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I have loved horror as long as I have loved my blackness. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting in my mother’s lap while she braided my hair, the glow of all sorts of monsters and ghouls from her small black-and-white television washing over us. Horror may seem like an unlikely obsession for a young black girl growing up on the shores of Miami. But so much of blackness in America carries an undercurrent of dread, in which the prosaic points of everyday life — wearing a hoodie to run an errand, attending church, passing a huddle of cops while walking through your own neighborhood — are fraught with meaning and reminders of the potential for violence. As a child, I learned that the world would be hostile toward me by virtue of my blackness at the same time I came to understand horror. It’s an exceedingly elastic genre, one that’s able to seduce, revile, inform, and move you, often within the same moment. In its second, discursive season which ended last week, Atlanta is at its most elegant and impactful when using horror in this manner.

Creator and star Donald Glover, director Hiro Murai, and the show’s all-black writers room have repeatedly used the genre to consider the horror embedded within black American identity and experience. In particular, the price of aiming for fortune as artists, internalized racism that leaves physical wounds, and our relationship to whiteness — which is less a specific monster the show deals with head-on than a pathological stain infecting people even when it remains unseen — are crucial thematic underpinnings to how the characters on Atlanta wrestle with their own identities. Glover and his collaborators don’t unpack blackness for an audience, white or otherwise, that’s unfamiliar with its vernacular. Instead, they mine the fraught internal dynamics of how these individual characters live with their blackness in an environment that can often be hostile toward it.

In its second-season premiere, Darius (a laconic, delightfully philosophical Lakeith Stanfield) recounts what amounts to a demented fable about “the Florida Man,” an elusive and unidentified white man responsible for the harrowing unsolved crimes the Sunshine State has earned a reputation for. The violence in this sequence — the Florida man sits crouched on asphalt eating a crumpled human being with blood streaking down his jaw, then walks up to the car of an unsuspecting black teen to shoot him in the head — sets the tone for what comes later in the season. The violence is jarring, gruesome, and touched with broader racial relevance. The sequence takes the tenor of a dream. Florida Man comes to feel less like a recounted news story and more like the kind of warning kids pass around the campfire. He’s a boogeyman by way of a sun-kissed Freddy Krueger. Later episodes lean even further into horror. “Helen,” the season’s fourth episode directed by Amy Seimetz, feels like a riff on Jordan Peele’s Get Out for how it deals with a black man coming into a white setting in order to discover a new side of his partner. But it proves more prickly and complex than the work that inspired it, as the partner in question is a black woman herself, touching the nerve of what it means to be biracial.

Taking place at the German Fasnacht celebration, the episode first seems to be concerned with unpacking the violence that white people pointedly enact upon black people by exploring Earn’s (Glover) discomfort at the event. Early in the episode, a white woman bounces up to Earn exclaiming, “No way! You look so good!” her hand lightly touching his face, checking for makeup. She’s mistaken him for the white man dressed as a Moor, only to realize with abject embarrassment that he’s an actual black person. But Atlanta typically doesn’t use the ignorance and racism of white people to inject horror in its stories, at least not directly. The writers seem more interested in the horror that blooms inside and among black people.

The episode goes on to upend expectations, focusing on Van’s (Zazie Beetz) relationship with being biracial, and her anger at being seen as an appendage in Earn’s life. Van’s security in how she defines herself as a black woman is chipped away continuously throughout “Helen.” When she tries to find some communion with the only other Afro-German in attendance, Christina, who is also a childhood friend, a frustrating conversation ensues. Christina notes that Van always “chose black” as if she “needed” that identity as a compass, not as if it was natural for her to do so. The episode tips from an undercurrent of dread to outright horror in a scene centering on Van, with a setup many horror films have used to great effect: a beautiful woman walking down a desolate alley in the dead of night as a menacing laugh and masked figure emerges from the shadows. By the time Van bashes the costumed figure behind her in a fit of fear and anger — a traditional mark of this celebration — it feels like a manifestation of how in flux her relationship with her identity currently is.

“Woods,” directed by Murai, is perhaps my favorite episode for how it considers the season’s clearest arc: Alfred’s (Bryan Tyree Henry) struggle with his growing fame as the rapper Paper Boi. After a failed excursion with his not-quite girlfriend, Alfred gets jumped by a trio of fans before escaping into the woods. The familiarity of Atlanta’s concrete landscape gives way to the strange and the harrowing. His mouth dripping with blood and skin slick with sweat, Alfred wanders around the woods looking for an exit. The episode is the most conventional in its horror setup: a man lost in terrain that was once familiar but now feels alien, the dead deer rotting as a warning of potential violence, a strange figure speaking ominously, who could be friend or foe, depending on his mood. What makes the episode powerful rather than conventional is how Murai frames the rumbling cacophony and shadowed grooves of these woods as Alfred’s subconscious turned flesh. Soon, everything he experiences comes across as emblematic of his own struggle to remain authentic to the life he’s lived, perhaps afraid that embracing fame to such a degree may upend who he really is. The finale, while lacking any of the horror cues that define so much of the season, details how he keeps Earn around because he provides a grounded sense that his growing profile makes difficult to maintain.

The way Glover and his collaborators use horror this season makes it clear that the show isn’t primarily interested in detailing the strictures white racism has inflicted on these characters, but in charting their internal lives and how they relate to being black in America. Nowhere is this more explicit than in the critically lauded, brilliant, and horrifying episode “Teddy Perkins.” It’s interesting to compare the episode to Glover’s other notable accomplishment this year, “This Is America,” the Childish Gambino music video he released ahead of the Atlanta finale last week that got a rapturous public reception. When you place “Teddy Perkins” and “This Is America,” which Murai also directed, side by side, they become curious case studies of how Glover uses horror to explore these ideas, to very different effects and levels of success.

In a Hollywood Reporter profile preceding Atlanta’s sophomore season, Glover says that success in this industry takes time: “You have to make them understand you speak their language — that you speak old white man.” Both “Teddy Perkins” and “This Is America” use horror to consider what exactly this means. They act as parables about inherited trauma, the violence it breeds, and the price of achieving fame as a black man in white America. Both incorporate commentary on the evolution of black music, and hip-hop in particular. Both are brimming with references. As Darius grows more entrenched with the ghoulish Teddy Perkins (played disturbingly by Glover himself), who à la Michael Jackson has seemingly undergone plastic surgery in an effort to be rendered white, I felt the influence of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the delirium of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, Claude Rains’s robed figure from The Invisible Man, and numerous black musicians including Stevie Wonder, who is mentioned by name. Meanwhile, watching Glover dance with wild energy as Childish Gambino in “This Is America,” against a tableau of violence that feels queasily like real-world horrors, numerous references can be found, from minstrelsy performances to the Charleston shooting. But only one of these works feels like it synthesizes its touchstones into a cohesive work and understands the effect of witnessing this violence.

“Teddy Perkins” is a masterwork of horror that uses its disparate inspirations and profound sense of dread to create a villain that is at once poignant and chilling. It operates on multiple levels. It can be read as a psychologically pointed spin on a haunted house. In Glover’s aching, unnerving performance, we witness an immediately iconic horror monster take shape. As Teddy and Darius speak about familial tragedies, rap music, Stevie Wonder, and abusive fathers, the titular character synthesizes into something more than his various influences and monstrous visage. He becomes a horrifying emblem of what happens when black people resent their blackness and seek to obliterate it. “Teddy Perkins” immediately felt bracing and potent in its message. But it took watching the video for “This Is America” to understand how easily the use of horror as an interrogation of modern blackness can go awry.

In the video, Glover and Murai make blatant and blunt many of the subtextual concerns of Atlanta. Under his Childish Gambino moniker, Glover contorts his face and body in a way that reads as pure minstrelsy. He runs through a gamut of viral and African dance moves. The music video shares Atlanta’s relationship with violence. It’s sudden, abrupt, cataclysmic, only to fade away as easily as it comes into view. Glover has a pointed message in the video, speaking to the same concerns Atlanta raises, about fame as a black artist and the price of playing by a rule book written by white forces (it provides such a variety of references and emotional turning points, it also leaves itself open to multiple readings). But the way he enacts violence against other black folks, only to dip into a recapitulation of minstrelsy, doesn’t ring as a powerful comment on the ways black artists must play by a certain script — it feels hollow and nihilistic. Watching it, I couldn’t help but wonder, who is this video trying to instill fear in?

