Matthew Chin

Re­porter

matthew.chin@guardian.co.tt

Fight­ing demons sent straight from hell, the hor­ror au­thor, screen­play writer, and child ac­tivist, San­dra Car­val­ho, gives the pro­tag­o­nists of her nov­el, The Guardians, a deep­er reach in­to the lives of read­ers and fans of the hor­ror genre.

The book, pub­lished in 2015 and lat­er re­pub­lished as a re­vised ver­sion in 2018, is now be­ing turned in­to a video trail­er, set to be re­leased lat­er this month by Nor­mal Nor­mal Films, di­rect­ed by vi­su­al artist and AI video­g­ra­ph­er Jean Benoit.

Ac­cord­ing to Car­val­ho, The Guardians is a sto­ry of light over dark­ness, tak­ing in­spi­ra­tion from the Bible. It fol­lows a cou­ple, Fa­ther Helder Pont and Si­ta Tay­lor, who must work to­geth­er to fight an evil force re­leased from hell over­tak­ing the Vat­i­can City and threat­en­ing to de­stroy their re­la­tion­ship. As chaos sears the earth and the hearts of men, Helder must bat­tle demons to re­build the faith of hu­man­i­ty and de­fend the Catholic Church.

In her younger days, as a teenag­er grow­ing up in Diego Mar­tin, Car­val­ho said she was en­tranced by comics, crime nov­els, and para­nor­mal sto­ries. Her fas­ci­na­tion with these gen­res lin­gered with her through­out the years, lead­ing her to write her own sto­ries.

To de­vote her­self more to what she loved to do, she had re­cent­ly re­tired af­ter 26 years as a di­rec­tor at a tourism com­pa­ny. She has al­ways been in love with the hor­ror genre. “I had this gift and would al­ways write about the end of days. I used to watch a lot of su­per­nat­ur­al things as well. I was al­ways in­ter­est­ed in the su­per­nat­ur­al world,” said Car­val­ho, who de­fines her­self as a se­mi-re­li­gious Catholic now.

An­oth­er source of in­spi­ra­tion for The Guardians stemmed from a lo­cal ex­or­cist, the late Fa­ther Regi­nald Hezeki­ah, whom she had met in pri­ma­ry school and who was well known in lo­cal Catholic cir­cles.

“One night, he start­ed to tell me a lot of his­to­ry and gave me in­sight in­to the kind of prayers from the Bible to ex­haust spir­its; it helped me with my re­search to make [The Guardians] orig­i­nal,” Car­val­ho said.

The au­thor made it clear she has nei­ther par­tic­i­pat­ed in nor had any ex­or­cisms con­duct­ed on her.

Re­flect­ing on T&T, Car­val­ho is not obliv­i­ous to the con­ser­v­a­tive pop­u­la­tion of the coun­try and re­vealed that one of her short nov­els, The Hunt, pub­lished in 2018, based on Mus­lim folk­lore, was not pub­lished lo­cal­ly.

The thriller fo­cus­es on a woman, She­ba Blair, who can sense jinns, an­cient in­vis­i­ble crea­tures ca­pa­ble of shape-shift­ing in­to an­i­mals and hu­man be­ings, and if in­jured, will seek re­venge by pos­sess­ing the per­son who hurt them, re­quir­ing an ex­or­cism. She re­frained from pub­lish­ing The Hunt lo­cal­ly in an ef­fort to avoid fac­ing po­ten­tial back­lash from con­ser­v­a­tives.

“Trinidad is con­ser­v­a­tive with a lot of re­li­gious stuff. I kept it on an in­ter­na­tion­al lev­el, so Tri­nis would not know!” Car­val­ho said, adding, “It was not by choice.”

But she thinks that by re­leas­ing a video trail­er for The Guardians, “more doors” will be opened, bring­ing the sto­ry back to life and gain­ing a wider au­di­ence.

She is open to The Guardians be­ing turned in­to a movie once an of­fer is made on an in­ter­na­tion­al lev­el.

Her next nov­el to fol­low The Guardians is Sands of Be­tray­al, a crime thriller ro­mance that fol­lows a Trinida­di­an fam­i­ly of car­tels. The book is writ­ten in Stan­dard Eng­lish, which she said would al­low it to be bet­ter wel­comed by in­ter­na­tion­al au­di­ences.

The Guardians was pub­lished by In­fin­i­ty Pub­lish­ers and is avail­able on Ama­zon. San­dra Car­val­ho is the moth­er of two sons, Adam and Si­mon.