After an extremely successful 2019, Griselda hoped to continue their hot streak by adding their first female rap artist, Armani Caesar. The Buffalo native quickly got to work on her Griselda debut, The Liz, due on September 18. Ahead of its release, Armani dropped the video for the single “Simply Done,” in which she teams with fellow labelmate Benny The Butcher. The song lives up to its name, with the duo keeping things simple, the video mostly taking place in an alleyway. From Armani’s confident bars to Benny’s money-flexing, the two rappers make it clear that they won’t be easily moved from their hip-hop pedestal.
Griselda first signed Caesar back in April, which prompted Westside Gunn took to his Instagram to welcome his fans to the label’s newest signee. “It was All about timing this was over a decade in the making she’s a hustler,” he said in the post. “She comes from the same streets as US and actually started with us Were about to get busy So I want EVERYBODY to follow her and Support her.” Following the announcement, Armani would release the “Simply Done” single and reveal The Liz would arrive on August 21. However, following the death of Griselda’s DJ Shay, she would delay the project to honor his passing.
Twitter is best known as a place to get breaking news, the president’s daily rants, and read a lot of terrible sports takes. It’s a take-no-prisoners platform where saying the wrong thing can get you canceled.
It’s a place of never-ending human interaction but very few users are looking to find romance on the platform.
That’s why hundreds of thousands of Twitter users are applauding @TBrown_80 and @KatieKatCubs. They managed to do what for many seems impossible, they found true love on, of all places, Twitter.
Our story begins three years ago when a gal named Katie living in Iowa posted some terrible advice she received from her married coworkers about where to find single men.
Terry Brown of Kentucky had recently started following Katie on Twitter because he thought she was “cute” and saw her tweet “as an opening.” He boldly, and in the opinion of many, incorrectly, suggested that Twitter was a good place for Katie to meet single men.
Katie thought Terry’s idea was horrible.
Terry responded with a funny list of more places that would be terrible for Katie to meet a single man.
Katie agreed but thought Terry was still egregiously wrong with his initial assumption.
The conversation turned to how Katie can find a relationship like women do in Hallmark channel movies or romantic comedies.
At that point, Terry made his move by taking things to the next level on Twitter and sending her a private, direct message.
“I slid into the DMs (as the kids say) as we were going back and forth and the timeline,” Terry told Upworthy. “And we just kept messaging each other, eventually exchanging phone numbers.”
The new friends talked for a while through Facetime and text message before Terry took the big drive from Kentucky to Iowa for the first in-person meeting. “It was amazing,” Terry said of their first date. “I pretty much knew she was The One after that first meeting.”
After dating for three years, Terry planned on proposing to Katie at the Chicago Cubs home opener in April, but those plans got squashed by COVID-19. So he settled for a more “subdued” proposal in Iowa.
On September 6, Katie said yes and it only made sense to share the news on Twitter.
But when Terry shared the news on his timeline, the tweet blew up, with over 500,000 likes. If anyone knows how unlikely a Twitter romance is, it’s Twitter users, so they shared the tweet like crazy.
“Since we were Twitter folks, I knew I had to post something,” Terry told Upworthy. “The initial ‘She said YES!’ tweet got about 1500 likes, but the SpongeBob meme tweet is at over 560K likes. It’s been surreal, to say the least.”
While the story of how a couple found love on Twitter is heartwarming, there’s a lot of people out there that want to know Terry’s technique for picking up his future wife on the platform.
You gotta have some serious Twitter game to pull off this impossible move.
“Twitter is a tool, just like anything else,” he shared. “It’s how you use it. I think that if you’re interacting with someone, you can get a pretty good idea of who they are. If you look at our interactions on the timeline, there’s nothing that would be considered flirty, but I just knew.”
“Always, always be respectful,” he says.
For Terry, meeting Katie was a reminder that you never know what lies around the corner or in your DMs.
“I was married for 13 years, got divorced and was in a dark place,” he admits. “My advice to folks is to not get too down. Literally, you just never know where you’ll find your person!”