In her moving autobiographical and critical work about horror, House of Psychotic Women, Kier-La Janisse writes, “As with most female horror fans, people love to ask what it is I get out of horror. I give them stock answers: catharsis, empowerment, escapism, and so on. Less easy to explain is the fact that I gravitate toward films that devastate and unravel me completely — a good horror film will often make me cry than make me shudder.” I thought of this when watching “Teddy Perkins” and “This Is America” back to back. “Teddy Perkins” left me feeling shaken and deeply sad. The way it considers Teddy and his brother’s identity, in light of their abusive father and relationship to fame, feels as if it is specifically speaking to a black audience, not translating black pain for a white audience, as “This Is America” does. As my colleague Craig Jenkins wrote about the music video, “Glover is smarter than this. Atlanta is smarter than this. Most arch black art flourishing now under the ever-present white American gaze is more careful than this.”

Each of Atlanta’s episodes that delve into horror end with a flash of violence — Van’s panicked attack of the demon thief; Alfred escaping the homeless man’s clutches; the murder/suicide that ends Teddy’s life — and a revelation. Characters learn more about themselves or question what they thought they understood. Violence acts as an emblem of inherited traumas or subconscious fugues. What unites each act of violence is that they speak to how whiteness has warped characters. For Van, it’s her German side that makes blackface seem like a cultural quirk rather than a nightmare. For Teddy and Alfred, it’s the rigors of fame and fortune. The images that have burned in my mind — Teddy Perkins’s introduction, the fear washing across Alfred’s face in the woods when he faces death at the hands of the strange homeless man — feel urgent because they are weighted with the existential concerns of its black audience, who are trying to define themselves in a world in which reality is shifting into further surreality. What it means to be black in America is given an answer: It’s to be in constant flux, to bend toward joy, or at least the peace of making decisions to redefine oneself or one’s sense of authenticity, even as suffering and violence have the potential to bloom on every corner.

If you’re wondering where the “queer” is in cinema these days, you’re better off looking to the past. Writing in The Village Voice in 1992, the film critic B. Ruby Rich named the wild, provocative, sexy slate of films by queer filmmakers New Queer Cinema. The label stuck, and would eventually get expanded by film historians and queer theorists to describe a movement that was stylistically experimental, rich, and above all, defiant. Historically, New Queer Cinema was inextricably tied to the AIDS crisis and the activism and community that formed out of it; it’s filmmaking made by and for people who were on the margins. But to say that these films are serious and somber would be a complete misunderstanding: They’re often funny, sharp, and incredibly alive.

It’s difficult to access some of these films now. Many of them are available on Kanopy, which you can stream for free (!) with a library card, or other subscription-based niche streaming sites like Fandor and FilmStruck. Some you can buy via iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play. (You can also do the tried-and-true method of “Googling it” and find some other streams.) This following list of NQC films is by no means comprehensive, but think of it as a starter guide into a wider world of queer cinema.

Born in Flames (1983), Lizzie Borden
Stream on Kanopy, Fandor

Before the queer cinema boom, there was Born in Flames by Lizzie Borden, a radical, independent film that imagined a revolution within a revolution when there’s a feminist uprising a decade after the Social Democratic War of Liberation. The catalyst for the plot begins when a black feminist leader dies in police custody, galvanizing various feminist factions. Made on a budget of $70,000, the movie is a bit like bricolage, with a number of contemporary resonances, from radio agitprop to shades of Afrofuturism. (Fun fact: Kathryn Bigelow is in it!)

Mala Noche (1986), Gus Van Sant
Stream on Kanopy, FilmStruck

Gus Van Sant would later make big feature films like Milk, about the life and assassination of Harvey Milk, but his first feature, Mala Noche, was an exploration of desire through the eyes of a young white store clerk named Walt and his obsession with a young undocumented immigrant named Johnny. The film, shot in black and white on 16mm film, contains many of the early Van Sant fixations that viewers would later see get refined in My Own Private Idaho, including male hustlers, illegality, and class.

Chinese Characters (1986), Richard Fung
Richard Fung would go on to make a number of videos about gay desire and AIDS, including the lovely Sea in the Blood (2000) and a fascinating PSA for safe sex through the Gay Men’s Health Crisis called Steam Clean (1990), but this early film asks still-pressing questions about the nature of gay desire when it’s mediated via pornographic images of white men. The video defies genre, mixing documentary with performance art and archival footage to explore the tensions of being a gay Asian man looking at porn.

Looking for Langston (1989), Isaac Julien
Isaac Julien would make a more commercial film during the peak of NQC called Young Soul Rebels (1991), but this short film, a tribute to the life and work of Langston Hughes, is a beautiful and vibrant elegy. Julien creates a lineage of queer black ancestors for himself, starting with Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance through to James Baldwin and Essex Hemphill, Hilton Als, and his contemporaries. The film moves like the poetry it recites, playing with the gaze and how various eyes look upon the black male body.

Tongues Untied (1989), Marlon Riggs
Stream on Kanopy

The heart of Marlon Riggs’s essayistic film is the question of whether desire is a political act. Guided by the writer Joseph Beam’s statement, “Black men loving black men is the revolutionary act,” Riggs goes through his own complicated journey of homophobia from other black people, and then racism in the gay community, to find a community of queer black people. There are playful interludes interspersed throughout the film, including a dating hotline where he searches for a BGA (Black Gay Activist).

Poison (1991), Todd Haynes
Stream on Fandor

Poison, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, is one of the marquee films that Rich pinpointed as a watershed of New Queer Cinema. Each of the film’s three parts tell a story about ostracism, violence, and marginality: the bullied child who allegedly flies away after shooting his father in order to save his mother (“Hero”), a brilliant scientist who accidentally ingests his own serum to become the “leper sex killer” (“Horror”), and a sexual relationship between two men in a prison (“Homo”). While Haynes would go on to make prestige pictures like Far From Heaven and Carol, this is his work at its most explicitly political and experimental.

Paris Is Burning (1991), Jennie Livingston
Stream on Netflix

While Paris Is Burning has raised questions around narrative ownership (whether Jennie Livingston, a former Yale student, should be making a documentary about a group she isn’t a part of), it’s undoubtedly one of the most important (by virtue of being one of the few) historical documents of the New York City ball scene, and it’s impossible not to become transfixed by the strength, elegance, and tragedy of the world where queer communities build kinship around art and identity. Dorian Corey, Venus Xtravaganza, Willi Ninja, and everyone else will always be remembered as legendary children.

The Living End (1992), Gregg Araki
Stream on Kanopy, Sundance Now

What a romp! Araki made this nihilistic road-trip movie on a shoestring budget of $20,000. The Living End follows Luke, a sexy homicidal drifter who (like Araki) has a distaste for T-shirts, and Jon, an uptight film critic in Los Angeles. Both are HIV-positive, and as their relationship unfolds, they tussle over Jon’s instinct to be a respectable gay, and Luke’s admittedly more alluring impulse to fuck the police and ride off to nowhere.

Swoon (1992), Tom Kalin
Shot beautifully like a black-and-white Calvin Klein ad, Tom Kalin fictionalizes the Leopold and Loeb murder case: The wealthy Chicago lovers kill a 14-year-old boy named Bobby Franks because they want to see if they are smart enough to do it. Unlike Alfred Hitchcock’s retelling of the murder in Rope, Kalin’s version is more interested in their relationship as lovers — he even has the two wed each other in an abandoned house before committing the crime. The murder is more a play of power between them, with Loeb weaponizing sex as a way to control Leopold.

Edward II (1992), Derek Jarman
There’s a scene in Edward II where the king and his doomed lover, Piers Gaveston, dance together in pajamas as Annie Lennox sings “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.” That pretty much encapsulates the deliberately anachronistic sensibility of this Christopher Marlowe adaptation filmed in dark, lush colors. It builds a bridge of historical queerness to the then-present-day fight against the AIDS epidemic and an indifferent government. Oh, and there’s Tilda Swinton in pearls.

Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992), Mark Rappaport
Stream on YouTube (free), Amazon Prime

If Laura Mulvey taught us what the male gaze was, New Queer Cinema was about showing viewers what the queer gaze was. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies is a documentary made up of glances and innuendos from Rock Hudson’s oeuvre, showing us how this dashing, leading man of the Hollywood Golden Age was a closeted gay man.

Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993), Gregg Bordowitz
Gregg Bordowitz, a member of ACT UP, the radical AIDS advocacy organization, made this film, which, like many of the other NQC films, mixes genres: there are satirical news elements (Andrea Fraser plays a character named Charity Hope-Tolerance) with archival footage from protests, appropriated footage of Evel Knievel stunts, video diaries, and a fascinating conversation with his parents about why he decided to come out as gay, even though he has been in relationships with both men and women.

