![]() There's a generation of filmmakers who grew up on “Jaws,” who grew up on De Palma films, midnight movies, who are now taking those films and making substantive movies. They're just movies you watch and you see a pretty cheerleader get a knife in the back and that's the end of the movie. You turn your brain off, they're not thoughtful, they're not deep, they don't have a lot of substance to them. One of the things that has always been the mindset, is that those movies are childish. You were seeing midnight movies and things like that. It used to be you were into “Lord of the Rings” or “Harry Potter” or horror movies - you were a weirdo. Radke: Isabella, why do you think genre films were not, or are not, considered prestige films? To us, to Black people, those things are as just as speculative as going to Mars and living with aliens. Sometimes we just want to have a good life - healthy, clean water, clean air, a good job. So now that we can imagine a different world, outside of the barriers of racism, classism, sexism - that's the imagination. But the speculative is like: What if we thought of today's world from a lens outside of colonialism, outside of the patriarchal hegemony? To imagine those things? For the history of Black people, we didn't have the power to be able to imagine a different world. You think of futurism, you think of "Black Panther," science fiction, technology, future space travel, "Star Trek," things like that. ![]() But speculativeness is this idea coined by Black authors thinking about blackness in other perspectives and other lenses, speculating on the world outside of whiteness. It seemed futuristic to imagine a world that still had Black people in it. Futurism was coined by a white journalist who was looking at the ways in which Octavia Butler, for example, was writing about the Black experience. Price: Great question, we're always having this conversation. Radke: What's the difference between futurism and speculative? Isabella Price: And now we have more genres - Afro-futurist, Afro-speculative, Afro-horror, Asian horror, Asian speculative, Asian futurism, Indigenous futurism. It covers horror, sci-fi, fantasy, martial arts, anime, animation, anything super-imaginative and super-creative. Billy Ray Brewton: Horror is probably what most people think of, but genre is expansive.
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