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Sam Danis: Hello, listeners. I am Audible Editor Sam, and I am so very excited to be talking to the immensely talented Tananarive Due today. She is the Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, LA Times Book Prize Award-winning author of many works of horror, includingThe Between and The Reformatory. She's also an educator. She developed a Black horror course for UCLA inspired by Jordan Peele's film Get Out and appeared in the fascinating documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror.
Today, we’re talking about her latest novel, Mazywood, narrated by Joniece Abbott-Pratt, an atmospheric tale of Old Hollywood, intergenerational family secrets, and some good old-fashioned supernatural terror. Tananarive, thank you for being with me today.
Tananarive Due: Thank you for having me on.
So, this feels like a story that has really been brewing for you for a long time, with elements and characters appearing across some of your short stories, notably “The Wishing Pool”and “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge.” How does Mazywood expand on that mythology, and was it always your intention to build something larger from it?
Heavens no. It really just started as a deadline. I had a deadline to turn in a short story for another anthology, and I just looked right in front of me for an idea. There was a book in my bathroom called Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams by the film historian Donald Bogle, and I'd been reading it in pieces, shall we say, about all these Black film stars from previous eras. It's the juxtaposition of the glitter and the glam with the humiliations and with the dehumanization they had to tolerate, trying to come of age in an industry that wasn't quite ready for Blackness except in some very, very familiar and safe forms for, let’s call it, the wider audience.
They were used to seeing Black people as servants and as comic relief and as minstrels, and so many actresses were caught up in that. I thought, “What if a little boy was visiting his grandmother who had come up during that era and was full of shame about her career, and there happened to be a monster in the snow? Of course those two things go together.”
Naturally.
Naturally.
I love it. So glad that book was there for you. So, getting into the glitz and glamour, Mazywood's namesake is your main character, the fictional actress Mazelle Washington. She finds a degree of success as a child star in the silent film era after discovering her uncannily talented companion, Scout the Wonder Dog, and then seeks resurgence as a young woman, ultimately, as you mentioned, finding herself typecast, as many Black actors were in her time, as things like the maid and the comic relief. I'd love to hear your own description of this incredibly complex character and what inspired her.
Yes, I have grown to really love Mazelle, which is interesting because I first met her in that short story “Incident at Bear Creek Lodge,” where she’s the older woman who is very much embittered by Hollywood and is the mean grandmother. So, in the novel, I got to meet her from the time she was a child, and I think as is the case for almost anyone you know since they’re a child, that's why parents have an unconditional love—like, “Yes, you did that. Maybe you deserve to be punished for doing that. But I will always love you.” That kinda thing. So, I will always love Mazelle for the potential she had, for the ambition she had, even from a young girl. Her intelligence. She just has this great child spirit.
I love writing child narrators, and I intentionally wanted to give Mazelle joy at the beginning of the story, because my last novel, The Reformatory, which also had child narrators, was so unrelentingly grim for the children, except for a few moments here and there they could steal.
Mazelle, it’s the complete opposite. This story starts on literally the same road in my fictitious town of Gracetown, Florida, as The Reformatory, but the path is a very different one for this bright child who makes a wish. Maybe her wish came true. I mean, it looks like her wish came true, but maybe she should have been more specific when she wished for a best friend, because what she meets on the road is a dog.
Man’s best friend, and technically true.
Man’s best, but it wasn't her best friend. She did not have a natural affinity for dogs, but because she grew up in a show business family, she immediately recognizes that she could have a great act with a very well-trained dog, which this seems to be. Although, if she’s noticing, the dog is not only following her spoken commands but also her unspoken commands.
So, I started her there, and it was a little bit of a heartbreaking process for me, but a necessary process, to ask myself, “What would it take to create this bitter older woman who started out as this just adorable, talented child?” It was like a death of a thousand cuts over the course of the novel. Yes, I start her in joy. Her dream comes true. She becomes a huge child star. That's not really spoiler-y to say. She might be the biggest child star in the world for a time.
But, slowly, Hollywood gets its claws into her, so to speak. And she confronts this dilemma. If she were a real person, she would have been a complete singularity. The beauty of a Lena Horne with the comic talent for pratfalls and sight gags of a Lucille Ball or a Carol Burnett, who can also dance, who can also sing a little bit.
She was the full package.
