Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk, The Boondocks, Seven Seconds) will executive produce Slay, a new horror-themed drama being developed for The CW, as reported by Variety. King’s younger sister Reina will join her in producing the series for Royal Ties Productions, a company they founded together.

Slay will reportedly follow the exploits of a Black teenage girl growing up in Virginia who has to use her inherited supernatural abilities to protect her community from the forces of evil, Variety reports. Virginia has a reputation as an alleged hotbed of spectral energy; the state’s oldest ghost tour has been a staple of its tourism industry for over a quarter of a century.

The show hits close to home for its writer and co-executive producer, Julian Johnson (Monsters and Mysteries in America, Prodigal Son), who was born and raised in Norfolk. In 2017, she wrote, co-produced and acted in the short film Crawford Road, named for a Virginia location infamous for its alleged haunted legacy.

 

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I am so grateful to this team for believing in my story telling. I sold the pitch in the room and it was the most surreal moment of my life. All the late nights, switching careers and being broke, overcoming brain injuries, moving away from my family and friends, and working fifty-eleven side jobs, while trying to be the hardest worker in the room paid off. I had the gift of crying on the phone with my family. We did it. ALL GLORY TO GOD! God showed me his grace and glory in 2020. I fall on my face in gratitude and am humbled by this opportunity. I spoke life into 2020 in the face of uncertainty, worked on this project while my neighborhood was under siege, and worked on the pitch with no power and an historic heat wave and fires in California. Amazing things happen when you forge ahead in seemingly insurmountable circumstances with a get it done attitude. I still have a ways to go. I will be working around the clock and a bit hard to reach. There is a bunch of work ahead. But thank you to every single person who has believed in me. THIS IS FOR YOU. 💕🙏🏽🙌🏽❤️ YOU CAN “SLAY” WHATEVER YOU SET YOUR MIND TO. #slay #showcreator #cw #cbs #deadline #blackgirlmagic #allglorytogod #gloryinc

A post shared by Julian Johnson, MBA, MFA (@_julianjohnson) on Oct 13, 2020 at 3:05pm PDT

Regina King, meanwhile, recently cinched her fourth Emmy for her role as Detective Angela Abar in HBO’s Watchmen. She was also named as one of Glamour‘s Women of the Year. Her feature-length directorial debut, the historical drama One Night in Miami, is scheduled to open in select theaters on Christmas Day prior to its arrival on Amazon Prime on January 15th, 2021, Variety reports. The film made history this year when it became the first fiction film directed by a Black American woman selected for inclusion in the Venice Film Festival, according to The Guardian.