Desmon Heck is an up-and-coming actor, producer, and director known for a variety of projects including NCIS: New Orleans, Criminal Minds, La La and Spider. Spider is a film he wrote and directed and starring Novi Brown from Sistas. Brown plays a woman who is so desperate for a man’s affection that she uses murder and witchcraft to make herself irresistible. There’s an underlying social commentary about racism, and standards of beauty.

Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr. is also a rising filmmaker who is known for a variety of shorts. However, his movie Black Box was distributed by Blumhouse in 2020, and he snagged Phylicia Rashad to play his leading evil lady. Black Box is about a single father who loses his wife and memory in a car accident. He undergoes experimental treatments to try to get back to normal but those experiments, performed by a seemingly smart and stable scientist (Rashad) have a more sinister purpose that unfolds as the movie plays out.

Robert O’Hara wrote and directed 2011’s The Inheritance, starring Golden Brooks, Rochelle Aytes, and Keith David. The Inheritance is about five cousins who end up at a family home in the middle of winter for a family reunion. Their meet-up goes left when they discover that they are there to secure their inheritance, a fortune that dates back several generations. However, their elders teach them a hard lesson, which is that they have to work for that inheritance, and they may not all make it.

Derrick Hammond has worked in a variety of capacities, from editor to cinematographer to producer, and more, on movies like Men in Black 3, Chase Street, and more. One of his most recent films he directed is Caroltyn, starring Danny Trejo. Caroltyn is about a woman named Kofi who discovers a demonic entity killing the children in her small town. Fearing that her daughter is next, Kofi knows she must spring into action to conquer the demon.

Nikyatu Jusu has been noted as a new filmmaker to watch. Her 2019 film, Suicide by Sunlight, is about a Black vampire who can day-walk because she is protected by her melanin. She must learn to suppress her thirst for blood in order to regain custody of her estranged train daughters. Jusu’s latest film, Nanny, became the first horror film to win the Sundance grand jury prize earlier this year and was picked up for distribution by Jordan Peele’s Monkeypaw Productions. Nanny is about an immigrant nanny navigating life in New York City while caring for the child of an Upper Eastside family. Eventually, she is forced to confront a scary truth that threatens her American Dream. Nanny will be in theaters on November 23 and on Prime Video on December 16.