There was no one like her. She’s the whole package, and she did get a franchise, which is not historical. There were no Black women with franchises back in those days. Unfortunately, it was in that era where the only prism of her humanity is seen in her ability to not just make people laugh but make people laugh as a servant. I don't know if the listeners have ever seen Stepin Fetchit. You hear the name Stepin Fetchit and you're like, "Ooh, that's offensive," and you're like, “Yeah, I get it." But no, you have to see the performance to understand why Stepin Fetchit was so offensive. I mean, mumbling and almost half asleep on his feet.
I actually don't blame the actor for getting the roles he could. I believe his name was Lincoln Perry. I think he was the first Black actor to make a million dollars. But that Stepin Fetchit character basically was the yoke that Mazelle got stuck with as Lazy Mazy. And the title reflects that she tried to kind of embrace it. She had kind of an attitude about it, like, “Yeah, well, too bad if you don't like how I made my money. I'm calling my resort Mazywood. Do you have a resort? Where famous people come to your private ski lift? I'm going to put it in big letters, ‘Mazywood.’” Until she reaches a point where she can no longer embrace that name.
Slowly, Hollywood gets its claws into her, so to speak... Unfortunately, it was in that era where the only prism of her humanity is seen in her ability to not just make people laugh but make people laugh as a servant.
Right. It’s important to note that she and her family prefer Mazelle as her full name, rather than the Mazy that she's kind of forced into over the course of her career.
Yes, in fact, when people call her Mazy, I run into readers, and when they call her Mazy, I kind of wince. I almost want to say, “Don't let her hear you call her that.”
It really is kind of a heartbreaking journey for her, and we'll get into the narration a little bit, but Joniece Abbott-Pratt just does that childlike wonder so well, which makes it even harder to see where her path goes.
She really does. She really does.
But you mentioned Lena Horne. Throughout the novel, we do get these little glimpses of Old Hollywood as she rubs shoulders with some Hollywood greats, like Lena Horne, Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant. So much research clearly went into this book. What did your process look like?
I had so much fun researching Mazywood. Starting with that first book, I must have read five or six other books by Donald Bogle, as well as a lot of other biographies. It's ironic, because, originally, my editor and I thought that the book was going to focus mainly on the contemporary storyline, which is its own thing, separate from Mazelle. It's a whole contemporary storyline. But as I was writing, if I had a throwaway line that she said to Clark Gable—in the original short story she says, "I think, Mr. Gable, you must have forgotten you're making more for this picture than I am." And all her dinner guests laugh, and, "Oh, isn't she witty?"
But, of course, now I have to figure out, well, where did that come from? And I had a little throwaway reference to it in my original draft of Mazywood, and my advance readers—who include my husband, Steven Barnes, who's also a novelist, and my agent—were both like, "No, if you have her in a scene with Clark Gable, we need to see the scene with Clark Gable."
So, that's kind of how it went. I'm writing along and I realize there's a moment that needs more unpacking. I went on a whole Gone with the Wind rabbit hole. I had never even seen the movie Gone with the Wind, and I have not read Gone with the Wind. But because of what Gone with the Wind represents, which was sort of this romanticization of the slaveholding Confederacy. I mean, that's what the whole title refers to. All of that is gone with the wind. Like, "Oh, no. Slavery's over?" It's kind of lovely in terms of how it's shot. It's extremely well-acted. But, to me, the whole concept of that film is offensive, so I’d just never seen it.
Then, of course, I got into the research and, oh, my goodness, Hattie McDaniel just lit me up. I knew she had been the first Black woman, first Black person, to win an Oscar, for her performance as Mammy in Gone with the Wind, and I had a pretty good idea of what that performance looked like, although seeing the film was very clarifying in terms of her talent. She was a very talented woman. Not just an actress, but she also did stage and humor, and I believe she sang. Everybody did everything, you know?
But to realize how she was boxed in as a servant and then at the same time criticized for playing that servant was such an interesting emotional place and served as, I thought, a great role model for someone like Mazelle, who has talents and abilities that Hattie McDaniel did not, but even so could not get beyond that typecasting as a servant, and then also gets blamed for playing that servant.
I think one of the things that’s so maddening for Mazelle, if she went over the edge—the reader can decide if she goes over the edge—but if she did go over the edge, I think it would be in part because of that child star syndrome that happens in real life, that sense of entitlement that child stars have. A famous example would be Gary Coleman. For a young kid to basically be running the set because the whole show revolves around them. I'm going back to Diff'rent Strokes. Sorry, that's before some people's time. But you can think of examples of your favorite child stars who didn't fare well and who had behavioral issues, drug addiction issues.
