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Horror Pride Month: Writer/Actor Ava Davis

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Patrick Morgan Horror Pride Month

The first time I saw Ava Davis act was in Melissa Kunnap’s short filmĀ Feast, and I was completely taken in by her performance. She had a quality that I could not quite describe but I knew I was seeing something real in her every gesture.

Little did I know when I wrote that review that I would have the privilege of sitting down to chat with Ava for Horror Pride Month this year. As it turns out, Davis is even more gracious and emotionally open than I could have imagined.

“Horror movies terrify me,” she began on a Friday afternoon in May. It’s not the typical response one expects when chatting with someone with genre work under their belt, but she went on. “Being in them is one thing but watching them gives me so much anxiety. I think Iā€™ve become more of a fan recently in working with Melissa and realizing that horror is a way to confront issues in kind of a safe way to neutralize them. If you give a demon a name, then you take away its power and I love that about horror.”

Davis and Kunnap are working on another short film together at the moment called Torn Together, something equally as terrifying as Feast in a completely different way,Ā and this time Morgan is helping pen the script which dives deep into highly personal subject matter.

For Davis this means facing identity and what it means to be herself.

“It’s taking a lot of personal issues and giving them faces and names,” she explained. “It’s been therapeutic but at some point, Melissa and I realized that other people were going to see this! This is a conversation I’ve only had with my mirror before and now I’m putting it out there for everyone to see.”

That inner conversation has centered, in part, on her personal transition journey. Part of which has involved looking for images in the media with which she can identify.

“When I first started this journey with my therapist I told them there was nothing and no one out there that I could really identify with,” she explained. “What’s crazy is that in the last four years we suddenly haveĀ Pose andĀ Star which has a trans woman in the lead. Then Laverne Cox was onĀ Orange is the New Black! I don’t know quite where my transition journey will lead me but it’s been amazing to see these examples in the media.”

Davis points out that many of the roles she’s been sent out for on auditions have either been prostitutes or roles that were tied up in just being trans rather than being a person. Furthermore, she says what she’s grown to love about the genre is that it empowers its protagonists which could be a boon for trans portrayals in media.

This is whyĀ Torn Together and her other projectĀ Duchess of Grand Park has meant so much to her.

“I’ve been thinking of this as my year of empowerment,” she said. “If I’m not finding the roles that I want to play, I’m going to write them myself.”

It’s the kind of attitude I’ve seen from a lot of LGBTQ filmmakers during Pride Month, and honestly it gives me hope.

As our time was coming to a close, I circled back around to the beginning and asked her what type of horror she really loved and she surprised me once again when, with a sheepish tone she said the one thing IĀ wasn’t expecting.

“I really kind of like the first two parts of theĀ Scary Movie franchise.”

Turns out Ava Davis has a thing for horror comedies and as I quickly dropped a few suggestions and we prepared to end the interview, I couldn’t help feeling that she’s well on her way to becoming a horror fan in every sense of the word.

If there’s one thing I’m absolutely certain of, it’s that Ava Davis can and will provide the kind of representation for others that she’s looked for herself. AndĀ that is exactly what the world needs.

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Movies

PG-13 Rated ‘Tarot’ Underperforms at the Box Office

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Tarot starts off the summer horror box office season with a whimper. Scary movies like these are usually a fall offering so why Sony decided to make Tarot a summer contender is questionable. Since Sony uses Netflix as their VOD platform now maybe people are waiting to stream it for free even though both critic and audience scores were very low, a death sentence to a theatrical release.Ā 

Although it was a fast death — the movie brought in $6.5 million domestically and an additional $3.7 million globally, enough to recoup its budget — word of mouth might have been enough to convince moviegoers to make their popcorn at home for this one. 

Tarot

Another factor in its demise might be its MPAA rating; PG-13. Moderate fans of horror can handle fare that falls under this rating, but hardcore viewers who fuel the box office in this genre, prefer an R. Anything less rarely does well unless James Wan is at the helm or that infrequent occurrence like The Ring. It might be because the PG-13 viewer will wait for streaming while an R generates enough interest to open a weekend.

And letā€™s not forget that Tarot might just be bad. Nothing offends a horror fan quicker than a shopworn trope unless itā€™s a new take. But some genre YouTube critics say Tarot suffers from boilerplate syndrome; taking a basic premise and recycling it hoping people won’t notice.

But all is not lost, 2024 has a lot more horror movie offerings coming this summer. In the coming months, we will get Cuckoo (April 8), Longlegs (July 12), A Quiet Place: Part One (June 28), and the new M. Night Shyamalan thriller Trap (August 9).

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Movies

‘Abigail’ Dances Her Way To Digital This Week

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Abigail is sinking her teeth into digital rental this week. Starting on May 7, you can own this, the latest movie from Radio Silence. Directors Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillet elevate the vampire genre challenging expectations at every blood-stained corner.

The film stars Melissa Barrera (Scream VI,Ā In The Heights), Kathryn Newton (Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,Ā Freaky,Ā Lisa Frankenstein), and Alisha Weir as the titular character.

The film currently sits at number nine at the domestic box office and has an audience score of 85%. Many have compared the film thematically to Radio Silence’s 2019 home invasion movie Ready or Not: A heist team is hired by a mysterious fixer to kidnap the daughter of a powerful underworld figure. They must guard the 12-year-old ballerina for one night to net a $50 million ransom. As the captors start to dwindle one by one, they discover to their mounting terror that they’re locked inside an isolated mansion with no ordinary littleĀ girl.”

Radio Silence is said to be switching gears from horror to comedy in their next project. Deadline reports that the team will be helming an Andy Samberg comedy about robots.

Abigail will be available to rent or own on digital starting May 7.

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Editorial

Yay or Nay: Whatā€™s Good and Bad in Horror This Week

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Horror Movies

Welcome to Yay or Nay a weekly mini post about what I think is good and bad news in the horror community written in bite-sized chunks. 

Yay:

Mike Flanagan talking about directing the next chapter in the Exorcist trilogy. That might mean he saw the last one and realized there were two left and if he does anything well itā€™s draw out a story. 

Yay:

To the announcement of a new IP-based film Mickey Vs Winnie. It’s fun to read comical hot takes from people who haven’t even seen the movie yet.

Nay:

The new Faces of Death reboot gets an R rating. It’s not really fair — Gen-Z should get an unrated version like past generations so they can question their mortality the same as the rest of us did. 

Yay:

Russell Crowe is doing another possession movie. Heā€™s quickly becoming another Nic Cage by saying yes to every script, bringing the magic back to B-movies, and more money into VOD. 

Nay:

Putting The Crow back in theaters for its 30th anniversary. Re-releasing classic movies at the cinema to celebrate a milestone is perfectly fine, but doing so when the lead actor in that film was killed on set due to neglect is a cash grab of the worst kind. 

The Crow
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