The Wretch Whom You Created is a radical, feminist, queer, campy monster movie that actively combats how monstrosity has been constructed through marginalized identities in horror, thriller, and science fiction movies and television. Viewers will be guided to reflect on how their own prejudices against race, gender, class, ability, and sexuality have been formed through different types of media, specifically ones with characters that are seen as Other, non-human, or sub-human. This film takes on the monster as a stand-in for those marginalized, made invisible, and misunderstood as both subjects and objects of desire and rejection within our culture. This non-linear narrative at the margins is deeply serious and also includes humor that provides leisure, happiness and joy as tools of survival and resistance.
In addition to creating this beautiful film together, we also wrote a manifesto stating the mission of our collaboration.
Our Manifesto, Written Collectively by:
Dylan Jane, Malik Ford,
Lena Abraham, Sophie Abraham,
Èbun Nazòn Powers, and Lily Sarosi.
We strive to create resistant media that upholds our differences and encourages others to do the same. We strive to genuinely collaborate and give equal voice to all peoples.
We strive to represent all people in the way they want to be represented in our media making efforts.
We refuse to reproduce racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, classist, xenophobic tropes and portrayals of people. We will not fetishize others identities.
We understand that the freak is manufactured through misrepresentations in media by those who consider themselves normal.
We must eradicate the need for contemptuous looking that our culture instills in us and combat it with compassion for ourselves and others.
We celebrate these acts of self love.
We strive to smash rape culture. We will make media that emphasizes consent and communication when featuring sex and intimacy in all sexual orientations and genders.
We believe survivors of sexual violence.
We strive to make feminist media that is not dominated by white cis feminists, and rather genuinely upholds and prioritizes trans women, women of color,
and all women at marginalized intersections.
We strive to dismantle the systems of oppression that are enforced by the media that we consume everyday. We seek to obliterate the cis white male gaze.
We resist white supremacy, fascism, and neoliberalism.
We resist the fear of otherness that grants the operators of white supremacy to press violence towards our communities.
The power of fear blinds feelings of dignity towards one another, justifies hate, insparks violence and evil
and arrests the development of all oppressed.
We strive to dismantle this fear with education, relieve hate with love, we strive to recoup and restore all that was stripped from us starting with our voices
We represent the Otherness of possible worlds, possible versions of ourselves, that are not yet realized. “Normal” bodies are upheld in their dominant position, and could not exist, without all of us, the monstrous others.
We are a mirror held up in front of you, which reflects your truest self.