So, all of that is still very much true, would be true in the 1920s. I heard stories about some of those kids on Our Gang. I mean, kids are going to act up, but then you get a sense of entitlement, too, and you add all that money on top of it, where they're practically supporting their entire families. It's a very complicated emotional place to start a career from, and to feel like you lost that sense of entitlement once you age out, as Mazelle did, and had to try to rebuild her career as an extra. She was a headliner. Now she's an extra on Gone with the Wind, so she has to basically start over.
I think that leads to sort of her emotional ruination, but also more, even, than that. And then that's accentuated by magic, I should say. So, she was a child star, but also access to magic. I'm not going into details. But I think that would have an effect of somewhat spoiling a child as well. Or at least giving them very outsized expectations about what life will have in store for them. When you add to that I intentionally chose the time period between the '20s and '40s, where we transition from silent film to talkies, which was another moment where Mazelle realizes, “Oh, I see what they think of me now.” When they started doing talkies, that was a whole different level that she had not been aware of.
But then from talkies through the '40s, when you have this really interesting period around World War II where there's a lot of pressure on Hollywood to do better with Black actors. The NAACP, which is the world's oldest civil rights organization, and the people, the press, everyone's clamoring for more and better roles. Lena Horne is presented to Hollywood as the new face of Hollywood, and studios did try for a while to do something with Lena Horne, but even she couldn't rise to the level that you would think, given her fame in the '40s. She did do very significant roles in Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky.
But this was during a time when Black performers and dancers and singers who were in the original film would get edited out when the film played in movie theaters in what they call the Southern markets. So, how much depth can a role have? That's why you see these movies where it's all about the white cast and like, “Oh, we're going to a nightclub, here's this tap-dancing duo that is going to get cut out of the movie.” So, that's the kind of environment that Mazelle is fighting against, and I think the fact that she could just smell that change was so close. So close.
Like, 1950, you’ll see Sidney Poitier playing a doctor. But in that period between 1940 and 1950, when she's trying to claw her way to what she believes she deserves, she's teased with the idea that she could be a Lena Horne or even more than a Lena Horne. She's teased with the idea that, yes, she can have her own franchise. But what actually ends up happening is just more repackaging of the same old stereotypes that, basically, let's just say, don't do her career any favors.
She's in a real time of kind of “damned if you do, damned if you don't.”
Absolutely.
Where the roles available to her are so limited and yet she could perform them with all her heart and still be criticized in the end. So, it's easy to see how she goes down the path that she goes, of bitterness.
One of the things that surprised me in studying Hattie McDaniel was a lot of people know her for the quote, "I could have played a maid or been one," which I thought was just sort of a theoretical quote. I understood, I thought, what she meant, but after reading her biography, I realized, no, what she meant was when she wasn't working in movies, she had no other choice but to work as a domestic. So, she's already out there. Her face is already out there on the screen, but between jobs, she's a bathroom attendant. She's doing whatever she has to do. As a woman who was raised by parents who had been formerly enslaved—her father fought in the Civil War for the North—of course she was only one step away from deep poverty, like real poverty, hunger poverty. So, you take the work you're offered.
Hattie McDaniel appears briefly in the novel, which I thought was a nice homage to her and her role in all of this history. There is, as you alluded to, a present-day timeline, and that's where the horrors really start to take shape and become known. The supernatural threat in this story is really, I think we've been alluding to this, the physical manifestation of Mazelle's hopes and dreams, but also her rage.
It's a creature, baby.
It's a creature.
A creature in the snow. A giant creature.
I think the creature is very much like one of those universal monsters from back in the day, like in Frankenstein or The Wolf Man, where, yes, they're monsters, but you feel badly for them. They didn't ask to be monsters.
It's a monster story, which I didn't expect, and I loved. Always love a surprise monster, and you keep using the phrase “claw your way,” and it gives me a smile. But this supernatural threat, this monster, it begins as a simple wish for a friend. Scout is frightening, loyal, pitiable, and dangerous all at once. How did you develop this character? Was it always your intent that this would be, in many ways, one of the most heartbreaking characters in the book?