Two summers ago, the world watched with aching empathy as an orca mother, whose baby had died about 30 minutes after it was born, grieved. A group of female orcas surrounded her in a circle for at least two hours after the birth and death—a seemingly clear symbol of sympathy and solidarity. The mother had a hard time letting go, though, as she kept the dead calf afloat for 17 consecutive days. Even through rough waters, when the calf would slip and fall, she’d dive deep to push it back to the surface again.
Expressions of grief are common among marine mammals, but this orca—tagged by researchers as “J35” but known colloquially as Talequah—seemed to show an extreme reaction to the loss. And her grief moved us all, perhaps due to our tendency to anthropomorphize animals or perhaps as a reflection of our own individual losses. Real or attributed, we felt her pain.
But now we can rejoice with her as she has given birth to a healthy calf, and so far, all appears to be well. Ken Balcomb, founder for the Center for Whale Research, said the calf (known as J57) looked “very robust and lively” according to the New York Times.
🐋❤️She’s the southern resident orca who broke our hearts, carrying her dead calf for 17 days back in 2018.
That’s not only good news for Talequah, but for the entire Southern Resident orca population. Orcas, who are also known as “killer whales” live in pods of up to 40 members and help one another hunt and care for young. Southern Resident orcas, who make their home in the Salish Sea off the coasts of Washington and British Columbia, have seen their numbers dwindle in recent decades. As of January 2020, there were just 73 Southern Resident orcas counted—the lowest population since 1976.
“With such a small population … every successful birth is hugely important for recovery,” wrote Sealife Response, Rehabilitation and Research in a July press release,
Recovering the Southern Resident Killer Whale with Research and Conservation
These endangered, majestic mammals are threatened by human activity in the ocean as well as pollution that runs to the ocean from land. The Center for Whale Research has a list of specific things we can do to help conserve orca habitats and improve their chances of survival, including watching what we pour down our drains, practicing natural yard care, keeping waterways clean, and more. All of those little things add up when enough people do them, which can make all the difference for animals who rely on us to keep their homes safe enough for them to thrive.
Welcome to the planet, J57. And congratulations on your “rainbow baby,” Mama Talequah. We know you’re going to take great care of your new family member.
Ronald Bell, the co-founder of the famed ’70s and ’80s band Kool & the Gang, has passed away at the age of 68. Born Khalis Bayyan, he died suddenly on Tuesday morning at his Virgin Island home with his wife Tia Sinclair Bell, according to uDiscover Music. A thriving soul group, Kool & the Gang was formed by Bell along with his brother Robert “Kool” Bell, Dennis “D.T.” Thomas, Robert “Spike” Mickens, Charles Smith, George Brown, and Ricky West back in 1964. The group would become one of the most successful groups in the last five decades. Bell’s contribution to the group was a large one, as he composed, arranged, produced, and performed a large number of the group’s records.
Over the group’s long-running career, Kool & The Gang released a total of 24 albums with their most recent being their 2013 Christmas album, Kool For The Holidays. Some of the group’s most successful albums arrived during a three-year stretch from 1979 to 1981, with Ladies’ Night, Celebrate!, and Something Special each reaching Platinum certification. However, the group’s best-selling album came in 1984 with Emergency. Kool & The Gang also scored two Grammy Awards, seven American Music Awards, a Soul Train Legend Award, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Ronald Bell would also be inducted to the Songwriters Hall Of Fame in 2018 alongside his brother Robert Bell, George Brown, and James “J.T.” Taylor, who joined the group in 1974.
How do you improve upon perfection? You don’t, which is why all attempts to recapture the glory of 1987’s futuristic thriller RoboCop have ranged from so-so (its 1990 sequel) to inexplicably uninspired (the 2014 reboot that wasn’t even rated R). But maybe the 10th or so time is the charm: According to /Film, MGM is working on a prequel series — and since RoboCop was an origin story, that means it’ll be the first RoboCop content sans RoboCop himself.