Zero Patience (1993), John Greyson
Stream on YouTube

This musical by John Greyson tells a reimagined history of Gaëtan Dugas, the real-life Canadian flight attendant who had been dubbed “patient zero” of the AIDS epidemic by the media and scientists. Zero Patience allows Dugas to clear his name while also resurrecting the ghost of Sir Richard Burton, who is on a quest to demonize him. And the movie has an excellent John Waters tribute, with singing anuses.

The Watermelon Woman (1996), Cheryl Dunye
Stream on Kanopy

The Watermelon Woman coalesced much of the video work Cheryl Dunye had been making earlier in the decade in the form of what she would call “Dunyementary,” a self-reflexive style of documentary. The Watermelon Woman would continue to play with reality and fiction, with the protagonist, Cheryl (played by Dunye), tracking down the history of an early film star known as the Watermelon Woman, who she later learns is a lesbian actor by the name of Fae Richards.

MURDER and murder (1996), Yvonne Rainer
Known for her experimental filmmaking and choreography, Yvonne Rainer made a narrative film — one that’s still formally challenging compared to commercial films of its time — of a late-in-life lesbian named Doris who suffers from neuroses and breast cancer. Her partner, Mildred, a queer academic, tells the story of their romance as older women. Rainer also makes appearances throughout the film in a tux, going on rants about smug homophobic parents while showing her bare chest with a mastectomy scar.

When Todd Haynes was working on Safe, the 1995 film starring Julianne Moore as a housewife who becomes increasingly allergic to the world around her, he expressed frustration over the classification of “gay cinema.” It wasn’t that he felt the category was pigeonholing, like some might today, but rather that it should be more exacting. “People define gay cinema solely by content: if there are gay characters in it, it’s a gay film,” he said in an interview in the spring 1993 issue of Film Quarterly. “Heterosexuality to me is a structure as much as it is a content. It is an imposed structure that goes along with the patriarchal, dominant structure that constrains and defines society. If homosexuality is the opposite or the counter-sexual activity to that,” he asked, “then what kind of a structure would it be?”

The critique would apply to any number of films from the past decade that are nominally LGBT in content, but not queer in structure. We’ve entered a boom time for LGBT film, and the movies released in the past decade boast a mainstream appeal, with straight actors now more than ever willing to play an LGBT character. There have been Oscar-validated prestige pictures (Milk, The Kids Are All Right, The Dallas Buyers Club, Call Me by Your Name), and corresponding flops (Stonewall, Freeheld), indie films (Princess Cyd, Tangerine), and commercial middlebrow ones (Love, Simon). While these films vary in intent, provenance, and quality, they encapsulate a similar catholic spirit: rather than assert difference, they point out similarities. They apply salve instead of salt. They’re safe, often boring, and sentimental, following familiar emotional arcs to tell a “universal story.” In short, we’re in a movie moment defined by the political sensibility of the gay-marriage movement.

Depending on your viewpoint, the legalization of gay marriage is either the greatest recent civil-rights victory or a myopic apportionment of rights. It was a beloved cause for progressives, but a philosophically conservative one. The rhetoric — love is love (is love is love) — was generic and effective, suggesting that the only thing that separates gay people from straight ones was semantics. “More and more Americans [have] come to understand what this is all about is a simple proposition: Who do you love?” then–Vice-President Joe Biden said a few years before the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide in 2013, ten years after it become the prevailing LGBT issue. “I think Will and Grace did more to educate the American public more than almost anything anybody has done so far. People fear that which is different. Now they’re beginning to understand.”

The political language around sameness — that “they” are just like “us” — moved out of the ballot box and into film. Part of this is a rhetorical strategy to sell movies to a heterosexual public. Luca Guadagnino has called Call Me by Your Name a “family film”; Rachel Weisz called Disobedience, her recent passion project about a lesbian relationship in an Orthodox Jewish community in London, a “universal story.” Alia Shawkat, the star and writer of Duck Butter, a movie about a 24-hour relationship between two women, emphasized the importance of normalization. “Eventually I want to get to the point where we’re watching movies and the story’s not about the fact that they’re gay, or about the fact that they’re black, or about the fact that they’re trans — they just are. And we’re just watching that person’s life,” she told Vulture. “That’s how it becomes more normalized.”

Beyond discourse, the question of what makes a film queer has become subsumed by aesthetics and narratives that display a straight gaze. The most egregious example is one of the most recent: Love, Simon, a gay bildungsroman whose political and moral center is that its protagonist Simon is Not That Kind of Gay. Simon is a blandly handsome high-school teenager (Nick Robinson) who spends much of the film assuring the (hetero) audience that he’s just like them. “For the most part, my life is totally normal,” he says in the expository voice-over. He lives in a big two-story house; his parents are played by L.L.Bean catalogue models Jennifer Garner and Josh Duhamel; he gets a car with a big red ribbon on it for his birthday like a holiday car commercial. “I’m just like you except I have one huge-ass secret,” he says. “Nobody knows I’m gay.”

So what kind of gay is he not? Well, he’s certainly not like the only out gay student at his school named Ethan, a black femme student (Clark Moore) who delivers many of the movie’s only jokes. In a scene where a couple of jocks are bullying Ethan, Simon remarks, “I wish Ethan wouldn’t make it so easy for them.” When Ethan and Simon finally talk in the end, rather than have Ethan push back against just how good Simon has it, the film whiffs and has Ethan act as a sympathetic shoulder to lean on. Ethan remains a patsy, offering reassurance rather than resistance to the implicit assumption that Simon is “relatable” precisely because he’s white, masculine, and upper-middle class. The gravest injustice in Love, Simon is that a gay white boy couldn’t have grown up like a straight white boy.

It’s easy to castigate Love, Simon, but it’s the middlebrow iteration of a widespread sensibility that trades in sentimentality as a way to render LGBT people sympathetic. Prestige pictures go a step further, populating their stories with dying, saintlike queers who cut themselves open and offer up their tragedy for our moral edification, whether it’s Julianne Moore as the terminally ill Laurel Hester in Freeheld or David France’s uncomfortable fixation on Marsha P. Johnson’s death in the documentary The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson. (It’s no accident that “death” comes before “life” in the title.) The Oscar-winning Dallas Buyers Club chose to tell the story of the AIDS crisis through a homophobic straight white man Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), who realizes the error of his ways after he becomes HIV-positive. It isn’t until the end, after Rayon (Jared Leto), a drug-addicted trans woman, bequeaths him with largesse before she dies, that he too understands “community.” Her death sanctifies him and, in turn, the viewer who might harbor similar biases.

These are meek films that ask for both forgiveness and permission to exist. Think of the softness of Call Me by Your Name — a beautiful but anemic film that lacks the straight-into-your-veins immediacy of the original novel by André Aciman. When it comes to sex between the two protagonists, the teenage Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and grad student Oliver (Armie Hammer), Call Me by Your Name is practically demure. In the moment when Oliver and Elio have sex for the first time, the camera pans to look outside the window. When the pair arrive in Rome on a couple’s getaway, they get to the hotel room and start roughhousing as though they haven’t been having sex in secret for the past three weeks. The film stopped short, as though fearful of what might be considered prurient or in bad taste.

It’s no surprise, then, that we’ve seen a slew of biopics in recent years: movies that eschew the darkly sexual, depraved, or fraught aspects of biography in favor of empowerment. Gay films have become more concerned with the process of canonization, and the biopic is a favorite vehicle through which to legitimize historical figures, as Gus Van Sant’s Milk did with San Francisco politician Harvey Milk or The Imitation Game did with British WWII code-cracker Alan Turing. The 2017 Billie Jean King biopic Battle of the Sexes sanitized the complicated and disturbing aspects of King’s relationship with Marilyn Barnett to turn her into an equal-rights hero. Then there’s Roland Emmerich’s 2015 film Stonewall, which went so far as to whitewash history by creating a fictional protagonist — a young, white male character named Danny (Jeremy Irvine) — who moves to New York from the Midwest to throw the first brick during the Stonewall riots of 1969. He’s the surrogate through which we meet the real-life, historical figures of color, including Marsha P. Johnson (Otoja Abit) and Sylvia Rivera, who becomes a “composite” character named Ray (Jonny Beauchamp).

