deerstalker

Gird your loins, American Horror Story fans: the first images from season nine of the horror anthology series have landed and they are (summer) campy as all hell. The new season, subtitled 1984, appears to take place at a summer camp in the 80s. This is clearly an homage to the classic summer slasher flicks of the time, like the Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp film series. This genre filled with horny teens and men in shorty shorts has since been spoofed in countless films, from Wet Hot American Summer to The Final Girls.

Now it seems that Ryan Murphy and company are taking a stab at the beloved genre. In an Instagram post, Murphy wrote “To celebrate the first day of filming the NINTH Season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY, here’s the official 1984 cast announcement along with some amazing 80s lewks. Enjoy!” He then posted a series of camera tests featuring the cast:

View this post on Instagram

To celebrate the first day of filming the NINTH Season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY, here's the official 1984 cast announcement along with some amazing 80s lewks. Enjoy!

A post shared by Ryan Murphy (@mrrpmurphy) on Jul 11, 2019 at 9:25am PDT

The cast includes a mix of AHS veterans and newcomers, who dance and pose to Dan Hartman’s 1984 hit “I Can Dream About You”. The returning players include Emma Roberts, Cody Fern, Leslie Grossman, and Billie Lourd. They are joined by newcomers Matthew Morrison (Glee), DeRon Horton (Dear White People), Angelica Ross (Pose), Zach Villa (Shameless), and Olympic skier Gus Kenworthy, who bears a striking resemblance to Richard Madden.

The gang all appear in a variety of 80s looks with nods to the archetypes of the day: Emma Roberts as the preppy good girl, Billie Lourd as the bleached blonde rocker chick, Kenworthy as the jock. A lot of camera time is given to Morrison’s prominent crotch bulge. Not much is known about their characters aside from Ross, who is wearing a stethoscope so I’m assuming she’s the camp nurse. John Carroll Lynch also shows up looking like a murderer, but I would expect nothing less from the man who gave us Freak Show‘s terrifying Twisty the Clown.

Conspicuously absent are AHS all-stars Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters, who have appeared in every season of the series. Paulson is supposed to have a dramatically reduced role, in part to her headlining Murphy’s upcoming Netflix series Ratched, which will tell the origin story of the infamous Nurse Ratched from One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There’s no word yet on whether or not Peters will make an appearance.

Sadly, AHS’s queen bee Jessica Lange will not be involved, as she has retired from the show. While she reprised her Murder House role in Apocalypse for a cameo, she has no plans to return. Still, if these first looks are anything to go by, we’re in for a campy, darkly comic season of AHS, aka my favorite version of the series.

American Horror Story: 1984 premieres on September 18th on FX.

(via The Hollywood Reporter, image: FX)

Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!

—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

The new season of American Horror Story is almost upon us, and we are finally getting our first look at this year’s cast for the retro-flavored AHS:1984. The anthology series’ ninth installment features the return of longtime members of the AHS ensemble like Emma Roberts, Billie Lourd, Cody Fern, and Leslie Grossman. But there are some new faces as well, like former Glee star Matthew Morrison; Dear White People‘s DeRon Horton; Olympic skier Gus Kenworthy; and Pose‘s Angelica Ross. Ross just took her final bows on Pose with this week’s episode.

You can watch the “screen test” cast announcement down below, thanks to creator Ryan Murphy’s Instagram account (via Entertainment Weekly). The video plays along to the Dan Hartman ’80s hit “I Can Dream About You” from 1984’s Streets of Fire. If you haven’t seen it, maybe the most ’80s movie ever made.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

To celebrate the first day of filming the NINTH Season of AMERICAN HORROR STORY, here’s the official 1984 cast announcement along with some amazing 80s lewks. Enjoy!

A post shared by Ryan Murphy (@mrrpmurphy) on Jul 11, 2019 at 9:25am PDT

This year’s cycle is said to be inspired by the summer camp slasher genre, which was insanely popular during the ’80s. Movies like Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp packed teenagers into shopping mall movie theaters. Horror fans still love and revere them to this day. Murphy likes to throw a twist into American Horror Story every year however. So who knows if this season is really in the 80s, or about the making of a movie set in the ’80s. All we know is that we’re living for Billie Lourd as “VHS Workout Tape Barbie”. She’s probably going to be our favorite character.

This season of AHS will be different than most; it will only feature Sarah Paulson in a very limited role. She’s going to be busy filming another show for Ryan Murphy. That series is an origin story for One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’s villainous Nurse Ratchet, debuting next year on Netflix. Also sitting out AHS for the first time is Evan Peters. Peters has been in every single season since Murder House back in 2011.