The news came from Ed Neumeier, who wrote the original as well as Starship Troopers, another proudly satirical blockbuster from RoboCop director Paul Verhoeven. Neumeier’s been teasing a new sequel, RoboCop Returns — which would do the fashionable thing and be a direct sequel to the first one, ignoring all others — for a couple years now, but he said a prequel show is also in the works. Mind you, it won’t focus on Peter Wellers’ Alex Murphy, the everyday Detroit cop killed by a gang with corporate ties. Instead it will zero in on Dick Jones, the crooked big wig played by Ronny Cox who funded said gang, and effectively became our android hero’s final boss.
Is it weird to have a RoboCop without RoboCop? Sure. But the RoboCop world is a rich one, with its thinly veiled attacks on late capitalism run amok via a giant corporation, OCP, that steps into “save” an ailing city (by building luxury apartments and kicking out the poor with ramped-up local police, which they also own). And Neumeier — who’s also overseen numerous Starship Troopers sequels, which took that franchise in fresh directions — thinks it’s a sharp idea.
“It has all the cool stuff about RoboCop except no RoboCop,” Neumeier said. “I’m working with these two writers, Dave Parkin and Rob Gibbs, who bought this idea to a TV producer friend of mine, who then brought it to me. The first time I heard it I knew it was a cool idea because I could see a lot of things you could do with it. It’s such an interesting character.”
Neumeier adds that “nobody necessarily starts out being the bad guy,” implying that Dick Jones will be an antihero along the lines of a Walter White or even a Michael Corleone, eroding over the long haul. Indeed, he says it will “be about the evolution of Richard Jones to Dick Jones, the story of OCP and how the world moves into the future, how the corporate world behaves.”
Actually, losing RoboCop but gaining a no doubt savage look at corporate culture at this time in history doesn’t sound like the worst idea in the world.
Legendary ESPN analyst Doris Burke will serve as will serve as a game analyst during this year’s NBA Conference Finals and Finals on ESPN Radio, becoming the first woman to serve as a game analyst for the NBA Finals on any platform, ESPN PR announced Wednesday. Burke will provide radio commentary alongside play-by-play voice Marc Kestecher and analyst Jon Barry for the NBA Finals and both Conference Finals series on site in the NBA Bubble.
This season, @ESPNNBA‘s @heydb to serve as game analyst for @ESPNRadio‘s national #NBA Finals & Conference Finals coverage@Hoophall broadcaster becomes the first woman to serve as NBA Finals game analyst on any platform
The Hall of Fame broadcaster is one of the most knowledgeable voices in the sport, having spent nearly three decades covering the NBA, the WNBA, and women’s and men’s college basketball for ESPN. Burke has broken barriers in the sports broadcasting world many times in her illustrious career, becoming the first woman to serve as a full-time NBA television game analyst on ESPN and ABC in 2017 – a role she continues to hold. She typically shifts her role to sideline reporter during the conference finals and NBA Finals broadcasts, but this year will join the radio crew to bring her expert analysis to the radio booth.
In her place, Rachel Nichols will take over sideline reporting duty for the Finals and Eastern Conference Finals, as she returns to the Bubble after some time back in Los Angeles. Nichols noted on Wednesday that getting to be there to help hand out the Larry O’Brien trophy will be a “dream come true.”
HUGE congrats to @HeyDB, who is gonna kill it as usual. I’m gonna be an an incredibly poor substitute stepping into her shoes on the ABC broadcast, but getting to hand out the championship trophy at the end of the Finals will be an absolute dream come true. https://t.co/jTgNlRG6qi
Nichols will continue to host The Jump from Orlando throughout the playoffs as well, while NBA Countdown will serve as the pregame and halftime show on ABC for the NBA Finals, including new addition Stephen A. Smith alongside Maria Taylor, Jay Williams, Jalen Rose, Paul Pierce, and Adrian Wojnarowski.
