Author: Alex Chew

Alex Chew is a filmmaker and co-founder of the Black Auteur Film Festival. She also runs the writers-first production company Sequence 8. Her next short story will be published in Haunted Reels: Volume 2. Her films can be found on Roku’s Genre TV and sequence8films.com.

Embattled, Yet Empowering: ‘One Battle After Another’ Smashes Centuries-Old Paradigm of Black Victimhood

Paul Thomas Anderson is not the first to subvert one Black femme stereotype after another. He’s just the whitest. However, the director’s latest film, One Battle After Another, serves to hold up a mirror to 2025 America.

Some critics have accused Anderson of writing Black women who are too sexualized, stereotypical or sidelined. However, recent interviews reveal that actors were often encouraged to go off script in order to add more authenticity to their roles. So it’s likely that many of the shades of gray used to paint these Black women as imperfect yet inspiring insurgents are derived from the Black women with whom PTA collaborates and cohabitates.

For me, the results defied history with humor and humanity.

Soderbergh’s ‘Presence’ Isn’t a Horror Movie—It’s a Ghost Story About Grief, Love, Redemption and Family

That trailer set me up for a straight-up horror film. What I got instead was something far more unsettling—and, ultimately, more rewarding. Presence isn’t built on cheap scares or cathartic screams. It’s a slow, intimate drift through grief and perspective, a ghost story told entirely from the other side.

By committing fully to realism, Soderbergh dismantles horror’s most familiar conventions and archetypes, leaving us with something haunting in an entirely different way. We aren’t watching the ghost terrorize a family—we are the ghost. We float through their arguments, their secrets, their loneliness, until the banality of eternity itself begins to sink in.

The result is one of the most quietly devastating haunted-house films in recent memory: a meditation on loss, dread and the slow realization that the scariest thing of all isn’t a jump scare, but grief itself.

From Private Island to Personal Hell: ‘Blink Twice’ Shows the Power of Survivors Working Together

Blink Twice, now streaming, reminds it audience that not all women are allies and not all men are predators. But some get away with acts of sexual violence akin to murder.

And when survivors band together, we’re going to do more than just dance on your table. In the blink of an eye—we’ll turn your private island into your personal hell.

‘Companion’ Unmasks the Horror Beneath the Tradwife Fantasy

Companion starts with a dreamy tradwife fantasy and ends in a blood-soaked feminist reckoning. Writer-director Drew Hancock’s film may nod to Scream, Ex Machina and Black Mirror, but it carves out its own smart, brutal allegory for waking up from the fantasy of obedience. Sophie Thatcher’s performance anchors the story as Iris evolves from Stepford-perfect to gloriously feral, reminding us that when women start asking questions, the whole system bleeds.

Female Filmmakers at SXSW Face a Familiar Challenge: Funding

With South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin’s rearview mirror, some of its most talented female filmmakers still have a long road ahead to bring their movies to public screens. Even the women who clinched premieres at one of America’s most prestigious festivals have to hustle to support their craft.

“The streaming channels that dominate global viewership are no longer buying many smaller or risk-taking projects,” wrote Keri Putnam of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center.

“The number one challenge is fundraising,” said Anayansi Prado, director of Uvalde Mom, which premiered at SXSW and tells story of Angeli Rose Gomez made worldwide headlines during by jumping a fence during a school shooting and racing in unarmed to save her two young sons.