Graveyard Shift Sisters

Jennifer Reeder's somber, hypnagogic look into the lives of teenagers and adults after a local high schooler goes missing demands a critical and compassionate look within.

Spoilers ahead!

I'm going to spend a lifetime with Knives and Skin. Its pulse of color, vibrating hope on a low frequency. Its unapologetic exposure of our inner-selves that is unspeakable, primal, and plain messy. Its audiacity towards the indulgence of surreality. Knives and Skin is a filmic whole. Shot incredibly by Chris Rejano and written/directed by Midwest-based artist Jennifer Reeder, it is a complete body and mind. Everything we have and will experience if given the room. Due to its tonal soup, I celebrate its particular brilliance by speaking of and back to this film the way it spoke to me.

Author Nicole Givens Kurtz is back with a new adventure! Sisters of the Wild Sage is a compilation of short stories that have a Wild west flare in a future where heroines are armed with ancestral magic. "When someone with a pistol meets someone with a magic wand, the pistol loses," Nicole says. "Saddle up. Escape to a West as weird and wonderful as one might imagine."

By Mary Kay McBrayer (@mkmcbrayer)

For a film that could have been easily white-washed, Ari Aster’s Midsommar does have an inclusive cast. Before our characters are even taken to Sweden where most of the film's dread fueled action takes place, we meet them in their college town. Dani (Florence Pugh) stresses about her sister’s scary email while her boyfriend, Christian (Jack Reynor) drinks at a bar with his buddies, only one of whom is black named Josh (The Good Place's William Jackson Harper).
I have watched enough horror movies to know—and I’ve been brown enough long enough to know—that this setting does not bode well for a person of color. The token minority, say it with me, tends to die first. Because of this ratio, I expected a few other established tropes of the horror genre in Josh’s character, too, and I have to admit, I was delighted and surprised that nothing played out the way I expected.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas was not allowed to indulge magic. She was warned that magic was essentially a quest towards trouble, and as a black girl living in working-class Detroit in the 1980's, trouble could all too easily (and without merit), find her. That motherly heed opens and echoes throughout the introduction of Thomas' book, The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. That deafening pause on imagination manages to blossom into a aromatic refute. The lore of magic is for everyone with many worlds to traverse. What was once demanded be inaccessible to Thomas is now extensively encapsulated in The Dark Fantastic as an act of taking to task, widely accessible, mainstream, popular fantasy fiction (fairy tales, horror, superhero comics, 'soft' science fiction, alternate histories) for its woefully problematic approaches to to racial representation. This history has had unsavory consequences for children and young adults of color …