Kills, Mostly Sisters: We Summon the Darkness (Marc Meyers, 2020) / Black Christmas (Sophia Takal, 2019)

Welcome to August! We have a month and a half left until the first issue of my comic, MAW, makes it out into the world. Please do me a favor and request your local comic shop to stock it; I love my disgusting sea monster and I want it to reach the world.

Until then, our MAW-related monthly theme is SISTERHOOD. Which... well, you read the headline.

We Summon the Darkness is a movie with only one twist, but it’s a good one. The movie is set in the 1980s, and concerns a giggly, carefree group of gal pals going off to — gasp! — a heavy metal concert. There’s been a string of mysterious crimes in the area, which are believed to be Satanic ritual murders, and so we understand, by the immortal laws of the slasher, that these girls are going to be running and screaming and fleeing a hulking male tormenter by the final act. When they pick up a group of Satan-friendly teenage boys at the concert, their fate seems sealed.

The girls take the boys home. There are drugs. There’s the promise of sinful premarital sex. We sigh, and settle in, and wait for some young women to get stabbed. Then, all at once, we realize who the slasher is. The movie has one point to make, but it makes that point with gusto: Never, ever assume you know who in this life was born to be a victim.