The post AHS: 1984 Cast Announcement Video Gives Us Full Retro Flavor appeared first on Nerdist.

**So many spoilers below for The Magicians season four.**

It’s been months since season four of Syfy’s The Magicians ended, and still, when I think about how it resulted in the death of pseudo-protagonist Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), I’m still left with that hollowness I felt when I first saw, in a beautiful display of narrative imagery, our kind-hearted hero burst into millions of blinking lights, just as his own light was forever extinguished. It’s bizarre to feel grief for a fictional character. Or, at least, I thought so at first when it hung over me well past the point any normal human, who isn’t in the depths of YouTube comment section hell, should obsess over anyone who isn’t real.

Through fandom, we’ve come to understand the sense of collective loss that happens when a series kills off a favorite character. If lucky, the character in question will simply be written off the show or, in another twist of the word “death,” will have a complete personality transplant between seasons or—even worse—episodes.

The reason why these shows, movies, or books have such passionate followings isn’t just because of great writing (there are plenty that flirt with the line of mediocrity more often than not), but because there’s a spark about it that we’re drawn to, a welcoming archway to escapism through reality bending and barrel chested heroes (or brunette, gun-toting heroines with lopsided grins). Buried in whatever thematic dressing, there’s someone we relate to—be it wide scale or microscopically, it’s an inch of a trait we see in ourselves that allows the perfect entry point into a world that otherwise felt larger than what we may dare wander into.

There’s always the character death that shocked you the most (noble but hapless Ned or Robb Stark, perhaps) or left you slightly dejected (let me remind you of the devastation that is “Not Penny’s Boat” and apologize in advance for any sniffles in cubicles.) There are deaths that perfectly mark the end of a storyline for a particular character, ones that are so enraging that fans are forced to quit the show, and ones that were the catalyst for one of the greatest episodes of television of this century (even just thinking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “The Body” makes my heart ache).

But as time passed, that tingling grief began to make more sense in hindsight. I, like plenty of other fans of anything, have a tendency to become hyper fixated, and—considering I’m a generally neurotic individual still riding the murky, nauseating waves of anxiety—I’m hyper fixated on things that make me feel good, that make me leave my own overly analytical thoughts on the backburner. The Magicians managed this, and yes, it was, in part, because it offered me a chance to play make-believe for 40 minutes per episode, but more so than that, as it pressed on through the awkward growing pains of season one, it gave me a character to latch onto.

While I don’t suffer from depression like Quentin does (certainly not to the same extent, at least), there was always something delicately empowering about a character whose greatest strength, in the end, was his decency. He was never the flashiest character in the room, easily dwarfed by the outsized personalities of Eliot or Margo and always out-powered by Julia and Alice.

(image: Eric Milner/SYFY)

His gift was his kindness—not his bookish intellect, but deep empathy. He understood the need to love something and did so with such purity, such eager necessity that it bled into his adult life. He was able to take his internalized pain and configure it into something that wasn’t just an anchoring footnote but a way to relate to others in pain and to see sparks of hope through his belief in the fantastical.

It isn’t a reach to say that plenty of people associate outsized responses to TV moments with fan entitlement and, to be fair, they’re not totally off base. In reactions to Captain Marvel, Game of Thrones, and Star Wars: The Last Jedi, we’ve seen how viewers can twist the source material into something ugly, both believing that they deserved a certain type of story they didn’t get and/or that they could do better than the vision behind the work.

However, that often straight, male indignant fury is quite different from those of us who grieve in the smaller, less abrasive way. Think of the anger of fans when LGBTQ+ characters are needlessly killed off in acts of cheap shock value (an element that certainly doesn’t help The Magicians’ case, as Quentin had seemingly been written as bisexual).

It’s not wrong to feel for the loss of a character or to do so over many months (as I have) because there’s a level of catharsis in knowing that you aren’t alone in this feeling. It’s part of what makes TV (all art, too, but television especially) such an enjoyable communal escape: We aren’t just leaving our self-provided emotions behind us for a while, but we’re also finding like-minded people who can also see themselves in a character like Q, a repairer of small objects.

Quentin’s loss hurt for a number of reasons. For one thing, his story wasn’t finished, and after a season or two of teasing an Eliot and Quentin reunion, the lack of closure makes what came before ring hollow, if still beautiful in individual moments. For another, it presents itself as daring for killing off the imagined lead character, but with the LGBTQ characterization, that death isn’t just shocking, but another sad tally in an ever-growing statistic.

