This is the Horror Oracle delivering this month’s URHorror newsletter: a consolidation of horror news, local NYC happenings, and intersectional commentary on a genre that brings generations together. I’m a horror fan sharing the things that excite me at the end of the day.
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Chucky will be toying around in theaters once more according to Don Mancini’s recent update on the franchise. After the cancellation of the SYFY series, fans of the franchise were left to wonder what’s next for the killer doll. Many reports are citing this as the big box office return for Chucky, but that’s whether or not you consider the 2019 remake to be canon (I don’t). Mancini has had an active hand in every other Chucky production except that one. For 22 years, Chucky has lived on through direct-to-video franchise installments that became canon in the tv series. That show made our favorite killer doll charismatic and likable through his one-liners and gay queer allyship. Don Mancini is looking to reverse that by making Chucky scary again, citing the Curse of Chucky as a jumping off point for the tone of the new film. Hopefully, this means more of Jennifer Tilly and Fiona Dourif kissing on screen. If it doesn’t, at least we know that Don Mancini and Jennifer Tilly have something else up their sleeves.
If you’re sick of remakes and revivals, then I have an original film that you’ll want to keep on your radar. Sapphic fans of Willow and Yellowjackets (so all of the fans) will be excited to hear that Sophie Thatcher and Erin Kellyman were recently announced as the leading cast for a new witch thriller set in 17th-century Britain. The original script from Chris Andrews follows a young bride (played by Sophie Thatcher) who has been accused of witchcraft on her wedding day. A ruthless witch hunter (played by Joe Alwyn) is in pursuit of her when she meets an outcast poacher (played by Erin Kellyman) who she forms an unlikely alliance with. Early comments on the script say it’s “a real page-turner, with a wicked sense of humour and a bold subversion of traditional female roles.”. Could this be the sapphic witch movie of our dreams? I will naively cross my fingers. In the meantime, keep up with Cavendish as it started production in September of this year.
When early reviews of The Mummy came out, the one thing that I noticed was a comparison to Evil Dead Rise: the last film that Lee Cronin directed. Both narratively and stylistically, his latest film does mirror his own take on Sam Raimi’s universe. Is that something worth docking a star over, though? It’s brutal unraveling of violence is no different from what audiences loved in Evil Dead Rise. And now, the film has been confirmed to share a universe with the deadites. Lee Cronin, in an interview with Collider, explained, “I always like to think everything I work on […] there's always going to be a bit of crossover.”. He pointed out the last name of the archaeology professor featured in the middle of the film as an easter egg for the characters in his Evil Dead movie. The actress who played Beth even makes a cameo as Miss Mills or, as the students like to call her, “rat face”. Though he was invited back to direct the upcoming Evil Dead Burn, he passed to bring this one to us instead. Atleast we can say we know what his Evil Dead Burn might’ve looked like now that The Mummy is in theaters.
but isn’t it always? I’m unpacking a decades long issue that is film as a male-dominated industry. It was announced this week that Curry Barker, director of the upcoming Obsession, has been “tapped” by A24 to take on the production company’s newest IP The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Despite the franchise going toe to toe with Halloween at this point, it feels like a story that has yet to be done right. Tobe Hooper and Kim Henkel gave us a horror narrative with a lens on the deep south and an allegory about dysphoria.Yet, all that has come of it are funded prequels and sequels that just regurgitate previous lore: all of which have been directed, written, and produced by men. I won’t lie. I was championing a TCM by the hands of Rob Zombie considering his personal fixation for the south: atleast Curry Barker is from the south. He’s also the new and shiny toy in Hollywood.
Barker’s claim to fame is his 2024 hour-long Youtube horror film Milk & Serial, which has garnered over 2 million views now. In a $14-million deal, Focus Features acquired his low budget horror film Obsession which is releasing early May. Before it even premiered at Toronto Film Festival, another one of his projects, Anything But Ghosts, was acquired by the same producers responsible for films like M3GAN and Late Night With The Devil. Why does it take such little proof for Hollywood to let you fill such big pants: pants that marginalized creatives spend YEARS proving their worth for? This isn’t to discredit the work that he’s put in to build a name for himself. Rather, it’s an interrogation of Hollywood’s white male fantasies plaguing the pathway for true “boundary-testing” storytellers. Kim Henkel used that word choice in describing the decision to take TCM to A24.
When this production news dropped, I immediately thought about the queer examinations of Leatherface as a character and how they bring substance to a franchise that I was always bored with. This character’s gender performance was always a punchline and fear tactic overlooked to pour more attention on the bloodshed. Scholars and horror fans alike have articulated Leatherface’s relationship with gender over the years, though, causing a shift in the way we remember this horror icon. It’s also shifted the relationship that some transgender horror fans have with the franchise: like Jef Rouner who finds queer power in monsters.
Leatherface is a monster who dons three different gendered flesh masks based on nothing but what he’s feeling that day. It’s a “style of the flesh” as GG Dascal put it in their queer studies essay titled ‘Self-Fashioning Styles of Flesh: Liminal Gender Performance in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’. Though Barker promises that his take on the IP will have some heart to it, my confidence is shy on whether this will be a narrative driven by the rage I’ve wished to see. There’s no ignoring the turmoil boiling over in the south right now. Queer kids are in danger, those ecosystems are being drained of life by data centers, and lawmakers are still letting guns into schools. Atleast the 2022 Texas Chainsaw Massacre gave us that. God forbid I want my horror to be political. Hollywood might handpick white voices for familiarity and digestibility, but will those white voices prove them wrong?
(5/3) Black & Monstrous: Bad Hair Movie Screening @ 4:30 PM
(5/10) Library Spirits: Horror Trivia @ 7PM
(5/24) THE TRIAL: An IWTV Powerpoint Party @ 7PM
(5/31) https://www.instagram.com/p/DXmGteBEWjN/?hl=en&img_index=1
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