Satranic Panic | 2023
Zarif in Alice Maio Mackay’s SATRANIC PANIC.
If we don't tell our own stories - who will? For a film like Satranic Panic, an indie Australian horror film directed by a 19-year-old trans woman, its very existence feels like an act of rebellion. It's certainly messy, its edges ragged and unrefined, but that DIY aesthetic is part of what makes it feel so authentic. What director Alice Maio Mackay (who has now made five feature films before the age of 20) is doing here is reclaiming trans stories from cis framework.
The film's protagonist, Arla (Cassie Hamilton) is a transgender woman whose hormone replacement therapy grants her the power to sense demons. After the death of a close friend, she and her non-binary bestie, Jay (Zarif) hit the road to uncover the evil dealings of a Satanic cult that is determined to destroy them. It's here that Satranic Panic subverts the narratives thrust upon trans people by religious zealots by framing the demons as enemies of transness. The demonic forces in Satranic Panic are diametrically opposed to transgender people because transgender people have found joy and peace in living openly as their true selves, a kind of beauty that is anametha to the evil forces of Hell. Our villain is an egg (that's a trans person who hasn't yet realized they're trans, for all my cisgender readers out there) who takes out their self-loathing on trans people out of jealousy, an act that could easily play on transphobic stereotypes but in Mackay's hands feels revelatory, a deliberate pushback against detrans grifters who seek to throw other trans people under the bus to ingratiate themselves with rightwing ideologues.
It's garish, it's subversive, it's CAMP - a phantasmagorical neon-colored romp that mixes horror, comedy, and whatever else Mackay decides to throw in along with the kitchen sink. What happens when you're a trans lesbian in love with the daughter of the leader of a satanic cult that wants to murder you? Satranic Panic has all the answers and more. There's just something so gratifying about seeing a film by queer people for queer people that has little interest in cishet perspectives of it. There's a defiance to its chaotic style - giving us a protagonist whose superpower is rooted in her transness, where transphobia is a symptom of evil and self-loathing is the root of weaponized hate. Sure, it's unpolished - but that's part of what makes it so special; it thumbs its nose at respectability politics at every turn. Like all the best B-movies, the special effects are low-rent, the performances are uneven, and its ambition occasionally overshoots its reach, but there's a passion and a fire here that's hard to ignore, something indicative of an artist with a singular point-of-view.
Compare this to something like The Danish Girl, a painfully "respectable" period piece that portrays being transgender as an act of noble suffering in the face of societal prejudice and misunderstanding. Satranic Panic doesn't really care if society understands; it's giving us demon-slaying trans people who are taking down evil and looking fabulous doing it, wielding magical weapons, and performing musical numbers in drag shows with equal aplomb. We need more films like this and more filmmakers like Alice Maio Mackay who are out there telling our stories on their own terms. She takes the vibes of psychotronic VHS exploitation horror and rebrands into a gleeful deconstruction of binary gender narratives, creating something both silly and electrifying, a perfect combination for a new vanguard of independent queer cinema.