If LGBT films today are framed by gay marriage, then the queer films of Haynes’s day, in the late ’80s and early ’90s, were defined by the AIDS crisis. The worlds of activism, art, experimental film, and cheap New York City rent collided to create a fertile time the film critic B. Ruby Rich named New Queer Cinema. New Queer Cinema had punch and swagger; it was acerbic, witty, subversive, and campy, spanning a vast range of aesthetics, genres, and histories, led by a group of filmmakers and artists that eventually included Haynes, Van Sant, Jennie Livingston, Isaac Julien, Sadie Benning, Marlon Riggs, Cheryl Dunye, and many others. Most importantly, they didn’t care about approval or acceptance. Film scholar Michele Aaron wrote that the defining feature of New Queer Cinema was an attitude of “defiance” — whether it was the HIV-positive cop-killers on the run in Gregg Araki’s The Living End or the homicidal couple that consecrates their self-sanctioned marriage by murdering a child in Tom Kalin’s Swoon, these were filmmakers who found liberation by embracing the margins. They were bold, sexy, dangerous, and depraved — radical in both content and form. Instead of running away from the accusation that queers were deviants, degenerates, and criminals, NQC films embraced it. When the Gay Liberation Front called out “Perverts of the world unite!” it was NQC that heard that call.

In fact, much of what made New Queer Cinema so transgressive is how it reimagined history in joyous, sometimes twisted ways. There are singing anuses in John Greyson’s musical Zero Patience, a historical corrective about Gaëtan Dugas, the Canadian flight attendant who had been vilified by the media and scientific community as “patient zero” of the AIDS crisis. Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman created a fictional queer black actress named Fae Richards as a way to reimagine classic Hollywood. Derek Jarman’s exquisite Edward II, an adaptation of the Christopher Marlowe history play, makes King Edward II and Piers Gaveston’s relationship the central narrative. And Isaac Julien’s Looking for Langston (1989), a nonnarrative film about Langston Hughes, mixes archival footage with fiction to build a genealogy of queer black men beginning with the Harlem Renaissance, moving to James Baldwin and then the present. All of these films search in-between the lines of the historical record, for the people that history forgot. Even today, they ask: Who keeps the historical record?

It’s dismaying, then, to see that subversion erode over time. Perhaps portending its ultimate demise, Haynes’s Poison won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1991, while Jennie Livingston’s documentary about the Harlem ball scene, Paris Is Burning, won the documentary prize. Hollywood seized upon the burgeoning market for LGBT cinema (think Philadelphia and In & Out), and by 1999, New York Times described the films at the New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival as “giddy gay lite.” What was once queer and fringe had been gentrified into something more easily categorizable, consumable, and thus marketable.

This isn’t to say that a queer sensibility — something subversive, punk, and anti-authoritarian — has vanished. Queerness, by nature, is hard to define, and equally hard to stamp out. There have certainly been queer films in the intervening years, including But I’m a Cheerleader and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. More recently, you can see it in BPM, Robin Campillo’s expansive film about ACT UP in the early ’90s in Paris, where love for community, and a symphony of voices arguing, protesting, and fucking fill the film; it’s in the liminality of Moonlight, where what often resonates are the things left unsaid; it’s in the wildness of The Ornithologist, the brashness of Xavier Dolan films, the claustrophobia of the aforementioned Duck Butter, and the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Cui Zi’en. You may notice that many of these weren’t made within the Hollywood machinery. And if this year’s Cannes Film Festival lineup is any indication, queer foreign films will continue to lead the charge, with the Kenyan coming-of-age story Rafiki, the Argentinian murder-twink film The Angel, and a slew of French films including Gaspar Noé’s dance-horror movie Climax, Sauvage, Knife + Heart, and Sorry Angel. Meanwhile, in America, coming up we have The Miseducation of Cameron Post (think a humorless But I’m a Cheerleader); Ideal Home, a comedy where Paul Rudd and Steve Coogan play a wealthy couple suddenly raising a kid; the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody starring Rami Malek that has already been accused of “hetwashing”; and a Love, Simon look-alike, Alex Strangelove.

Hollywood liberalism and the marketplace have converged to create an environment where being “the first” is confused with innovation, when actually, it’s just evidence that gay people can be commercially viable, too. While the AIDS crisis produced a rupture that galvanized art and activism, today we’re in a paradigm where a cadre of gay men and women are a part of the Establishment, and there is a greater compulsion to work within channels of power rather than outside of them. The era of gay marriage has created a profound complacency and misunderstanding that the biggest fight has been won; in fact, it’s only further obscured real and present dangers. In the U.S., there is still no robust, federal anti-discrimination law; there’s an alarming HIV epidemic among queer black people, homelessness, and ongoing violence against trans people. There is a pervasive sense that if you are not white and powerful, you will be left to die. We need to recover a cinematic language that captures the exigencies of queer American life, its skin and smoke, thickness and fragility. We need a queer cinema that thinks beyond the limits of commercial tribalism, beauty, and wealth, and toward new, imagined futures. We need a queer cinema that fights back.

We’ve been so excited for the Queen biopic to hit theaters, and after significant cast changes and a few teaser images, we finally get our first look at the film with the new trailer.

Queen and the band’s frontman Freddie Mercury are unquestionable rock legends. Their music is instantly recognizable, and they defied stereotype and convention at every turn. The band is legendary, and a biopic on Mercury and Queen has been long overdue.

Happily, the first trailer for that biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, is here and backed by some of Queen’s most iconic songs as it highlights what trailblazers Freddie Mercury and the rest of Queen were. The trailer highlights how unique their music was, specifically the song “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and shows us what Mercury went through to get his musical vision out to the world just as he envisioned it. Basically, this is a must-watch for any fans of Mercury, Queen, or even just good music.

If you’ve been following the creation of this movie, it’s been quite a long road to get this movie made. Originally, the role of Freddie Mercury was to be played by Sacha Baron Cohen, a casting announcement that came way back in 2010. While Baron Cohen ultimately dropped out in 20133 due to creative differences with Mercury’s bandmates, Mr. Robot star Rami Malek ultimately stepped in to play the legendary rock star.

And from the looks of the trailer, Malek seems to do a great job embodying Mercury. Not only does the film do a great job making Malek look like Mercury, but he also seems to embody that effortless coolness that made Mercury so iconic.

The film will tell the story of Queen’s meteoric rise into rock legend, the ways Mercury’s personal problems nearly destroyed the band, and their triumphant return and now-legendary performance on the eve of Live Aid.

This film has been in the works for a long time, and luckily, you don’t have to wait much longer to see it for yourself. Bohemian Rhapsody opens in theaters on November 2, and we just can’t wait.

The post The first trailer for Queen biopic ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ will rock you appeared first on Hypable.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine—the Andy Samberg television show about cops that you thought everyone was watching because it was, in fact, funny but somehow you’d only seen, like, two episodes—has been cancelled. Happy, you monster?

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Timothy Olyphant negotiating a lead role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Deadline reports that Primetime Emmy nominee Timothy Olyphant (Santa Clarita Diet, Justified, Snowden) is in negotiations to co-star in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, written and directed by Oscar winner Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction).

Olyphant will be joining Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, and the recently-announced Burt Reynolds, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth, and Michael Madsen. Olyphant’s schedule had to be reworked around his Netflix original series, Santa Clarita Diet, which was recently renewed for a third season.

Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood focuses on a male TV actor named Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) who’s had one hit western series and is looking for a way to get into the film business. His sidekick Cliff Booth (Pitt) — who’s also his stunt double — is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate (Rick’s neighbor in the film) and four of her friends by Charles Manson’s cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story. The movie is said to be similar to a “Pulp Fiction-like tapestry” that covers a group of characters during that summer.

Production is currently being prepped in Los Angeles for Sony Pictures and the film is slated for release on August 9, 2019.

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

The post Timothy Olyphant Negotiating a Lead Role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood appeared first on ComingSoon.net.

Starz has given Outlander an early renewal for another two seasons while also announcing the premiere date for season 4!

Though Outlander season 4 won’t premiere until November 2018, Starz went ahead and green-lit season 5 and season 6 early. No details on when these seasons will premiere has been released yet, but one could assume it will be at least another year.

Starz President and CEO Chris Albrecht said, “Fans can rest assured their beloved Claire and Jamie will be back facing new challenges, adversaries and adventures in seasons five and six as we delve into American history and continue the story of the Frasers as they settle in the New World.”

Outlander season 4 is still in production in Scotland and is scheduled to air 13 episodes based on the novel Drums of Autumn, the fourth book in Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series.

Season 5 and 6 will be shorter, with only 12 episodes each, and will be based on book 5 The Fiery Cross and book 6 A Breath of Snow and Ashes.

The series will continue to be executive produced by Ronald D. Moore, Maril Davis, Toni Graphia, Matthew B. Roberts, and Andy Harries. Starz and Sony will also continue their partnership on the hit series.

The third season of Outlander averaged 5.8 million multiplatform viewers per episode, while averaging 5.1 million multiplatform viewers for all three seasons.

