the special houses for the opportunity to live in one? You may think not, but maybe you just haven’t found yourself in the right circumstances. Linghun makes you confront this question, and it does so with a caring hand. If I ever write something even 10% as good, I will feel beyond accomplished. 

Linghun is available at your favorite book retailer and also Amazon. 

YOUR MONTHLY MISSION

It’s October starting today, babes. This is what we do in October. This is the list of prompts that I generate every year with the intent of writing a piece of microfiction that’s 100 words long each and every spooky day. The thing about this list is that you don’t need to write anything! Are you an artist? Use this list to paint an awesome picture! Photographer? Set up something to capture the essence of the prompt. Make a collage! Make a strangely decorated pizza everyday! I don’t care! Just have fun with it. Flex your creativity! Be weird about it! You don’t have to even do the same medium everyday! Shit, you don’t even have to do it everyday! Do what speaks to you.

If you make something cool, send it to me, and I’ll include it in the newsletter! As for me, you’ll get my 100 word microfiction responses in your inbox each week. The October special. Hope you’re ready.

SNAPSHOT OF THE WEEK

Part of my accidental double-exposure roll. I have no idea how this happened. Taken with my Minolta SRT101 on Ilford HP5 400.