Well, yes and no. I would say, if I go back to the lineage of the story when it was just a short story, and I did a story afterward called “Return to Bear Creek Lodge,” which was literally a year later but still during the contemporary protagonist's childhood. He's Mazelle's grandson. I just knew it was a creature that behaved in a way that other creatures didn't. So, it slithered under the snow almost like a snake, but then when it pokes out its snout, well, it has a snout and fur, so it's not a snake. And it has these teeth, so what the heck is this thing? In the short story, I didn't really have to explain much more than that. It was like, "Whoop, there it is. You guys can make your own inferences about what it symbolizes.” But as I was working on the novel, and I should point out that the contemporary story in Mazywood began as a screenplay.
Oh!
Yes. If people read it and say, "Wow, this feels so cinematic," well, that's because it was cinematic.
I have a question here about how cinematic it is, because it feels like a true survival horror story.
It was literally cinematic. I was just chuckling to myself a few hours ago remembering that Imani, the 13-year-old character, has this GoPro camera on her helmet, which in the script was actually providing footage.
Found footage, yeah.
Like, very realistic found footage, and it lasted into the novel, which I was just sort of amused by that. So, because we were collaborating on the screenplay, I took lead on it, and it was based on the characters from my story, but [my husband] contributed so much. And one of the great contributions was a conversation about the creature. Because he said, "Look, the creature in that short story is a symbol, but this is a biological creature, so what is its lifespan? What is its habitat? Why is there only one?" Like, all these questions. And some of those questions you can answer with magic, because I say so.
But I did like the idea of trying to ground the creature in something biological so that Imani, who is sort of channeling my late-in-life love for survival reality shows that I developed during COVID. I watched them all. If I had been 13, I would've been in my yard trying to make a fire. All the things she's doing, I would've been doing. So, she's me, and she's looking at tracks, and she's trying to figure this thing out. Even though it's like nothing they've ever seen or experienced, she is very much trained to see it as an animal and not a monster, if that makes sense. And because she's trying to understand it, why is it doing the things it's doing?
It's very confusing to them. They don't have any clue why it's doing the things it's doing. But she's always trying to figure that out. She's always giving it that respect, even though, at points, she loathes it. And then at other points she feels sorry for it. I think the creature is very much like one of those universal monsters from back in the day, like in Frankenstein or The Wolf Man, where, yes, they're monsters, but you feel badly for them. They didn't ask to be monsters. They didn't ask to be created.
Yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of moments where Imani's relationship with this character mirrors Mazelle's in ways where she tries to find that sympathy and connection. So, getting into the story a little deeper, it centers around this family that visits Mazywood, this historic lodge, and encounters this monster. Your novels, I notice, often center around a family. The Reformatory is based in part on your own great-uncle's tragic story. Family members in your stories often share these unique gifts, and sometimes supernatural gifts, with one another. I think it's safe to assume family is important to you. You're a parent. Your own parents were prominent civil rights activists. Tell me about the importance of that familial connection in your stories.
Yeah, I do love writing about families. In fact, as much as I love horror movies, horror movies that center around, like, say a slasher, that centers around a family on vacation, there's no one who's expendable in family horror.
That's a great point.
When there's a group of college kids, there's always that obnoxious one. You know that one's going to die first, so you don't really care. You're looking forward to it. But with a family, Grandma's not expendable. The dog's not expendable. No one's expendable, so it's a very tense kind of writing, first of all, and I think that draws me both as a reader and as a writer.
But beyond that, I love exploring relationship dynamics. That was kind of, weirdly, my journey with survival reality television, was I started with the shows where people were solitary, and then I evolved to the shows where people had to work as groups, and then I got really fascinated by group dynamics and whose leadership rises and who seems to be a leader but can't perform, and all those kinds of things.
So, when you take a family with all of its usual issues that all families have, and in this book, I don't think it's spoiler-y to say that my protagonist, Johnny Washington, who's Mazelle's grandson, is married to a woman 15 years younger than he is. Their daughters are both teenagers. One is on her way to college. And now they've been faced with an unexpected pregnancy and sort of their inability to be honest about how they feel about that with each other. They're basically both bowing to what they perceive are the other's expectations, and it leads to such silences and stress that the kids are afraid they're about to get a divorce. They can feel something's wrong, but they don't know what it is.
I wanted to explore that, as someone who's been married almost 30 years myself. Not that this has happened to me. But it's something I wondered about, like, “Wow, what if that did happen?” I try to explore that and kind of the gaps in communication and the ways we dance around not talking about things, which is a theme in the story, from Mazelle's timeline. She has huge secrets, and now this couple has secrets from each other in terms of just not being honest, not being forthright about what they're really feeling emotionally.