It was also the second-most viewed premium scripted series among women in 2017, beat out for first place by Game of Thrones. It’s also only one of six current premium scripted series to increase its premiere ratings in season 3 from season 1.

Starz also released three new first look images from season 4:

Now fans just have to wait not so patiently for Outlander season 4 to premiere for more of Jamie and Claire’s epic romance!

The post Starz announces ‘Outlander’ season 4 premiere, renews for seasons 5 and 6 appeared first on Hypable.

Odessa College announces a search for an accomplished, dynamic, and innovative librarian for the position of Digital Services Librarian and Events Coordinator. OC seeks an individual who is strongly committed to advancing the academic mission of a student-centered library and … Continue reading →

Following a stellar performance as both host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live, Donald Glover capped off the weekend by dropping a surprise Childish Gambino track that pretty much guaranteed he’d be dominating the trending topics on Twitter. The Hiro Murai-directed video for “This Is America” is a…

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In February of this year, Jeffrey Tambor was officially fired from his Amazon series Transparent for allegations of sexual harassment on set. But Tambor is still welcome at Netflix, where he’ll reportedly appear in the next season of Arrested Development.

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John Lithgow joins Pet Sematary remake as Jud Crandall

Entertainment Weekly reports that Oscar nominee and Golden Globe winner John Lithgow (The Crown, Trial & Error) has joined the remake of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary as Jud Crandall. The role was previously played by the late Fred Gwynne in the 1989 adaptation of the book.

Jud is the older, country neighbor who befriends Louis Creed (played by the previously-announced Jason Clarke) and has lived in the area long enough to know its many secrets. He takes the young Creed family on a tour of the nearby woods that leads to a peculiar pet burial ground, aka, the “pet sematary.” After the family pet is killed by a speeding truck, Jud takes them to an even stranger place deep in the wilderness which leads to greater horrors as tragedy strikes the Creed family.

Paramount Pictures‘ adaptation will be directed by Dennis Widmyer and Kevin Kolsch (Starry Eyes) and is written by Jeff Buhler, the showrunner for Syfy’s upcoming horror science fiction series, Nightflyers, based on the George R.R. Martin novella. Lorenzo di Bonaventura (1408, Transformers) is producing along with Mark Vahradian and Steven Schneider (Insidious).

The film is an updated version of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. The following is how the 1983 book is described: The road in front of Dr. Louis Creed’s rural Maine home frequently claims the lives of neighborhood pets. Louis has recently moved from Chicago to Ludlow with his wife Rachel, their children and pet cat. Near their house, local children have created a cemetery for the dogs and cats killed by the steady stream of transports on the busy highway. Deeper in the woods lies another graveyard, an ancient Indian burial ground whose sinister properties Louis discovers when the family cat is killed.

Pet Sematary is scheduled to begin shooting this summer and slated for release on April 19, 2019.

(Photo Credit: Getty Images)

The post John Lithgow Joins Pet Sematary Remake as Jud Crandall appeared first on ComingSoon.net.

In You Should Be Watching, the staff of The A.V. Club advocates on behalf of the hundreds of TV shows you’re not watching but should.

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Ron Howard’s Solo: A Star Wars Story will be in theaters this month, which means Disney and Lucasfilm have Howard on the hook to do a whole bunch of promotional work for the film. Thankfully, that’s good news for fans of both Star Wars and Howard’s most iconic TV role (aside from his other two TV roles that are more…

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The Bluth’s are back in town! Mitch Hurwitz dropped a major announcement via Twitter detailing what’s next for the Arrested Development family on Netflix. The promise of season five is closer than we think, according to Hurwitz, but no date has been announced. This comes after a five-year hiatus from the fourth season of Arrested Development premiering on Netflix after its cancellation from Fox.

Not only are we getting a fifth season, we are being gifted a season four remix on the Bluth family holiday known as, “Cinco de Quatro.” This remix was put together by Hurwitz himself, who has been behind Arrested Development since its conception back in 2003. Many fans of the show had been dissatisfied with how the fourth season was structured – focusing on one Bluth family member each episode before bringing them all together in the season finale. In an interview with Huffington Post, Jason Bateman said, “If I’m driving down the street in my episode and Gob’s going down the sidewalk on his Segway, you could stop my episode, go into his episode, and follow him and see where he’s going.” This was due to the difficulties of the filming schedules with all of the actors.

The remix of season four could give us our season five release date on Netflix since it falls in line with Hurwitz’s statement of the announcement being real soon. This announcement also comes after Jeffrey Tambor’s termination from Amazon Studios amidst sexual assault allegations. While Tambor has vehemently denied these claims, the cast of Arrested Development has stood by him. David Cross stated to Entertainment Weekly that, “I can’t speak for everybody, but I know there are a number of us who stand behind him. From the limited amount we know, we stand behind Jeffrey — and I am one of them.”

It will be interesting to see how Netflix handles Jeffrey being put back in the spotlight – regardless of whether or not his scenes in season five were filmed before he was called out. Either way, be looking for Hurwitz’s season four remix of Arrested Development this Friday on “Cinco de Quatro” and a potential season five announcement date following soon after.

What do you hope to see from Arrested Development’s new season? How do you feel about Tambor’s potential return with the season? Let us know in the comments below.

Images: Fox/Netflix

More of the latest in nerdery!

• HBO’s Westworld renewed for season 3!
• Martin Scorsese on the importance of cinema in an age of content!
• James Gunn reveals the Guardians’ new ship was named after Pat Benetar!

In an interview with TV Line prior to the release of the Outlander season three DVD/Blu-ray, David Berry discusses his role as Lord John Grey during season three and the upcoming season four.  There are spoilers in this interview about season four, so I would skip this post for now if you are a non-reader. Excerpts are below, but please head over to TV Line to read the entire interview.

TVLINE | I read an interview where you said you’ve read a lot of Diana Gabaldon’s Lord John novels and novellas. Have they given you any insights into the character that helped you portray him in Season 3? 
Yeah. When I first stepped into the role, I hadn’t read anything, and then I went ahead and read as much as I could. And I don’t know, what did I really glean from it? You know so much is already there on the page. A lot of it is lifted from the books. When you read around it you get a better sense of the stuff that isn’t written there. One thing I guess: It informed my performance in the Governor’s ball sequences. [An extended] interaction between John and Claire that didn’t make it into the episode, that I still wanted to play a sense of that relationship or infuse it with a bit of that. That tonality that there’s tension between John and Claire, it isn’t really explicitly mentioned in the scripts per se, but it’s sort of in the unspoken dialogue between the three characters, John, Jamie, and Claire, and that history in the book helped with that performance.

TVLINE | I loved the scene toward the end of the season where, in one fell swoop, John nullifies Jamie’s arrest, dresses down the naval officer and forwards the plot. It also gave us a chance to see him a little bit more commanding than we had seen him previously. I know you can’t speak very freely about Season 4, but are there opportunities coming up where we’ll see that side of him again?
Well, that was an interesting scene, because I actually only had really a night to learn it, and I was thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m never going to be able remember all these lines,’ which is frequently the case in Outlander. [Laughs] So I learnt it overnight and just gave it my best shot and I was pleased to see it came up so well. That was probably a nightmare for the editor to put together. I don’t think I ever did a full take where I said all the lines out. But what was great about it is that it just gave a sense that John is his own person and has his own agency and does command a little power. He’s not just a guy who is longing for unrequited love. In his own right he could probably have the pick of the bunch if he wanted, being the powerful guy he is.

It’s through his heart that he chooses to protect Jamie and to be that guy and to use his power, never abuse it — not like that at all — to help others, and that’s a bit of his conflict as well. I think that Capt. Leonard really had it coming. I think the audience really wanted to see that character get beaten down, but everything kind of lined up on my side to make it work, except for learning the lines. [Laughs]

TVLINE | In Book 4, Drums of Autumn, John comes to America. Again, I’m not going to ask you to talk about stuff you can’t speak about, but it has always struck me that John and Jamie these men live in a time when it is not easy to have a friendship that spans years and continents, and yet they manage to continue that bond and have it grow closer as the years pass. What do you think it is about them that allows for this to happen? 
Well, they have a shared history. I think when a good friendship has some kind of shared trauma or shared experience that really binds two people closely together, and in this case being Ardsmuir. And then of course, Helwater, where Jamie entrusts John with his son, William, and that, of course, is one of the most compelling reasons to stay in touch with any friends… They also have a simpatico of a shared intellect and honor and just the way that they believe that in the moral forces of this world, whatever they are, however hard they are to see in this very brutal, 18th-century world. I think they share those things.

