By Sharai Bohannon

I fell in love with two movies at SXSW this year, and the internet men continue to annoy me whenever I mention either online. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, and They Will Kill You both have deadly women leads. They both have sisters being chased by cults, and that is enough for the internet to forget how subgenres work. This is not my first rodeo, so I know this is more about them having leading ladies than anything else. After all, we have seen the same movies made with men for years. I literally tapped out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe after WandaVision because I could not go back to watching dudes punch each other again. Not after they finally showed they could have substance outside of Black Panther.

We have also watched pairs of brothers since almost the dawn of time, but two movies with sisters in the year of our Lord Zazie Beetz is too hard to process. This uninspired brand of sexism is not new. It is the same internet that yelled women can’t bust ghosts in 2016. It is also reminiscent of the meltdown when Jodie Whittaker was announced as the 13th Doctor. A show with a two-hearted alien that has been around since the 1960s was supposed to somehow never consider that a regeneration would not end with another dude.

This old virgin male energy is now sadly expected whenever women get to have 15 seconds out of a year. Men on social media mean it to be demeaning to the women who worked their asses off. However, it mostly makes us wonder how they do not realize how badly this reflects on them. After all, if you cannot tell Beetz and Samara Weaving apart, you probably have not spoken to a woman in years. Also, interestingly enough, if you cannot notice the drastic tonal differences, aesthetics, and plot differentiations, you might not be the best judge of movies. 

I love Ready Or Not 2: Here I Come, and They Will Kill You, but they have completely different vibes. More importantly, while both have baddies kicking ass in what film bros want to be a male-dominated field, they both lead to different conversations for those of us who actually watch films and can do basic script analysis. I can, and am sure that I will, be writing essays about both of these titles from here until eternity. However, I am most giddy to discuss They Will Kill You being the newest vehicle for Black girl rage. This is one of my favorite topics to write about, and not nearly enough horror media is doing it. 

The angry Black woman trope is something that haunts many Black women. It is thrown at us to keep us from questioning systemic inequality and lay the foundation for a false narrative when we point out injustices. In actuality, when Black women get angry, we get shit done. Anyone familiar with Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and Marsha P. Johnson, to name a few? Learning that the angry Black woman stigma is to make us doubt and second-guess ourselves so we do not ask the important questions is the most freeing thing we can all do as Black women. Which is why I love to see it on screen in a medium where we are usually the Black best friend. Unless we are over the age of 30, in which case we become maternal figures who are still only there to serve the white leads.

The Black girl rage button is one of the huge differences between these two movies I adore. They Will Kill You allows a Black woman to have a whole narrative where she beats asses while looking for her sister. Beetz literally transformed herself to become one of the few Black women to lead an action movie in a minute. Unfortunately, action and action-horror are still heavily male-dominated genres where women usually get fridged. Even though most titles in this category utilize martial arts, it is also an overwhelmingly white genre, which is a rant for a different day. Also serving Black girl rage in the film is Myha’la, who plays Asia’s (Beetz) sister Maria. This makes me happy because she played Jordan in Bodies Bodies Bodies, where she also gave a masterclass in side-eye and insults.

I haven’t gotten the chance to interview Kirill Sokolov and Alex Litvak about the script for They Will Kill You. So, I don’t know if they just wanted Beetz because she has been fantastic in everything she has done so far. Or if they looked at her and wanted to put another badass Black woman on screen to add to the legacy most of us attribute to early Pam Grier movies. Grier was one of the first Black women action stars, and she made a name for herself in 1970s Blaxploitation cinema. Movies like Coffy and Foxy Brown have become part of the cultural lexicon for good reasons. They show that Black women’s action cinema has had an audience since before I was born.

It is hard not to see Grier’s influence on the few times films make space for Black girl rage. Media like Sugar Hill (1974), Vamp, Slasher: Solstice, Love Lies Bleeding, and now They Will Kill You specifically depict Black women fighting and changing lives. Interview with the Vampire (TV show), Sound of Violence, Tragedy Girls, and Eve’s Bayou allow them to simmer in their rage before becoming the problem. Let us not forget Us, where Lupita Nyong’o played two different Black women fueled by rage to change their circumstances. Red specifically used hers to organize the tethered for a hostile takeover. Needless to say, Black girl rage is the true Black girl magic. Abusers fall, the disenfranchised find leaders, and history shifts in the hands of the right Black women character. Not unlike in the real world, when society gets in formation instead of voting against their best interests. I digress.

While incels will incel, the already old joke of pretending Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, and They Will Kill You is the same movie, diminishes the importance of Black girl rage. It is also triggering to those of us whose scripts with Black leads are “too similar to another show,” then finding out the show is Insecure. While it was a great show, it ended in 2021, and more importantly, we should have more than one Black show a decade. This is why it is not hard to believe that Nina Lee was told by a studio executive that her Black-led rom-com’s future depends on how well a completely different Black-led rom-com performs at the box office. Meanwhile, white-led movies fail all year long, and many white-led shows feel copy/pasted from the thousands of shows that came before them.

With everyone saying the quiet part out loud, it is very obvious why we so rarely get the stories we would like to actually see. In a way, it is refreshing to know that white guys who skip over the all-white cast also have an uphill battle. However, it also means the internet and the industry are willing to push for more of the same to their own detriment. None of the incels or execs trying to tank their studios are reading the room. Then boldly wondering why box office numbers are down and why people have [insert universe or trend] fatigue. This lack of curiosity and refusal to understand the way even simply putting POC in leading roles enhances a narrative is frustrating. The loudest people also are the ones who cannot do script analysis or five seconds of Googling to see what they might be missing. They hate art and do not want the rest of us to enjoy it either.

I love Ready or Not 2 and have been too vocal about this world being what I hoped Knives Out would have been. Few people are ever going to give us as much ensemble gold as Radio Silence has in just the last seven years. I am also just very here for the frustrated, “Are you shitting me?!” screams of Samara Weaving. As a woman (whose job includes being on the internet), each scream makes me feel seen and is too relatable. However, as fantastic as this movie is, and as much as it sparks joy to see so many of my favorite women throwing hands (another reason I love a Radio Silence party), it is different. I love it for what it brings to me as a film nerd, a feminist, a 90s kid, and a pop culture addict. I love it because it’s a great time in a theater in what is seemingly another awful year of this garbage decade.

Meanwhile, They Will Kill You hits hard in different ways. It is a completely unique kind of ride that mostly works because the writers made a space for Black girl rage. They then moved it to the center stage and supported it with all of the Sam Raimi-induced fever dream energy that makes many of us lean forward. It goes off the rails in completely bonkers ways than the other film. This need for men to continue telling me they cannot tell the movies apart says a lot about internet brain rot and the male loneliness epidemic. They saw two great movies coming down the line and are not used to seeing cinema. Which is sad but unsurprising because simple movies keep getting made for simple men. The rest of us have to suffer along because the trolls are vocal and have time to make the internet the worst place.

Anyway, I hope all of us with taste have a great time and maybe sneak in a double feature. Who knows when we will get this again, with the way things are rapidly heading to hell. Also, congrats to everyone involved with these two films. Simply knowing women can do things puts you ahead of the curve because the bar is in hell for men, and they are still tripping over it. Hopefully, more men will get the memo that women can do more than be moms, wives, and fridged girlfriends. Or, dare I wish, people will start letting more women in the door so we get more box office moments like this. I long for more weekends where I have multiple options of watching sisters throw hands and pass the Bechdel test. Maybe that makes me a naive old fool, but this March gives me a glimmer of hope.

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