Then you have two sisters. I have two sisters, so I love a sibling dynamic, and Imani and Cherise, in some ways, are like me and my sisters. It deals with neurodivergence in a way that wasn't an issue in my family, but I have since then dealt with children and neurodivergence, so I wanted to also honor that and the kinds of changes families make and accommodations families make for differences in personality, differences in the way reality itself is even perceived, which can happen with neurodivergence.
A lot of my books are really a time capsule for the most recent events in my life, but through, of course, a looking glass. There's no creature, but I will say that Scout the Magical Dog is an outgrowth of my newfound love for dogs. I say that as someone who was not a dog person. I grew up with cats, was very much, in fact, afraid of dogs because my late mother, who was a civil rights activist, had a dog named Scout who was a German shepherd. And to this day, German shepherds do make me nervous. I'm still working on that. Because it was a core memory. My mom says I couldn't have been more than 18 months old, and she thought, “There's no way you could remember that.” But I do remember, or I did remember, anyway, Scout glaring at me in the car with those scary teeth, and Scout bit the mailman at my grandmother's house.
Scout was legendary in terms of being a bad dog. The worst bad-dog thing that Scout ever did was, I believe, in 1964 in St. Augustine, Florida, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was in town for a civil rights protest, and this was a hotbed for terrorist violence against civil rights activists. I mean, you might have seen the photos of people pouring acid into a swimming pool to keep people from swimming. That was in St. Augustine. It was a very, very racist town at that time. I'm sure now everyone there is wonderful. But during that time, very, very racist. And when Dr. King was on stage, Scout lunged at him, lunged at him, and Dr. King drew back in fear.
All my childhood, my mom would tell us that story as sort of a teachable moment, like, "Children, even though Dr. King is celebrated as such a brave civil rights activist, just always remember, he was still human, and he was afraid of Scout." I'm like, “Okay, that was a good teachable moment, and that was meaningful to me,” but in later years, “I'm sorry, Mom, why did you bring Scout so close to Dr. King? You knew Scout was a bad dog.” But in any case, that was where I was with dogs before Mazywood, and I think my attitude toward dogs is best reflected in The Reformatory, where the dogs are chasing people and hurting people.
Not a good portrayal of dogs there.
Not really good dogs in Reformatory. Well, there is that one moment. I'll give that dog a bone. In any case, by the time I get to Mazywood, I now have a grandpuppy. I have a pit bull mix that my stepdaughter Nikki has, and the dog's name is Nala, and I love Nala. And now I get dogs. I get the dog energy, the dog loyalty, why people love dogs. So, again, it's a snapshot now of my evolution that I'm writing about good dogs instead of bad dogs.
That’s amazing. This one's for you, Scout. Even though maybe you weren't the best dog. But I think we all have those legendary pets in our family, and I think mine is a German shepherd, too. But the scariest thing that ever happened is my sister tried to ride it and fell off of it, so.
Oh, that's incredible.
When there's a group of college kids, there's always that obnoxious one. You know that one's going to die first, so you don't really care... But with a family, Grandma's not expendable. The dog's not expendable. No one's expendable, so it's a very tense kind of writing.
Getting into the past and the issues that you tackle, The Reformatory was very dark in a lot of ways. But you talk a lot about giving yourself permission to write horror, to write characters that look like you as a woman, as a Black woman. The Reformatory and Mazywood both blend real-world horrors with supernatural ones, and yet as we've alluded to before, there's also a lot of fun and joy to be found among these characters, among the families in particular. How do you strike that balance between going into the darker corners of history and also finding that kind of joy within your characters?
That's a great question. You know, in The Reformatory, which was so dark, and for me as the author, very difficult to write.
I'm sure.
It was really important for my 12-year-old character, Robbie—who was unjustly locked up and sentenced to six months at a terrible, haunted reformatory—while he's being driven there, and of course he's wracked with fear, I wanted to add a scene where he's fascinated by the car's dashboard and the steering wheel, because kids love cars, especially little boys.
I remember that scene.