Source: TV Line

The City of Santa Clarita is recruiting to fill thirteen (13) LIBRARIAN positions. This recruitment is part of our transition of the Santa Clarita Public Library from outsourced operation to public management by city employees. Located in Southern California, Santa … Continue reading →

The City of Santa Clarita is recruiting to fill ten (10) LIBRARY ASSISTANT positions. This recruitment is part of our transition of the Santa Clarita Public Library from outsourced operation to public management by city employees. Located in Southern California, … Continue reading →

The Avengers will soon do battle with Thanos, but we’re still getting lots of new reports and footage from Infinity War. So on today’s Nerdist News Talks Back we broke down what it could all mean when the Mad Titan invades Earth, along with the DCEU choosing another female director, and Steven Spielberg‘s record-setting milestone.

Guest host Amy Vorpahl was joined today by Nerdist News writer Aliza Pearl, editor Kyle Anderson, and producer Ben McShane. With a little over a week to go before Avengers: Infinity War hits theaters they began with the latest on Marvel’s epic showdown with Thanos, including a new commercial for the film where Spider-Man and Iron Man go toe-to-toe with the big purple baddie. Does this new teaser have us more worried about who might die in the movie? Why is Ben convinced the Silver Surfer is still going to appear despite the Russo Brothers saying he won’t? And what exactly could the Arrested Development reference they teased for the film be?

Speaking of huge superhero franchises, Cathy Yan has been tapped by Warner Bros. to direct their Christina Hodson-penned Harley Quinn/Birds of Prey spin-off. This makes her the third female director for the DCEU, so how bad does Disney look for not having a single woman direct either a Star Wars or MCU movie yet? As for the actual movie, do we hope they adapt a story from the comics or create an entirely new one? And between this, Gotham Sirens, Suicide Squad 2, and that Joker vs. Harley Quinn movie, is this character overkill? Or are they just giving fans what they want?

Finally, according to The Wrap Steven Spielberg has become the first director to cross the ten billion dollar mark worldwide for his career. Peter Jackson is in second place at $6.5 billion, so do we ever see someone topping Spielberg for the top spot? Is there any other director who can match his genre-spanning resume? And do we prefer his fun fare or his serious works more?

As always Nerdist News Talks Back airs live on our YouTube and Alpha channels Monday through Thursday at 1 p.m. PT. Then we end the week with Nerdist News What the Fridays, our new hour long recap of the biggest trending pop culture stories, at 1 p.m. PT only at Alpha. It’s the place to be to discuss what we can expect from Infinity War, and it will be the place to be to discuss what we saw in it after next week.

But what about today’s show? We want to hear your thoughts on it in the comments below.

We’ve Got More Talks Back For Ya!

• Will fans end up rooting for Thanos?
• Did Thrones film its final battle?
• And finally, the cast of Lost in Space stopped by!

Images: Marvel, HBO

Know best to American audiences as Judge Harry T. Stone in Night Court, the eponymous Dave Barry in Dave’s World, and the original adult Richie Tozier in the ABC mini-series It, actor Harry Anderson was found dead today at the age of 65. He was discovered in his home in Asheville, North Carolina, and while no official cause of death has been determined, Anderson’s son Dashiell told TMZ it was due to “natural causes.” In addition to acting, Anderson was also passionate about magic, which Night Court fans may remember was a pastime of his character Judge Stone as well. Anderson limited his acting to a handful of guest appearances over the past 20 years, and he leaves behind a wife and two children.

When I was younger, I remember looking at women with (what I thought was) effortlessly beautiful curly hair and being perplexed at the fact that mine didn’t just naturally wake up looking like that. Little did I know, maintaining curly hair actually takes a lot of effort!

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Listen up, fives: A 10 is speculating. Jane Krakowski, who starred as the vain, demanding Jenna Maroney on NBC’s Emmy-winning cult sitcom 30 Rock—and continues to play a variation on that same theme on creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s new show, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt—says a 30 Rock revival is possible. Not…

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There are many reasons Arrested Development continued to stick around in the cultural zeitgeist after its unceremonious cancellation, but one of them has got to be the fact that people wouldn’t stop quoting every damn line all the damn time. It’s a testament to Mitch Hurwitz’s writing team that nearly every second of…

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Supernatural’s hotly anticipated Scooby Doo episode airs this week. We’ve seen it already, so in true crossover form, two writers with very different priorities teamed up to review ‘ScoobyNatural’ from their respective corners.

In thirteen long years of a world where – somehow – absolutely anything is possible, you’d think Supernatural has done pretty much everything there is to do. Creeping up on 300 episodes, you’d think they’d have pulled every trick in the book. Time travel? Many times. Alternate universes? You betcha. Back from the dead? Puh-lease.

De-aging, old-aging, body swaps, possession, fourth-wall breaking, surprise siblings, Groundhog Day, parody versions of their actual real-life selves… But they’ve never done a musical episode, they’ve never gone to space, and – until now – they’ve actually never crossed over with another show, let alone an animated one.

In ‘ScoobyNatural,’ we see the Winchesters enter the world of Scooby-Doo via a haunted television, an experience that shakes up the worldviews of both Team Free Will and Mystery Inc.

In order to better understand what has been achieved here, we decided to pair our Supernatural features writer, Natalie, who has no attachment to Scooby-Doo, with one of our biggest old-school animation fans, Brittany, who’s not very familiar with Supernatural. Together they share the experience of ‘ScoobyNatural’ from all dimensions. How does it hold up as a legitimate episode of Supernatural? How does it hold up as a legitimate episode of Scooby Doo?

Brittany: Team Mystery Machine

A double-triple-decker sardine and marshmallow fudge sandwich. In reality, that is a disgusting and nearly impossible sandwich to devour in one bite. But in “Hassle in the Castle,” a Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? mystery from 1969, it serves as the introduction to one of the members of the gang, Shaggy. Shtick, for sure.

Like the sandwich line, the voices, synthesized sound effects, jibes and expressions unique to Daphne, Fred, Velma, Shaggy and Scooby-Doo are easy to plug and play.

Which begs the question — what would a show like Supernatural, grounded in the darker, gorier, and more permanent consequences of hunting demons in genre television do with a cartoon so keen on disproving the existence of things that go bump in the night? Mock it? Point in awe and wonder?

As a kid, you waited for the familiar beats — a montage here, a Scooby-snack there, and a unmasking where you heard the Sherlockian deductions rattled off. The purity of the Scooby Gang, taking science (mirrors!), logic (wires!), and props (masks!) into every case.

But whether I realized it as a kid or not, they always focused on something deeper: human motivation. Villains preyed on fear, posing as ghosts, goblins, vampires, werewolves and more to get what they wanted, typically driven by revenge or greed.

It would be easy to poke fun at the use of “Jinkies!” or lean into the caricatures Mystery Inc. presents. Luckily, the Supernatural boys balance the right beats of nostalgia with what I’d describe as the shattering of innocence. It sounds heavy, and in a sense it is quite the lift for a series to take on, 13 seasons into the game. And it is certainly something I was not anticipating a live-action series to even attempt.

Something is awry in the world that the Supernatural boys find themselves. How does one protect what was once an escape from the threat of very reality they were fleeing? A reality that happens to have demons, angels, monsters and ghosts. Ones that harm their prey, ones that kill. They must, in a way, end the childhood innocence of Scooby Doo in order to save it.

Many, and I mean many, of my beloved television series are coming back into vogue. They are the series that shaped my sense of humor, provided an escape, and molded the person I am. My parents had a hand in that as well, I guess, but it was the worlds of Will and Grace, Gilmore Girls, Spongebob, and even Roseanne that filled the hours alone in my room. Supernatural, in thirty minutes, captures what I feel the rest of these revivals fail to do over the course of a few episodes — both rip out the heart of a nostalgia series, but make sure it is replaced intact.

For Supernatural the cross-over into an animated cartoon is new territory. But for Scooby-Doo, at least the classic cartoon version, the introduction of real pain, torture, and the unexplainable makes for a more complex hour than I could have ever hoped for. It is a smart, funny, and extremely poignant deconstruction of the classic cartoon.

Supernatural has the advantage of launching these characters into whatever era of Scooby they feel. Opting for the original incarnation left ‘ScoobyNatural’ writers Jeremy Adams and Jim Krieg with a structure that is well-worn and ripe for examination. And Supernatural is, not-so-shockingly, the perfect vehicle to do this. It calls out subtle animation quirks (a brightly colored book lampshades a decades-old cartoon-nerd gripe), and mocks Fred’s can-do attitude (honestly, who can confidently walk into a room wearing an ascot?).

