[Editor’s note: The following containsspoilersforMa.]
Mais so good, you guys. You gotta watch it. It’s an absurd, tone-shifting, and genuinely frightening horror film starringOctavia Spenceras an adult woman so warped by trauma and loneliness that she starts befriending and hosting local high schoolers in a sociological attempt at revenge. It’s out of this world, it inspired a ton of wonderful memes, and I fully believe Spencer deserved an Oscar nod for her work.
So when its director,Tate Taylor, starts talking about his ideas for aMasequel, I pay attention — even if it feels a little illogical, given how the firstMaended with her burning the hell up in a house fire of her own making. Apparently, according to an interview withEntertainment Weekly, Taylor’s designs for this ending were not as final as I thought, saying he “purposely left her death ambiguous!” and that he knows “Octavia would do” a sequel if the right idea came about.
And when he pitched his idea, it took me about 0.001 seconds to immediately recognize it as agreatidea:
“My idea is that she’s moved to another town, and she has open houses in another city and kills people in the open house. I think she’d be a real estate agent in the Pacific Northwest, and just murder white people looking at McMansions. That’s as far as I’ve gotten!”
I just cannot begin to tell you how much I need to see aMa 2where Ma murders rich white assholes in Seattle mansions. It would bring my heart such a sense of wholeness. It’s such an inspired, intuitive heighten for a film that already sprinted right up to the line of “un-heightenable.” And Spencer, who has only spoken highly of playing Ma (“There are archetypes people only want to see me as. So I had to change that for myself [and] the next young woman of color to be able to play every type of role,” she told EW), would annihilate such a premise.
Hollywood, if you’re listening, and you want to tap into “this afterlife as this cult thing,” as Taylor puts it, you need to greenlight his and Spencer’sMa 2immediately. I will do the publicity free for you. And the memes simply write themselves.