They love cars, and this is a fancy car. He's never been in a car this fancy. So, he's able to distract himself by playing with the steering wheel and sitting in the car, and I wanted him to be very childlike. I wanted to really capture that sense of innocence for the purposes of the story, because yes, that does make it scarier, but also because it's that innocence, I think, that leads to his resilience in that story very much. And the reader needs it. The reader needs a moment to play in the freezer. Although, I'm sure that if you're playing in a freezer in a reformatory, the reader is not enjoying that as much as the kids are, because the reader knows that's not going to go well.
In Mazywood, I got a lot more chances to show joy, and part of it is realism, because we do have joy in real life. We make jokes with our families. We have moments of lightness. But also, just from a craft standpoint in terms of horror, you can't just ratchet up, ratchet up, ratchet up, ratchet up through the whole story. You have to let go of the control and let it ease back, ease back, ease back. And then while the reader has their guard down, then you ratchet it up again.
That's the idea behind that, is to sort of find those ebbs and flows that don't let the reader give themselves permission to say, "I can't read this anymore. I have to put this down." Although sometimes readers will do that no matter what. They'll put it down. But you want them to pick it back up again. They have to know what's going to happen next. But hopefully before they get to that point, something light has happened, something funny has happened, or Imani sort of looks with wonder at some things that for the rest of her family is—she's like, "Oh, wow, it's snowing!" And the dad who's driving in this downpour is like, "Oh, it's snowing."
So, just trying to find those bits of nuance that both make them seem like real people, because to me the real key to scares is in characterization. I'm a character-first reader and a character-first writer, and there are many, many wonderful horror writers. Of course, I started out, as many of my cohort did, reading Stephen King, and Stephen King is a very character-first author. So, that was sort of my training in what a horror novel feels like, a character-driven piece where you know the characters so well that even if a saltshaker just moves from one side of the table to the other, your reader is so invested and thinks this is a real world to the point where they will be scared.
Stephen Graham Jones does that with a ceiling fan in The Only Good Indians. Like, just a mundane household item takes on a whole different characteristic because it's through the prism of fear, because we believe in the world, because we believe in the characters. So, that's really what that's all about.
Imani provides a lot of that levity because she is the younger character, and she's so brave sometimes in a way that gives you, as a parent, a little bit of reflux.
She's incredibly brave. I feel like Imani may be the bravest character in the story, and she will lead you some places that you don't want to go.
Speaking of characterization, I want to talk about the narration. Joniece Abbott-Pratt is the narrator for this. She also narrated The Reformatory. The Reformatory really just shot her to the top of my favorite narrator list. She is just so wonderful and brings such emotion and heart to everything she does. What about her performance is really special to you?
Where do I begin in terms of Joniece Abbott-Pratt? I heard her for the first time when I listened to Lone Women by Victor LaValle, and I thought, "Oh, she does children's voices really well," because there were several children in that book. So, I suggested her to my editor at Saga Press, and they hired her. At first, because The Reformatory was such a long, difficult book to write, I had no intention of listening to the entire narration.
I'm sure.
All I did was put it on. I was like, "Let me just check her out, see how it sounds," and I could not stop listening. Even though I wanted to stop listening, I could not stop listening. When she got to my character of Blue, who's a very pivotal character in that story, that voice, I was like, "Oh, my gosh. She knows Blue's voice better than I do." Like, she just captured Robbie, she captured Blue, she captured Gloria. And it's so much fun to hear her narrating Mazywood now, because instead of, in The Reformatory, it would be sort of a scene where something terrible is happening in a whipping shed; in Mazywood, instead it's a scene backstage on the set of Gone with the Wind, and she gets to channel Hattie McDaniel and all these actors. So, it's always exciting to hear Joniece Abbott-Pratt.
She’s fantastic. Like we talked about, she's so good at bringing that kind of childhood wonder and joy to her characters, but also real terror. Like, she could be in a horror movie. She does fear really well.
She does. She keeps you riveted.
She really does. I also couldn't stop listening. So, we mentioned this was such a cinematic listen. It's so interesting to hear that it started as a screenplay. I can totally see it. It's good old-fashioned fun monster horror in a lot of ways. You, alongside your husband, Steven Barnes, recently adapted your graphic novel The Keeper to a short film. What was that process like? Could you see yourself adapting more of your work or writing more original for the screen?
Oh, I certainly would love to write more originals for the screen. The Keeper also started as a feature screenplay we wrote back in 2019, and we got very close to setting it up with my absolute favorite director, but the studio said no. It's a small story. It's about a grandmother who basically summons a demon to take care of her granddaughter when she dies. That's the story. It's not a big tent pole. It's not something where A-list actors are like, "I gotta be in that." It's a 10-year-old girl and an 80-year-old woman, for the most part. She has some friends in the feature version.