But it never, ever makes the viewer feel shame for accepting those things as the norm. Instead, “ScoobyNatural” lets you in on the jokes by providing Sam and Dean’s contrasting viewpoints (and Castiel’s perfectly played indifference). You’re as ecstatic as Dean when he first sees Scooby, and yet you’re equally as frustrated as Sam when he realizes everyone is willing to stay overnight in a haunted house.

I’ve only ever watched two, late-era episodes of Supernatural. As a Gilmore Girls acolyte, I still cannot get Sam and Dean’s name straight, and I just learned how to pronounce Castiel with this episode. But I’m so glad that these were the characters to tackle this one-of-a-kind television mash-up.

Natalie: Team Impala

Supernatural continues to baffle me with how legitimately they’re able to make the most absurd concepts in the history of television actually land, and ‘ScoobyNatural’ is no exception – anyone who watches the show knows that this isn’t even close to being the most bizarre circumstance the Winchesters have faced in their time on air, and when the news broke, the reaction was excited, sure, but it was also “seems reasonable enough.” That aspect alone is an instant win. How do they keep doing that?

It’s a testament to Supernatural’s legacy — to the writing, acting and the thoroughness of the character work — that this turn of events is something we can actually find precedent for, suspend our disbelief about, and take seriously. Is it funny? Sure. Is it comedy? Not exactly. Is it a gimmick? Not even close.

One thing we absolutely CAN’T call it is necessary. Despite sitting inside the Supernatural canon, ‘ScoobyNatural’ actually may do Scooby Doo more of a service than it adds to Supernatural itself. In fact, I’d predict that the people who’ll appreciate this episode the least are the Supernatural purists and pedants – unsurprisingly, given that it was written by the Scooby team as a standalone story, it’s really a Winchester paint-by-numbers episode that fumbles the lore and, it could be argued, takes valuable time away from the arc at hand.

Sure, Supernatural didn’t need this episode to exist. Scooby Doo didn’t need this episode to exist. It exists because it was something they wanted. It’s a labor of love, which should be enough to turn any gaze from critical to indulgent. It’s clear that Scooby writers Adams and Krieg – who pitched this idea to Supernatural boss Andrew Dabb in the first place – are fans of the show and the characters, and have as good a grasp on the boys as any normal person who doesn’t spend most of their waking hours studying the show with a singular focus could possibly be expected to have.

The boys themselves fare well, which is what really counts. Sam’s impatience and skepticism translates perfectly – the script serves him well, the animators even got his resting bitch face right, and he has, in my opinion, the greatest comeback of episode – and while Dean has some low points of old-school cartoon humor that won’t click for those who cherish him, his best moments in this episode lean into his softer side, his love of nostalgia and home comforts, and his enthusiastic nerdiness – qualities that you have to know the character pretty well to write as a given.

Castiel’s appearance is cute as hell, and it cleverly connects the insular crossover event with the season-long plot. I feel like it’s worth noting that the plot of ‘ScoobyNatural’ absolutely could have worked as a brothers-only outing and that Cas could have smoothly reentered the show post-Syria-mission the following week.

His presence feels important precisely because of how incidental it is – the implication that, if Supernatural is doing something really special these days, it’s a necessity that Castiel be a part of it. There’s analysis to be done regarding his actions and reactions in this episode, and in his role not as an angel, but as part of the Winchester unit.

But if you want to drag every last ounce of meaning out of ‘ScoobyNatural,’ it’s really Dean’s episode to walk away with. The surface-level read is an extremely accessible success story – anyone with a point of reference for these characters and these worlds can pop it on and enjoy a unique standalone hour of television. As my esteemed colleague mentioned, it’s easy to pinpoint the most meta moments that dismantle Scooby-Doo, the call-outs of its cartoon logic and the truths the characters are forced to face.

Going deeper, there is deconstruction to be done here of Supernatural, too – it’s as much an exploration of Dean’s stolen innocence as it is of the gang’s, and – on top of 13 years of slowly becoming comfortable with his indulgences, scraping together some small belief in his own right to happiness – when you remember how this season started for him, and what’s likely in store, that’s an impossibly poignant thing to reflect upon at this moment in his arc.

Most of all, what we witness in ‘ScoobyNatural’ is a commentary on what it’s like to have your entire reality shaken. The boys are, ultimately, able to preserve the purity of their childhood heroes, and cover up what they know to be real, but as we see the Scoobies have an existential crisis over some seriously unpleasant truths, you can’t help but think back on the childhood of the Winchesters themselves, and the utter cruelty of it.

There was nothing to be done to ever save Sam and Dean’s innocence, and their entire journey of saving people and hunting things really hinges on protecting others from ever having to live with the reality that they themselves experienced.

That’s what this episode is, at its very core, all about, and that’s where the value of it, as a Supernatural obsessor, really lies for me. Much like watching Sam’s childhood fantasy experience in season 11’s “Just My Imagination,” my priority in an episode like this is not my own personal enjoyment, but instead, with a slightly deluded sense of gratitude, the fact that someone like Dean gets to have something like this to hang on to.

Well, that, and the fact that he finally gets to drop the f-bomb again. Zoinks.

‘ScoobyNatural’ airs March 29, 8/7C on the CW

The post Previewing ‘ScoobyNatural’ for the ‘Supernatural’ expert and the animation aficionado appeared first on Hypable.

One Day At A Time has been the largely unsung success story of Netflix’s move into the world of more traditional multi-cam sitcom fare, telling warm, funny, and relateable family stories in the shadow of louder, flashier projects like Fuller House or the recently canceled Disjointed. (Not to mention doing so while…

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We are smack dab in the middle of an era of TV reboots. We’ve recently seen the return of classic shows like Twin Peaks, and very soon, Roseanne will be returning after twenty years away from television screens. Meanwhile, Queer Eye was the TV reboot we all needed but didn’t even know we wanted.

The Golden Girls theme song with the X-Files intro was everything I thought it’d be and more. pic.twitter.com/vYH8x14y06

— Blake Hammond (@BigRadMachine) March 2, 2017

One show that won’t be coming back, however, is one of the most beloved — The Golden Girls. Sadly, three of the four titular girls are no longer with us, and no one wants to watch a show about Betty White’s character Rose sitting alone in the kitchen eating cheesecake by herself. (And I’d like to think that no one would dare try to recast the girls ever, unless it’s a challenge on RuPaul’s Drag Race, then it’s OK.)  But maybe then next best thing, according to Twitter user Blake Hammond, is to mash-up Golden Girls with X-Files. Now THAT is a reboot we are down for.

And yes, we know, we are still in the midst of the X-Files second event series revival, but it is probably its last, as Gillian Anderson is said to be done with the role for good. But maybe if wait just a few more years, when both Anderson officially joins David Duchovny in retirement age, X-Files can come back as a show about Mulder and Scully just sharing a house in Miami, reminiscing about the old days investigating supernatural occurrences. I mean, just watch the X-Files opening credits remixed with the classic Golden Girls theme song and tell me you wouldn’t watch that show.

What two classic shows would you like to see get the mash-up treatment? Be sure to let us know down below in the comments.

Images: Twentieth Century Fox / Disney 

 

Matthew Lillard has been in Hollywood for over 25 years, with roles in Twin Peaks: The Return, The Descendants, and Halt And Catch Fire. But one of his most recognizable roles is Shaggy Rogers from Scooby-Doo, as Lillard has portrayed the live-action version and contributed his voice to the animated franchise. In the…

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Today is National Cereal Day, the single most important day on the calendar. Okay, that might be overstating things, but there’s no overstating how much we love cereal. It’s a quick, perfect meal you can eat at any time of day, there are so many types to choose from, and you’d have to be Homer Simpson to screw up making a bowl.

So to celebrate our favorite breakfast food that we also frequently eat for lunch, dinner, and at three a.m., we’re ranking the top 50 kinds. We’re sticking to the most famous ones–unless we feel like including a type we are fond of. That doesn’t mean this list isn’t definitive though, because we used, like, super serious science/decades of eating it to put it together. So we can’t imagine anyone will have any problems with it.

50. Shredded Wheat

What was the original sales pitch for this? “Here’s some unsweetened wheat to eat, and it’s shredded so it will feel like chewing on hard grass.”

49. Grape Nuts

Nothing like a bowl of grape-flavored pebbles to start your day off on the worst foot. At least it gave us this.

48. Boo Berry

Made of pure blueberry concentrate and too much sugar for any human to safely consume, this is scarier than most horror films.

47. Franken Berry

Like Boo Berry, but with a slightly less disgusting–yet still totally unappetizing–strawberry flavor. (Don’t freak out Monster Cereals fans, one of them made the top 5.)

46. Wheaties

Apparently to be a champion your breakfast has to taste like rough cardboard.

