It’s all in the title: They Will Kill You. The horror film dropped its trailer with Zazie Beetz starring as a newly hired maid who scores a job at The Virgil — a creepy old building, one that would make any New Yorker rush past its heavily gilded doors. And then there’s that pesky pentagram embedded in its roof. But we have to assume that she really needs the money.
Once Beetz’s on-screen ego is inside, the doors lock behind her. Not one or two, but many. She even makes a sly joke about it.
Over the next two minutes, we watch as Beetz slices and dices her way through a group of satanic-worshipping killers with one collective goal in mind — to serve her up as their monthly human sacrifice. In between the gore, she fires off expletives and one-line zingers that reassure us, despite the blood and carnage, she’ll survive.
In a sense, Hollywood is answering a long-standing demand from moviegoers. There’s been a push for women — especially Black women — to be center stage as leading survival protagonists. Resourceful and quick-witted, they’ve been MacGyvering their way out of danger through sheer wit and grit, characteristics that mirror the real-life endurance many women have had to tap to succeed, or even more earnestly, to exist.
But another question lingers: Has this become a trope that Hollywood has come to rely on too heavily? From Run Sweetheart Run (2020), where Ella Balinska is literally running for her life as her date forces her into a killing field through the streets of Los Angeles, to countless thrillers where Black women must confront death just to live, it’s a pattern that’s hard to ignore.
Yes, we’re making headway on screen visibility. But the evolution should be stories where Black women don’t have to face violence, death and terror to prove our worth.
That would be the real escape.
They Will Kill You is in theaters on March 27.