Until today. Coolhaus, the hipster-beloved ice cream brand, has collaborated with LA’s Common Space Brewery to make something they dub “dessert beer.” The official name is the overly wordy “Vanilla Ice Cream Sandwich Dessert Beer” but the image on the can is enough to give you an idea of what we’re talking about. This is a 7% ABV flavor bomb — un-session-able both because of the alcohol content and the sweet notes.
But does that mean it’s bad? Absolutely not. In fact, I liked it a lot.
TASTING NOTES:
I drank my first one of these nice and frosty. I’m drinking one right now as a refresher course and it’s room temp. In both cases, you get a lot of malts on the nose. Remember “malts” the milkshake term? You’ll hear it a lot in old-timey movies. In ice cream parlors of the ’50s, a “chocolate malted” was far more common than a “chocolate shake.” That meant the addition of malted milk powder, a substance which I buy in bulk for my own milkshakes. That malt flavor is exactly how this beer hits on the nose.
The palate is rich vanilla. It’s beer and you get a little more hops and malt than you did on the sniff, but the ice cream and vanilla notes are strong with this one. It’s like that creamy root beer left in the root beer float after you eat the ice cream (without the sarsparilla flavors). The nice perk here is that whatever hops snuck past all the vanilla do it at the middle palate, right when the whole beer could veer off the rails into being too sweet. It’s a good catch and the only time I’ve ever really thought, “Thank god for that note of hops!”
The finish is sweet with a little fizz. The beer itself is pretty low on bubbles, but that last little kick is a nice touch. Fizz, malt, a teensy bit of hops, and vanilla sweetness — that’s what you’re left with. If you like those things and like it when they err on the sweeter side of the spectrum (as I do), this beer is for you.
BOTTOM LINE:
Get one if you like milkshakes more than you like beer (and you live in California). If you want to call it a stunt beer, fine — but it’s a prtty delectable stunt.
WHY SHOULD ANYONE CARE?
Consumer product goods — foods, beers, etc. — are all becoming calibrated to the “style drop” and “brand collab” cycles. Some work. Some fail. Some are clout chasing. All in all, for a beer newbie who likes sweetness, this one is pretty fun.
Thanks to good timing, the second season of The Mandalorian — so far still the crown jewel among Disney+’s original content, and ditto Star Wars content made in the last two-plus years — won’t be delayed due to the coronavirus. And when it does return, on October 30, it appears that we’ll be returning to the planet that started it all: Tatooine, home to Luke Skywalker when he gets caught up in the fine mess from the very first Star Wars.
Entertainment Weekly dropped a first look at Season 2, and along with news of new characters — among the new actors will be Rosario Dawson, Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff, and Timothy Olyphant — there were new pictures. And one of them, of a Tusken Raider astride a Banthas, implies we’ll be back on the desert planet. Unless Banthas can be found elsewhere in that neck of the universe.
Mind you, there’s no confirmation from Disney that this so. Besides, this wouldn’t be the first time The Mandalorian has ventured to Tatooine. One episode from last season saw Pedro Pascal’s Din Djarin swinging by the iconic Mos Eisley cantina. If it turns out Tatooine is definitely one of Season 2’s destinations, it may confirm a fan theory that the show will bring back beloved bounty hunter Boba Fett, who may be played by no less than Timothy Olyphant. Of course, surely not even the return of Boba Fett could upstage Baby Yoda. Or Werner Herzog.
There’s nothing better than bingeing some good scary movies on Netflix on a dark, stormy night. From ghosts to vampires and zombies just about every morbid fantasy that your demented mind can conjure has representation. We’ve watched the best horror movies on Netflix streaming right now, and here they are, in their beastly, blood-curdling glory. It’s perfect for that late night movie binge to keep you wide awake all the way through 2020.
Writer/director Trey Edward Shults followed up his unnerving family portrait in 2015’s Krisha with a look at another family under the most desperate of circumstances. After an unknown illness has wiped out most of civilization, a number of threats — both seen and unseen — come for a family held up in their home out in the wilderness. It’s a subtle, dream-like tale that stars Joel Edgerton and Christopher Abbot as two patriarchs intent on keeping their families safe, no matter the cost.
