Karen Movie Got Death Threats & Racist Letters From Real-Life Karens
A producer from the thriller film Karen said that filmmakers had to deal with real-life Karens calling the police and making death threats on set.
[as originally published on screenrant.com]
A producer on the film Karen says filmmakers received death threats and racist letters from real-life Karens during production. The dark thriller movie is a visual amalgamation of the Karen trope, a name typically used to describe a white woman who uses entitled and often racist logic to police the behaviors of others. The film, while being a critical bomb, was released at the beginning of September.
Karen stars Taryn Manning as the titular character, who makes it her mission to harass and displace the new Black family that moved into her neighborhood. Cory Hardrict and Jasmine Burke star as Malik and Imani, the couple that moves into the upper-middle-class area and is tormented by their racist neighbor. The film is directed by Coke Daniels and fans on Twitter have compared the film to Jordan Peele's Get Out. But while Get Out was a commercial and critical success, Karen is currently at 17% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes.
In an interview with the Murder Master Music Show on YouTube, Karen producer Sevier Crespo says that the production team was harassed by neighbors of the filming locations. A few months before Karen was set to film, the neighborhood in which they were planning to shoot made the news because members of the community had put notes in the mailboxes around the area basically saying, as Crespo recalls, "We want to preserve this neighborhood. We want to keep it as white as possible." He added that the letters made his "stomach turn" as he worried about the safety of a diverse cast and film crew coming into the area to film. It was exacerbated by fears about the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing contentious election.
The incidents happened in an Atlanta suburb where Karen producers rented out homes to film in. Crespo said the homeowners and direct neighbors didn't cause problems but people in the neighborhood weren't happy. The situation escalated when a post was made on the community website about the nature of the film. "We had people flying drones, taking photos, calling the police, calling the HOA, and complaining," Crespo said. "It was like people are calling, there were a few death threats. There was a lot of, 'We're suing if you make us look bad." Crespo said the remarks were aimed at production in general, the folks providing shooting spaces to the crew, and a particular individual involved with the film.
While the Karen film ended up being made without a hitch, the situation shows that some people were truly threatened by a film using racially motivated actions as satire. As Crespo put it, it's like life imitating the art they were attempting to make. So it wasn't just that they had to film scenes for Karen of neighbors calling the police on harmless, perfectly legal activities, but live it in real-time while making the film.