We shopped it and shopped it and shopped it. Got tons of meetings, but no one wanted to make it until we got to Blackmaled Productions, which is Malcolm Lee's company. He did Girls Trip, Best Man. He just did Strung for Peacock. His executive there, Giselle Johnson-Morris, got us a deal with a Japanese streamer. She was really thinking outside of the box. Samansa, which is a streamer for short films, international short films, Oscar-nominated, like, all kinds of short films, and we got very good funding to adapt it into a short film, which we shot last year. It's now making the rounds in film festivals. It was in the BlackStar Film Festival, nominated for Best Short. Some others that haven't quite been announced yet.
Amazing.
We're very, very excited about that. And this is one of the great things. I was not a director when I started writing Mazywood, but I do feel, almost superstitiously so, that I project my future sometimes into my stories. So, as you can imagine, I'm very careful about some of the things I write about. It might not seem like I am, but I am. And this definitely happened with Mazywood, because when I was writing it, I was not a director, probably wasn't even seriously thinking about being a director. But by the time it's out now, it's literally published at the same time I'm making the film festival circuit as a director, which is a little weird to me.
We've done some screenplays together. You mentioned The Twilight Zone, and we wrote episodes, and the Horror Noire anthology movie. And yes, we've always wanted to have more of a hand in adapting our books to film. But what we've learned over time, it's a tough business. It's a very tough business, but it's especially tough if you're marginalized, especially during these times. It's a little difficult to find people who are like, "Yeah, I gotta have that next Black horror project." I've been through those times. That happened after Get Out. Not so much now.
So, really, the answer to me, and we just taught a little mini course on this, is do it yourself. We had help. We had financial help for The Keeper, but anyone with an iPhone or a smartphone has a camera they can make a movie with. I tell people, instead of waiting and waiting and waiting, just hit record, have your teenage neighbor or son or friend who edits social media posts all day edit it together for you, or learn how to edit it yourself.
Make it small. Ramp up from no money to $500 you borrow from friends to crowdfund for $5,000. I really think that in today's environment, for anyone who's an aspiring filmmaker, the old models have shifted so much. I won't say they're dead, but they have shifted so much that it's really more about who has the imagination and vision to just make it themselves.
I do feel, almost superstitiously so, that I project my future sometimes into my stories. So, as you can imagine, I'm very careful about some of the things I write about. It might not seem like I am, but I am.
Yeah, it is interesting the juxtaposition of these two things happening in your life, where Mazywood is so focused on Old Hollywood and the challenges there, and it's a whole new set of challenges these days. It's kind of an interesting parallel that you've got going on right now.
Well, I wanted to do that intentionally, in the same way that I wanted The Reformatory to shine a light on our system of mass incarceration, and that little town is almost a microcosm for where we are now. It's too big to fail. There are too many industries dependent upon mass incarceration, so yeah, no wonder it's hard to make changes. And the same thing in Hollywood. Even though things are obviously much better now than they were in the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, it's all still very cyclical, and there are times when it is more difficult than even, like, six years ago for a Black-led project to get traction.
Because, in the meantime, your executive has been laid off. That was the person who had the passion and who was taking it around, and there's so many Black executives who've lost their jobs, and I'm sure that's true over many demographic groups. You can see the seeds of the beginning of Hollywood in the way Hollywood presents now. So, the issues are different, but they haven't disappeared, and I intentionally wanted Johnny's frustrations at his meeting to be a bit more subtle than the things that Mazelle was dealing with.
I've been in meetings pitching projects for film where the executive will say to your face, “Do the characters have to be Black?” And that would have been a great example of modern-day, you can call it discrimination, you can call it challenge, whatever you want to call it, for a Black filmmaker. It's very obvious. It's kind of hard to argue with that one. But I didn't want it to be that obvious. I wanted it to be more like it usually is for Black artists pitching films. You just don't quite know if that was what the problem was, or if it was the problem that was given to you, the problem that was stated to you in the room.
Right, it was abundantly clear in Old Hollywood when you faced these challenges, but—
Absolutely, it was in your face.
—a little more subtle these days. So, you love horror. That's obvious. You're a little bit of a horror scholar now. You developed a course for UCLA called “The Sunken Place: Racism, Survival, and Black Horror.” I've never wished I could go back to school more. So much of your research and knowledge in Black horror shows in Mazywood. Tell me about your journey from horror lover to horror scholar.
