All in Film
On Christmas Day, Universal Pictures released the first trailer for Jordan Peele’s new horror film Us. Jordan Peele is the Academy Award-winning writer/director of last year’s breakout horror film Get Out. He somehow found the time to write and direct another horror film while also developing the latest Twilight Zone reboot for CBS All Access and launching an open submission script search for his production company Monkeypaw Productions.
Willowdean Dixon is the daughter of the biggest celebrity in her hometown. Her mother, Rosie, is both a former Miss Teen Bluebonnet and the current director of the longest running pageant in the history of Texas. Willowdean was basically raised by her Aunt Lucy because her mother was too busy fulfilling all of her duties related to the pageant world. When Lucy passes away unexpectedly, Willowdean channels her grief into an opportunity to prove her value to her mother by entering the Miss Teen Bluebonnet pageant and showing off in her own way.
This morning, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced the nominees for the 76th annual Golden Globe Awards. The ceremony, honoring film and television, will be broadcast live on 6 January at 8 pm EST. These nominees tend to be quite different from the Oscars or the Emmys as the HFPA is comprised of 90 members from 55 countries. They also split films into Musical or Comedy and Drama categories. This allows for twice as many nominees in picture and lead performances, but only single categories for supporting performances, directors, and screenplays.
Consider Dumbo my problematic favorite. It’s, sadly, not hard to think of times that the Walt Disney Company produced incredibly racist content in its feature and short films. There’s Sunflower, the black centaur and handmaid to the white and blonde centaur in Fantasia, drawn with exaggerated Jim Crow caricature features and literally erased from the Disney Vaults for all future re-releases of the film. Then you have Peter Pan and the infamous song “What Makes the Red Man Red?,” indulging in horrible stereotypes about American Indians and First Nations people in similarly racist caricature. Songs of the South had Uncle Remus as the happy slave singing and dancing for the enjoyment of free white children (the film is largely unavailable in America, and Disney has defended the film as not racist because it is set in the 1870s when Uncle Remus was most likely a sharecropper and not a slave; yes, an eye-roll is appropriate here). Disney also tripled down on the Siamese cat as racist Asian caricature conceit in Lady and the Tramp, The Aristocats, and Disney’s Rescue Rangers (not a film, but modern enough that Disney should have known better). This isn’t even getting into the racist WWII propaganda films that every animation studio produced to aid the war effort. It’s a slippery slope from “Der Fuhrer’s Face” to “Commando Duck.”
Content warning: Little Evil features a scene about suicide in reference to another horror film.
Little Evil is a horror-comedy film about the evil child horror genre. Yes, the film is an evil child film, specifically an antichrist film. At its core, it’s a tribute to the absurdity of the genre. Done right, it’s terrifying; done wrong, it’s ridiculous; done like this, it’s a risk.