Jason Ralph reportedly asked to leave, though, and while there’s respect for him as an actor in making that creative decision, he did some of his finest work in season four, imbuing Q with an apathy that manifested in his physicality, in a persistent hunch of his shoulders and world-weariness that had him further burrowing into himself. His depression, which had largely been spoken of in the past tense, was fully on display in his disinterest and his waning knack for self-preservation.

It was a note that made his death—and his worry, afterward, that maybe it hadn’t been so accidental—all the more devastating. We get the feeling that, had he made it through to the ending moments, he too would be sitting around the campfire with all of his friends and loved ones, that maybe that icy façade he’d built throughout the season would’ve thawed again.

(image: Syfy)

Beyond all of the possibilities that were missed—storylines lost and relationships unfulfilled—there was a deeper sadness in losing a character who, in my own way, represented attributes I wished to see onscreen more. From his unlikely acts of heroism to seeing the strength in those around him and a desire and will to do good by those he loved, Quentin was the opposite to so many antiheroes, or rough-around-the-edges/heart-of-gold types.

He wore his heart on his sleeve, and it was almost always messy. He was sad and neurotic, passionate and obsessive, and he found fantastical worlds as a means to cope with a self-destructive, emotionally volatile mind. Sometimes we need those stories to help us see beyond our present, to give us light and offer a reprieve from anxiety.

He wasn’t so much an audience insert as someone who took on the baggage of the viewers to allow us assertive affirmation that our fervor for these transportive tales is worthwhile. In learning to deal with the death of a character I loved, it’s been easier to realize that, so often, the reason we mourn fictionalized people in highly fictionalized worlds isn’t so much because we’ll miss them (though I will), but because we’ll miss that outlet—that mirror—that granted us an array of exuberant escape.

Be it through fleeting glances or stolen kisses, through sing-a-longs or mystifying subtleties of dynamics, or dragons, sentient ships, and fabulous gowns made for a Queen (or King), The Magicians was a perfectly packaged means of profound reality pauses. With the loss of Quentin, it loses its heart. Still, with the journeys we went on with him, it’s bittersweet and all the more poignant in the end.

(featured image: Syfy)

Allyson Johnson is a twentysomething writer and a lover of film and all things pop culture. She’s a film and television enthusiast and critic over at TheYoungFolks.com who spends too much of her free time on Netflix. Her idols are Jo March, Illana Glazer, and Amy Poehler. Check her out at her twitter @AllysonAJ or at The Young Folks.

Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!

—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

Jackie Aina may be better known as a champion of diversity and inclusivity in the beauty industry, but she’s also an advocate for Black love. Not only does the beauty influencer use YouTube to coach women through applying their makeup, but she also uses the platform to show Black girls, and specifically those with deeper complexions, what a healthy romantic relationship looks like.

On the Beauty Carnival stage at the 25th Anniversary of Essence Festival, the content creator opened up about her conscious decision to share her relationship with her significant other, with her three million YouTube Subscribers.

While most public figures keep details about their relationships private, the 31-year-old says she wants young Black dark skinned women to see an example of a positive relationship amongst two Black people.

“I’m really big on representation and visibility, and we’re here at Essence Fest so we’ll just be extremely honest—everything’s got to be Black,” said Aina. “Ultimately, I actually decided to start the [couples] channel, because lets just be honest, sometimes the men in our community are not always as welcoming of a particular type of woman amongst the Black community.”

Hinting at colorism, which is a prevalent issue that still negatively impacts women of color, she opened up to the audience.

“When we started to become more public with our relationship, in my head I thought to imagine how encouraging that might be for someone who looks like me to see she has a man who loves her, that’s also Black, that’s not degrading her, humiliating her, talking about light-skin this and light-skin that. That could be the little bit of encouragement someone may need. It might be inspiring for them. A lot of people don’t have a lot of positive examples of that.”

Aina isn’t shy about drawing visibility to the issues that affect young Black women, including sensitive subjects such as skin color. Not only does she draw awareness to shadeism at the beauty counter, but she also underscores its impact on romantic relationships and self-confidence. In a climate where touchy subjects are brushed under the rug, we’re happy to see that she’s pulling out the carpet and bringing these important topics to the forefront.

“I want young Black women and young Black dark-skinned women at that, to see another example of a positive healthy relationship among two Black people,” Aina said in closing.

To see #blacklove personified, check out these touching images of Jackie and her bae.

The post Jackie Aina Wants To Teach Young Black Women About Healthy Relationships appeared first on Essence.