Yeah, bingo. That was really it. I didn't know I was a horror scholar. I considered myself a horror fan and a horror creator, and then I was approached for Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, and I was asked to be an executive producer. And much to my surprise, they weren't asking me because I was Tananarive Due, author, who's been publishing Black horror since 1995. They asked me because I was Tananarive Due who's teaching the Sunken Place class at UCLA after I saw Get Out and thought, “Oh, my gosh. That would be a great way to teach Black horror.”
So, it felt accidental, but just as I was very excited to be asked to teach at UCLA, which also was not something I had set out to do as a goal when I started publishing. I, of course, now love teaching. I love teaching. I love the security of having a job. Because, as an artist, I've been an artist for a long time, so you have good years and you have bad years.
I like a very steady through line, and everything else is either gravy or then maybe better luck next year. Because I find that I create most from a place where I feel secure. So, yeah, my becoming a horror scholar, which I still in my mind am putting quote, unquote because I don't think of myself that way. But I appear in the movie Black Zombie as another talking head. And as I was watching screenings of that, I was like, “Wow, I sound like I know what I'm talking about.” I think if you watch enough horror movies, we all become scholars. If you study it long enough.
Of course, when I think of a scholar, I think of someone like Robin R. Means Coleman, who wrote the book Horror Noire that we adapted the documentary from. I mean, she really rolled up her sleeves and did the research and the work. I feel like a lot of what I'm doing is eating popcorn and enjoying the fruits of the filmmakers' labor.
Well, thank you for the permission to call myself a horror scholar when I watch far too many horror movies this month.
There you go.
And that brings me to my last question: Horror itself as a genre really feels like it's going through a renaissance right now. It's just all over publishing, film. As a horror fan, I love it. Can't get enough. But I'm curious what you're most excited about in the genre. What would you like to see more of in horror going forward?
I'm going to start with adaptation. I would like to see more marginalized horror creators getting the adaptations alongside our colleagues. Because nothing makes me happier than when someone like a Daniel Kraus or a Joe Hill or a Josh Malerman gets an adaptation. Like, yay, one for the team. Horror is a very close-knit family, and they're some of the sweetest people you would ever meet when you get together in a room, so I mean that genuinely. I am rooting for everybody in horror. But even as I said during the premiere of Horror Noire all those years ago, Hollywood is 50 percent adaptations, but when you look at these books by marginalized creators, where are our adaptations?
Even, for an example, Octavia Butler, she's not a horror writer, but she only recently got her television series adaptation of Kindred, and now there's one in pre-production, I guess, for Parable of the Sower. But how long did that take? And she's Octavia Butler, you know, all caps. So, I would love to see more of the fruits of the great diversity we're seeing within the horror genre.
I'm one of those authors. Stephen Graham Jones is another one of those authors. Alma Katsu. There are so many writers from different backgrounds. Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Just so many. I almost freeze up because there are so many, almost too many to name who are emerging in the field. Johnny Compton with The Spite House, and just so many great works. I want to see not only more investment in finding those authors and giving those authors platforms, but yeah, where are the adaptations?
Because I find as a horror fan, and one of the things I love so much about a streamer like Shudder is that they're not afraid to have foreign language horror. In foreign language horror, you're finding mythologies, setups, character groups who are very different from what we're used to seeing, and I love that. Because it's within that novelty you can really surprise me, and I think that's something people are missing when they overlook marginalized horror and feel like, "Oh, it probably won't find its audience." It can find its audience, and it will find its audience. We just need more of it.
Right. We just need to take the chance.
Yes.
Hollywood is 50 percent adaptations, but when you look at these books by marginalized creators, where are our adaptations?
Tananarive, thank you so, so much for chatting with me today. I loved the book, and I think I've successfully pestered all my co-workers into listening to it.
I'm so glad. It's hard to follow up a book like The Reformatory. It's scary because that has performed so much better than anything else I've ever done, and you know the next thing people are going to read is Mazywood, and you're like, "Holy cow, I hope it measures up." So, I've been very happy, because they're very different books.
They are very different.
Very different books, and I've been very happy that so many readers like you have come along for the ride.
Absolutely. There was no way I wasn't listening to that one. I enjoyed both in such different ways. Listeners, you can listen to Mazywood right now on Audible.
