Screened as part of NZIFF 2017

Tragedy Girls 2017

Directed by Tyler MacIntyre Incredibly Strange

At once giddily postmodern and subtly disturbing, this hilarious Gen Y splatter-farce finds two social media-obsessed high school girls fixated on becoming famous when a serial killer moves into town.

USA In English
98 minutes DCP

Director

Producers

Anthony Holt
,
Armen Aghaeian
,
Edward Mokhtarian
,
Cameron Van Hoy
,
Tara Ansley
,
Craig Robinson

Screenplay

Chris Lee Hill
,
Tyler MacIntyre. Based on an original screenplay by Justin Olson

Photography

Pawel Pogorzelski

Editor

Martin Pensa

Production designer

Mars Feehery

Costume designer

Dakota Keller

Music

Russ Howard III

With

Alexandra Shipp (McKayla Hooper)
,
Brianna Hildebrand (Sadie Cunningham)
,
Jack Quaid (Jordan Welch)
,
Nicky Whelan (Mrs Kent)
,
Kerry Rhodes (Drew)
,
Timothy V. Murphy (Sheriff Blane Welch)
,
Elise Neal (Mrs Hooper)
,
Marycarmen Lopez (Trish)
,
Rosalind Chao (Mayor Campbell)
,
Kevin Durand (Lowell)
,
Craig Robinson (Big Al)

Festivals

SXSW 2017

Elsewhere

Sadie and McKayla are high school best friends. The two are social media-obsessed partners in crime, reporting on a serial killing spree in their sleepy midwestern town in the hope of gaining more than 15 minutes of online infamy. When things don’t move fast enough for the ruthlessly ambitious pair, they decide to take matters into their own hands. As the bodies pile up and the girls’ hunger for fame drives a wedge between them, the serial killer on the loose has devious plans of his own.

Deliriously anarchic in its deconstruction of genre, Tragedy Girls will generate much goodwill with horror diehards. With nods to everything from Carrie to Cannibal Holocaust, the film also delivers fantastically gooey practical splatter FX in spades.

Send-ups of horror films have come thick and fast in the 21st century. Whereas Wes Craven (Scream) and others turned the original slasher movies on their head, genre-savvy millennials are now having to out-meta each other with films like Final Girls and Tucker & Dale vs Evil. So it’s refreshing that Tyler MacIntyre’s debut feature avoids Xeroxing the competition. It’s one of the funniest horror comedies since Jason and the Mean Girls went to see Clueless together. — AT