45. Nut & Honey

We would prefer nothing than to this cereal, which is most famous for a series of not-that-clever commercials.

44. Special K

Fancy Wheaties but still blah. At least they don’t the lie about champions eating it.

43. Waffle Crisps

Who was sitting around saying, “You know I like waffles, but what if we made them hard as a rock, then served them in milk where they immediately got soggy?”

42. Rice Krispies Treats Cereal

Lots of cereal variations are better than the original, but this is a case of reverse engineering falling short.

41. Alpha-Bits

Would rank a lot higher if they didn’t become absolutely vile the second you finished all the marshmallows.

40. Honeycomb

Can I interest you in some edible wood flavored with way too much honey? No, I can’t? Obviously.

39. Cookie Crisps

A bowl of cereal that is literally a bunch of cookies dunked in milk should be amazing, but these are basically flat rocks.

38. Corn Flakes

Corn Flakes are totally fine if they are all you have, but they are basically the foundation of a house without any part of the house installed yet. You really need a foundation, but can’t live in it because that’s just a hole.

37. French Toast Crunch

It has its fans who got General Mills to bring it back in the U.S. a few years ago. But there’s a reason it went away in the first place–it’s an inferior version of one of the greatest cereals ever.

36. Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds

Pales in comparison to the line’s best version, and almonds are pretty blah so they don’t help the flavor profile.

35. Rice Chex

Too low? Maybe, but cereal is meant to be eaten with milk, and Rice Chex taste better on their own.

34. Puffins

The best “grown-up” cereal that still tastes good, but the regular kind isn’t great, just decent.

33. Peanut Butter Cap’n Crunch

Peanut butter makes for a great cereal flavor, but this version of the classic cereal is just a little too peanut-buttery, which sounds crazy but this is a cereal that needs a better balance.

32. Honey Smacks

They’re still tasty, but they have a really unusual texture, and it’s strange to eat them if you’re over the age of 12 or sober.

31. Cap’n Crunch Berries

Better than the peanut butter kind, but not as good as the original. The berries are a little too sweet in a cereal that is perfectly sweetened to start.

30. Crispix

Much better than you remember, and they hold up better in milk than Chex. Chex are a better snack, but we’re ranking cereals here.

29. Golden Crisp

Just comes down to texture for why it foes higher than Honey Smacks, but otherwise these are the same cereals.

28. Life

Life is pretty good, much better than actual life. However it isn’t nearly as special as you remember. And you can trust me because my name is Mikey.

27. Cheerios

Cheerios get the job done, so long as the job is to have an average bowl of cereal. Better as a dry snack.

26. Kix

Kix suffers from a very strange problem: once you open the bag you need to eat the entire box in a week or they’ll get so stale you can chip a tooth on them.

25. Reese’s Puffs

You know how sometimes you just say, “Screw it, I don’t care if I can fit in my bathing suit this summer?” Well this is the cereal you buy after you do.

24. Trix

Trix is for kids because they are probably too sweet to justify eating them frequently as an adult, which knocks it down.

23. Corn Pops

Corn Pops tastes good, isn’t cloying, and has a nice, satisfying crunch. Until they get soggy that is, and then they are gross.

22. Special K Red Berries

All it takes to jump over 30 spots is to add some dried sweet strawberries, which totally transforms the entire flavor.

21. Rice Krispies

A classic but a goodie. A nice balance of sweetness without feeling like too much of a kid’s cereal, and they sing to us. No other cereal sings to us.

20. Apple Jacks

They hold perfectly in milk, taste awesome, and produces one of the best post-eating flavored milks to drink.

19. Apple Cinnamon Cheerios

Cheerios make a really good base for a good cereal, which is what this variation is. There’s really no reason to ever buy regular Cheerios when these are on the shelf.

18. Basic 4

The box makes it look healthy, but it is not. What it is though is one of the best cereals out there, with a great mix of different flavors and textures. Not to exaggerate, but if you’ve never tried it you’ve wasted your life.

17. Cap’n Crunch

It might seem sacrilegious to have this out of the top 10, but Cap’n Crunch has a major, major problem: it gets soggy right away. You have to speed eat it or you end up with a bowl of mush.

16. Honey Nut Cheerios

The best Cheerios by far. It’s like they looked at Nut & Honey and said, “What if we used those flavors to make a cereal that isn’t terrible?”

15. Frosted Mini-Wheats

50% of it is awesome, 50% of it tastes like cardboard. GUESS WHICH SIDE IS WHICH.

14. Cocoa Krispies

One of the best variations ever made. Not every cereal works with chocolate, but this is much better than the original. Might rank higher if a better brand didn’t exist.

13. Froot Loops

A great tasting cereal with a nice, crunchy texture that holds up, and the milk that is leftover is awesome.

12. Honey Kix

I’ve been told these can be hard to find, but man they are worth the hunt. They are dramatically better than regular Kix, and for reasons I don’t understand they also don’t go stale as quickly.

11. Raisin Bran

A cereal so good it makes raisins tasty. Raisins. Raisins are basically spoiled wine turned into an edible rock. But Raisin Bran is legit, whether you’re a kid or an adult.

10. Cocoa Puffs

The only real complaint with Cocoa Puffs is you have to give them a chance to slightly soften up in the milk, but once they do this is a fantastic cereal.

9. Peanut Butter Puffins

The best “adult” cereal in the world. None of the other flavors they sell even come close. A perfect balance of peanut butter, so it tastes great without being too sweet.

8. Fruity Pebbles

If Fruity Pebbles, which is almost a perfect cereal eating experience, is ranked eighth, that’s an amazing compliment for the next seven.

7. Golden Grahams

The single most underrated cereal finally gets its due. Delicious, satisfying crunch, and they hold for the entire bowl.

6. Honey Bunches of Oats Honey Roasted

An amazing cereal that isn’t terrible for you to eat. The honey-flavored oat clusters are some of the best bites of food you’ll find in any meal. Also gets better the more you eat it.

5. Count Chocula

This might sound shocking for a cereal that is made with chocolate and marshmallows, but it’s not terribly unhealthy for you. But even if you gained five pounds for every bowl you ate it would be worth it.

4. Lucky Charms

Maybe the favorite of kids everywhere, Lucky Charms is good because even the non-marshmallow bites still taste good.

3. Frosted Flakes

There should be a statue at the United Nations to the man or woman who looked at unsweetened breakfast flakes and said, “Let’s just cover them entirely in sugar.”

2. Cocoa Pebbles

Because they are so small, Cocoa Pebbles can really fill your spoon, giving you a much more complete, satisfying bite than most cereals. It’s also perfectly sweetened, makes it okay to eat chocolate for breakfast, and results in the absolute best leftover milk.

1. Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Long live the cinnamon-flavored King, the most perfect cereal ever devised by men or gods. That’s just science. And you can’t argue with science.

But just in case you do disagree with us/science, how would you rank them? Tell us what we got right or wrong in the comments below.

Featured Image: Kellogg’s, Post Consumer Brands

International Women’s Day is on Thursday, March 8, and Mattel is celebrating the occasion by releasing the Inspiring Women Barbie doll line and revealing the latest role models from their Shero program. Via Huffington Post, the Inspiring Women series means kids and Barbie fans of all ages can bring home dolls based on historical figures. The first three dolls are Amelia Earhart, Katherine Johnson, and Frida Kahlo.

These women all made significant contributions to the world in their respective fields of aviation, mathematics, and the arts. And while these designs are perhaps more suited for collectors, imagine how a young child could be influenced by receiving a doll based on Katherine Johnson and learning about her valuable work with NASA and the role she played in getting Americans into space. The entire series is available for pre-order now and will ship in mid-April.

Can't express how totally mind blowing and delightful it is to have your childhood favorite resemble you!! Thank you @Barbie, for this incredible honor, and for celebrating all kinds of women, everywhere. What a great way to inspire the girls of tomorrow! pic.twitter.com/X5FteJQltn

— Patty Jenkins (@PattyJenks) March 6, 2018

And to continue the rad female role models trend, the Barbie brand has also revealed additions to their Shero program. These dolls are made to honor the recipients with one-of-a-kind collectibles, so they’re not available for purchase. It’s too bad; Patty Jenkins is in the line-up, and I would love to be able to stand her alongside a Wonder Woman Barbie. Some other Shero dolls include history makers such as snowboarding champion Chloe Kim, conservationist Bindi Irwin, and journalist Martyna Wojciechowska.

Which of the Inspiring Women would you like to bring home?

Images: Mattel

Amy Ratcliffe is an Associate Editor for Nerdist. Follow her on Twitter and keep up with her Disney food adventures on Instagram.

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