Hannibal Lecter is one of horror’s most iconic characters, but it’s a testament to the creepiness of Anthony Hopkins in a leather muzzle that, no matter how many times the film gets quoted, hearing him tell Clarice Starling he’s having an old friend for dinner still sends chills up our spines. Jodie Foster plays the FBI agent tasked with catching another serial killer with Lecter’s same M.O. and she does it by striking up unnerving conversations with the guy, but Hopkins is the real star here, playing Lecter with a restrained insanity that makes his small talk of enjoying human liver with fava beans so much more nightmarish.
Before Ben Feldman played a lovable know-it-all on Superstore, the guy was surviving a terror-filled jaunt through the catacombs of Paris in this horror movie. Feldman plays George, a reluctant sidekick to Scarlett (Perdita Weeks), a young alchemy scholar and his former girlfriend. Scarlett convinces George a few others to venture into the famous Paris underground in order to find the fabled philosopher’s stone (Harry Potter kids should know all about this thing, we’re not explaining it here). What they find instead is basically Dante’s Inferno come to life as they face down cults, demons, ghosts, and all manner of horrific beings. Let this be a warning, children: Nothing good happens this far below street level. Nothing.
Allison Williams, who’s become something of a scream queen after her work in Get Out, continues her horror track record with this thriller about a gifted musician who befriends the talented student who replaced her. Strange happenings begin to occur, events that sabotage the young girl, but as terrifying as this story is, there’s absolutely no way you’ll be able to predict its ending.
Al Pacino playing the demonic head of a New York City law firm with Keanu Reeves serving as his greedy, equally-evil protégé? Yes, please. Look, this horror flick doesn’t have as many frights as some on this list, but it’s filled with tense moments, strange happenings, and a twist you don’t see coming. Reeves plays Kevin, a talented attorney from the South, who makes his way to the Big Apple after winning some high-profile cases. His clients were guilty, but what does that matter, right? Charlize Theron plays his barren wife, Mary Ann, a woman who at one point encounters visions of a baby eating her ovaries, and Pacino plays Milton, Kevin’s boss and Satan himself, literally. It’s a whacky ride into the occult, but the performances are worth it.
This 2002 prequel to Silence of the Lambs features everyone’s favorite cannibal – Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins) – and a copy cat serial killer played by Ralph Fiennes. The film follows a detective named Will Graham (Edward Norton) who gets roped into solving a string of homicides that are committed by a killer known as The Tooth Fairy, a guy who eats his victims in the hopes of transforming himself. Fiennes is chilling in his portrayal of a psychopath whose childhood trauma causes him to target the innocent and Norton is the kind of hero you root for in weird, terrifying stories like these.
This Netflix nightmare follows a group of friends who venture into the Scandinavian wilderness in order to honor their recently-murdered brother. The guys, Luke (Rafe Spall), Phil (Arsher Ali), Hutch (Robert James-Collier), and Dom (Sam Troughton) are forced to take a different path from the one planned, a mistake that leads them to cults and sacrificial offerings and an ancient being who prefers to stake its prey. The scenery is gorgeous, the chemistry of the cast is spot on, and the premise — how these men confront their fears and failures thanks to a supernatural being — starts out promising, though it could’ve delivered a better ending.
Ethan Hawkes plays a washed-up true-crime writer in this grisly flick filled with occult deities and possessed children. Hawke’s Ellison Oswalt moves his family to a home whose last residents all hanged themselves in order to uncover the reason for the killings and who was behind them. Unfortunately for Ellison, supernatural forces seem to be at play and he finds a box of snuff films, all depicting gruesome murders across decades, all featuring families who moved into the house. The movie combines the best of the horror genre — creepy kids, weird home videos, demons, etc — and Hawke does a good job of playing a father desperate to save his family from the mess he made.
