There is great news from the ever-expanding segment
of independent horror films from African diaspora directors and producers…and
of new Black filmmakers from St. Louis like Michael Larnell (“Cronies”). 

Filmmaker Jeffrey Thompson is in full
pre-production on his horror feature film "The Bubbleheads: Legend of
Carrico Road." In the film, a fugitive and a news reporter’s night take a
deadly turn for the worse as they stumble upon a family of bloodthirsty
cannibals in backwoods Missouri. 
The cannibal family is based on an urban legend from Thompson’s hometown
of Saint Louis, Missouri.

Thompson gained notoriety in 2014 when his concept
trailer for “The Bubbleheads,” shot and edited on an iPhone, was the number one
story on the popular Horror Society website for almost a week.  It was viewed over 37,000 times, and
sustained over 2000 shares and likes on Facebook, according to Mitchell Wells, editor-in-chief
of Horror Society.  Wells goes on to
say that the popularity of the trailer is also based on recent horror movie
trends of, “reality or true event stories that filmmakers are coming up with…movies
like “The Conjuring,” “Paranormal Activity” and other similar films. “

According to The Riverfront Times and the St.
Louis Paranormal Research Society, the legend of the “Bubbleheads” themselves
are: either “a family who took experimental drugs that caused their heads to
swell to the size of large pumpkins,” and the government (or some big pharmaceutical
company) hid them away on the isolated Carrico Road (colloquially called
‘Bubblehead Road’) just south of the Missouri River, or they are an old
generation St. Louis family who through years of inbreeding, “have descendants
of the original settlers developed hydrocephaly, or "water on the brain,"
which caused their heads to be oversized, hence the term
"bubblehead."” 

Either way, that sounds crazy creepy. 

Thompson, who has a history in comic book
writing and video game development, tells us that in addition to speaking to
executives at major film companies, he has also secured commitments from key
crew members, including, co-writer Bernard Kenney, cinematographer Dan Kneece
(“The Confession”) who has also worked with auteur David Lynch, producer John
Anderson III, and SFX expert Tony Rosen, designer of the Annabelle doll from
“The Conjuring.”

Check out the concept trailer and stay tuned
to S&A for more on Jeffrey Thompson and “The Bubbleheads: Legend of Carrico
Road.”

Curtis Caesar John is a longtime contributor
to Shadow And Act, for which he created the feature ‘This Week in Black Television.’  Currently the Film Editor for Bold As
Love Magazine, he is also a producer on the upcoming doc BlaxploITALIAN, and the
founder and executive director of the forthcoming Brooklyn, NY microcinema The Luminal
Theater. Follow him on Twitter at @MediaManCurt.