Dale and I spoke with Brigid Alverson from Smash Pages about Survivors’ Club, genre-blending, how “our brains have commingled into one evil story-telling sentience” and watching Hollywood horror films while growing up in South Africa.
We’ve also got a sneak preview from Issue #6, out now, below (with special thanks to @noksangoma for being our consultant on this scene to ensure we did an accurate representation of traditional divination with the spirits of the ancestors. Any mistakes are ours! (And she advised against the troll toy, but when I went to see a sangoma in Mai Mai for research for Zoo City, she used a troll, so we included it here)
SMASH PAGES: Being from South Africa (although I know you have traveled to the U.S.), how did you perceive these films at the time you were first watching them, and how do you see them now? Did you think of them as foreign films or just part of the mass culture? How do you think the fact that you are viewing them in South Africa changes your point of view—are there particular things that resonate with your own world view?
Beukes: In pop-culture, we all grow up American. (Especially if you’ve been deprived of British television as a kid because of the UK’s sanctions against the apartheid government). We both have a very low tolerance for torture porn because the reality of violence in South Africa is so horrific, especially against women, those films demean what real people go through.
Halvorsen: Horror films are our generation’s fairytales. We all grew up with them, we all know those monsters. The good horror films are social commentary, like George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.
Click through here for the full interview.
Issue #6 is out now and available from your local comic books store or you can buy the whole series in digital from Comixology right now.