Despite a cast that includes Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, and Glenn Close, this unusual, post-apocalyptic film got a bit overlooked during its brief theatrical release. It’s best enjoyed without knowing too much of the plot. Suffice it to say that Melanie (Sennia Nanua), the girl of the title, isn’t quite what she seems, and there’s a reason that she, and others her age, are kept in a secure military facility. But the best trick of the film, thanks in large part to Nanua’s winning performance, is the way its innovations go beyond just putting twists on a familiar genre and, instead, making us question where our sympathies ought to lie.
When a punk rock group accidentally witnesses the aftermath of a murder, they are forced to fight for their lives by the owner of a Nazi bar (Patrick Stewart) and his team. It’s an extremely brutal and violent story, much like the first two features from director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin and Murder Party), but this one is made even tenser by its claustrophobic cat-and-cornered-mouse nature. Once the impending danger kicks in, it doesn’t let up until the very end, driven heavily by Stewart playing against type as a harsh, unforgiving, violent character.
Robert Eggers’ Sundance hit attracted some of the oddest complaints directed at any film in recent years when some disgruntled audience members suggested it wasn’t scary enough. Maybe they were watching a different movie? Set in colonial New England, the austere film follows a family outcast from their strict religious community and trying to make it on their own at the edge of some deep, dark woods. It essentially takes the witch-fearing folklore of the era at face value, watching the family disintegrate under the insidious influence of a nearby witch. It’s a slow-burn horror movie, light on shocks, heavy on unease, and thematically rich in ways that only become apparent later.
Patrick Wilson stars as the father of a little boy trapped in a coma who’s been possessed by evil spirits. Rose Byrne plays his wife, and while the story itself is a bit muddled, the premise is solid nightmare fuel. Really, is there anything more terrifying than a demon child?
This indie comedy quickly became a cult classic, turning familiar scary movie tropes on their heads in bloody and hilarious ways. Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine star as two bumbling-yet-well-meaning hillbillies who get pulled into a nightmare scenario when a group of horny coeds think they’re trying to kill them. In a series of events that escalates in violence, Tucker and Dale try to do the right thing while managing to stay alive in the process. As one of the best horror comedies, it’s a hidden gem waiting to be discovered by those looking for off-the-beaten-path hilarity.
This Thai horror film follows a young man named Tun and his girlfriend, Jane, who accidentally run over a young woman after a party and are haunted by her spirit. Hauntings and horror go hand-in-hand, but this film digs deeper into the supernatural trope by revealing a surprising, gruesome connection between the woman’s ghost and the film’s protagonist. We won’t spoil anything here, but let’s just say there’s a reason this death follows this guy wherever he goes.
This supernatural horror flick isn’t the best-rated fright-fest on this list but it does feature a superb performance by Florence Pugh (before she got big) which makes it worth a watch. You’ll still come away terrified watching Pugh play one half of a brother-sister duo scamming people out of their money by pretending to commune with the dead, especially when she starts actually conversing with some pissed off spirits.
Mike Flanagan, who directed Oculus and Ouija: Origin of Evil, expertly directs this simple tale of a deaf woman being menaced by a masked (and later unmasked) killer in her remote home. This is nothing you haven’t seen before, but Flanagan brings real panache and visual energy to a film that could have easily felt redundant in the hands of a lesser filmmaker.
Succession’s Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch star in this horror mystery about a father-son coroner team attempting to identify a Jane Doe who was harboring all kinds of dark secrets. When a corpse is brought into a small-town coroner’s lab, he and his son begin to experience supernatural phenomena. Tommy (Cox) and Austin (Hirsch) try to escape the lab but quickly realize that they’re dealing with something far more dangerous than a dead body while demonic spirits, old curses, and witches come to life.
This survivalist horror story starring Kiersey Clemmons is more than it appears. Sure, the main story follows Clemmon’s Jennifer, a young woman stranded on a remote island after the boat she was partying on with her white, privileged friends, sinks and it contains monsters — both fantastical and extraordinarily human — but it also trades in allegories about emotional abuse, class warfare, and believing survivors. Basically, it’s a horror flick that packs a savvy metaphorical punch.
Stephen King’s 1992 novel transpires mostly in one isolated lake house’s bedroom where its protagonist, Jessie, lies bound to a bed after her husband dies in the midst of a sex game. That makes it a tough story to film, which may explain why it took 25 years to get turned into a movie. But the wait was worth it: director Mike Flanagan delivers a resourceful, disturbing adaptation anchored by a great Carla Gugino performance (with some fine supporting work from Bruce Greenwood). Forced to find a way out of her situation, while confronting her own past, Gugino’s Jessie is made to go to extremes, which leads to, among other things, one of the squirmiest scenes in recent memory.
This Iranian horror flick manages to tie in relevant world events with a darker story of demonic possession. The film follows Shideh, a former medical student and mother trapped in her home during the bombings of Tehran with her daughter, Dorsa. The pair are soon haunted by a djinn, a malevolent spirit who can possess a human by taking what’s most important to them. For Dorsa, it’s her doll, for Shideh, it’s a medical textbook her dead mother gave her. The two fight to survive the bombs and this evil spirit, and you’ll be fighting to get to sleep after the nightmares from this one begin
After losing her father, young Veronica (Sandra Escacena) and two classmates attempt to contact the other side with a Ouija board during a solar eclipse. Something more sinister breaks through, though, as Veronica is haunted by a dark presence everywhere she goes. Veronica excels phenomenally in the cliche horror bits every viewer has seen a thousand times over, such as mishandled Ouija use, frightening entities that only the protagonist is privy to, and twisted dreams. Based on a true story, the film relies on the strong performance of newcomer Escacena, highlighted by her haunting expressions of terror and anguish.
Not only did Paranormal Activity spawn a horror franchise that’s given us nightmares for the better part of a decade, you can also blame the supernatural thriller for the emergence of the found-footage craze when it comes to blockbusters. After a young couple moves into an idyllic suburban home, they begin to notice unusual events taking place. In order to figure out what’s happening, they strategically set up cameras throughout their house in hopes of capturing some evidence of any kind. It’s the classic “be careful what you wish for” from there.
This ’80s Sam Raimi creation launched the director’s career and has since become a cult classic. The story follows a group of college students vacationing in an isolated cabin in a remote wooded area when they find an audio tape that somehow releases a legion of demons and spirits. Most of the group suffer varying degrees of possession which leads to gory mayhem (hence the film’s NC-17 rating).
One of the better found-footage movies to come down the pike in Paranormal Activity‘s wake is this creepy gem about a videographer (director Patrick Brice) who answers a strange Craigslist ad from a man (Mark Duplass) who requests to be followed around with a camera for 24 hours. There are a few points late in the narrative where suspension of disbelief becomes an issue (a not-atypical problem for the genre), but if you can look past that, you’ll be treated to a very scary turn by Duplass and a supremely-unnerving epilogue.
(Spoilers for Creep🙂 What could have very well been a stand-alone character exploration in 2014’s Creep is heightened in Creep 2, which sees Mark Duplass’ chameleon-like killer seeking a different kind of self-portrait. Burned out on his string of murders, Aaron reaches out to a woman who’s looking for her own kind of story by meeting and filming the lonely people she meets online. Instead of a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing path the killer normally follows, he tells the woman what he is off-the-bat and what he wants: An ending to his journey. With all his cards (seemingly) on the table — and her hiding some of her own — it’s an even more fascinating tale than the original.
Zombie movies have been done to death, brought back to life, and repeated a few more times. But that doesn’t mean there still aren’t entertaining stories to be found in the genre. Train To Busan doesn’t bring anything exceptionally original to the walking undead, but it’s no less of a thrilling ride. An overworked dad is riding the rails with his neglected daughter when a Z-word outbreak strikes, causing savagery from corpse and living alike. Its fast-moving, contorted foes are genuinely freaky in the movie’s cramped setting, making the story feel like a zombified Snowpiercer. It’s a fun action flick with a slightly heavy-handed but solid emotional core that’s unsurprisingly getting an English remake.
After back-to-back big studio bombs, Karyn Kusama returned to her scrappy indie roots with this contained, brilliantly suspenseful study of the darkness that can arise when people don’t allow themselves to feel. The Invitation isn’t a perfect film, but Kusama does a lot with the scant resources she had to play with here, and you have to appreciate her willingness to tackle grief so directly in a genre that tends to have little time for genuine human emotion.
A varied group of people is stuck in a bar after a man is gunned down outside. As the paranoia spreads and they turn on one another, they discover a mysterious sickness could be the culprit. It’s a bottle-type plot that has been done before — locking a bunch of frenzied folks in a cage and let instincts take their course — but this Spanish horror comedy injects its own dark humor and keeps the answers to a minimum, making an entertaining story that unfortunately favors the “dark” over the “comedy” in its final act.
Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper collaborate on this nightmare-inducing horror flick about a suburban family whose young daughter is kidnapped by malevolent spirits. Steven and Diane Freeling live a relatively normal life, taking care of their three children, the youngest of which begins conversing with a static television and issuing ominous warnings about ghosts. Steven and Diane hire a medium to figure out why their house is haunted and discover spirits are using the children’s bedroom closet to kidnap them and bring them to another dimension, forcing both parents to confront their own fears to save their family. It’s the ghost story that all other ghost stories are modeled after, and there’s nothing more terrifying than little blonde-headed girls that are possessed.
A man (Legion‘s Dan Stevens) travels to an island to infiltrate a brutal cult in the hopes of saving his kidnapped sister. As the group’s leaders close in on discovering his identity, the dark secrets of the island start to present themselves. Written and directed by The Raid: Redemption director Gareth Evans, Apostle is a tense, beautifully shot thriller that doesn’t even seem like a horror film from the get-go. Stevens provides another icy, powerful performance alongside Michael Sheen’s turn as the leader of the harsh cult. It’s certainly a highlight among the Netflix original films.
How do you make a sculpture garden that is home to a 20-foot witch head and an already-frightening Humpty Dumpty even more terrifying? Just add a historically devastating series of wildfires to give the sky a hellish red tint, and you’re there! Right now, much of the western United States — from California’s southern border with Mexico to Washington’s northern one — is engulfed in flames, as wildfires continue to burn throughout the three states. If images of Oregon’s Enchanted Forest theme park bathed in blood-red or San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge glowing orange like Blade Runner 2049 feel a little apocalyptic, that’s because they are!
According to CNN, while 11,479 acres burn in Southern California’s El Dorado fire, Central California is battling the Creek Fire which is burning an area roughly the size of Central Park every 30 minutes and is currently 0% contained. As a result, the usual blue skies of Northern California’s Bay Area have been stained a rusty red from the 150,000 acres that have burned in the Plumas National Forest since August 17th, when a lightning storm set off the blaze. 14 wildfires rage in Oregon, painting the sky a deep red, and Washington is grappling with a fire season that has burned more acres this Monday alone than over the past 12 fire seasons.
Thousands of people and animals are being displaced all across the Western United States, and hundreds of thousands of acres will continue to burn as firefighters struggle to contain the wildfires, it’s a pretty dire situation and a clear reminder that we have myriad opportunities to take better care of our planet. The West’s devastating wildfires have followed New Orleans and Texas’ own natural disaster just last week in Hurricane Laura, and coupled with a global pandemic we just want to know — what’s next for this truly sh*tty year?
Several people across California, Oregon, and Washington have taken to Twitter and Instagram to share scenes of how the smoke from the fires is blocking out the sun and adding an apocalyptic filter to everything. So thanks 2020, for letting us know what the dinosaurs saw as the planet became uninhabitable for them and they all gradually suffocated.
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(@AngryBlackLady)