The Radical Queerness of Alice Maio Mackay
Xai in SO VAM.
Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay was not yet 18 when her debut feature, So Vam, premiered in 2021. Now 20, Mackay has a staggering five feature films under her belt, a filmography that has quickly become one of most thrilling and radical bodies of work by a queer filmmaker in ages.
Alice Maio Mackay.
They are primarily horror films, a genre that has long been associated with queerness, embraced by members of the LGBT community for its themes of alienation and existing in society as an “other.” Yet in the world portrayed in Mackay’s films, queer people are not the other; they are the heroes in stories where bigotry and prejudice are the source of all evil. It’s a defiant flipping of the script that allows queer people to reclaim their agency in a hostile world that either paints us as victims or monsters. “Let’s go make them fear us!” proclaims one queer witch in her 2021 short film, The Serpent’s Nest. It’s a theme that weaves throughout her work, right from her earliest short film, Tooth 4 Tooth (2020), and gets revisited repeatedly film after film - these queers bash back.
In So Vam, a bullied teenager gets turned into a vampire and joins a coven of queer vampires who feed on the blood of the bigoted. The way Mackay takes historically marginalized people who are often portrayed as monsters in right-wing circles and allows them to fight back against the real evildoers who seek to destroy them is so refreshing, and it serves as through-line in her work, popping up again in Satranic Panic (2023) and T-Blockers (2024). There’s a certain roughness to her work, a purposefully hangdog quality that feels as if we’re watching a bunch of friends getting together and making movies together. This can often lead to a certain campy quality - Ed Wood has clearly influenced Mackay - her 2022 short The Howl of the Werewolf is a direct adaptation of one of Wood’s short stories. We see Wood’s influence again in 2024’s T-Blockers, which is bookended by strange black and white monologues delivered right to the camera by Australian drag queen Etcetera Etcetera - not unlike an even gayer Elvira, or perhaps more accurately, Bela Lugosi’s “eye of God” work in Ed Wood films like Glen or Glenda (1953).
Lisa Fanto in BAD GIRL BOOGEY (2022). Notice the bisexual (pink and blue) lighting!
It is a campy quality that is both deliberate and born of Mackay’s limited budgets, which force her to get creative (sometimes hilariously so) with makeup and special effects. So Vam, despite its budget constraints, is a rousing artistic statement in the guise of a campy B-movie. Mackay continues to grow with each subsequent film, but this is where she made her intent clear - transgender youth fighting back against their oppressors in a film that is authentically and unapologetically queer. When our hero, a gay high schooler constantly at the mercy of his bullies, finally comes into his power, it's as a triumphant drag queen - free of the awkward self-consciousness that defined him before. He is no longer the victim, but a person entirely in control of his own identity - confident and fully blossomed into something new and beautiful. There's something so powerful in that image, and Mackay lingers on it - the finale of the film is a full drag number that allows the protagonist to be fully themselves, and it’s something another filmmaker may have truncated rather than allowed to play out in its entirety. That's what makes her films feel so radical and transgressive; they are essentially revenge fantasies filled with trans joy that are also honest about the inherent brutality of transphobic bigotry and familial trauma. Evil people may portray us as monsters, but we know who the real monsters are - and Mackay’s films are a joyful reclamation of our humanity.
For her sophomore feature, Bad Girl Boogey , Mackay gave us a Goosebumps/slasher mashup in which a haunted mask turns people into bloodthirsty killers. Here, she both establishes and continues running themes that she revisits throughout her work. It's a film about reckoning with the past - its characters dealing with the long-forgotten trauma of a small town still simmering beneath the surface. It's a theme that I think is more fully explored in Carnage for Christmas, but here, the film feels less about its protagonists and more about the metaphor embodied by the masked murderer.
Cassie Hamilton in SATRANIC PANIC (2023).
As is typical in Mackay's films, the victims of the killer are often queer, and the evil mask, a product of Nazi occultism, makes people turn their hatred toward marginalized people. What makes it interesting is that it does not make people hate - it simply brings out the hate that's already in people's hearts and gives them the courage to act on it. It allows people to release their inner hatred, much like fascist rhetoric invites people to feel comfortable enough to express prejudices they might otherwise keep to themselves out of societal pressure. The mask, which almost resembles a Guy Fawkes mask, is the real villain - like a cloak of online anonymity that makes people comfortable expressing their hatred in increasingly harmful ways. At a time when trans people are under constant attack by bad-faith actors online, this feels especially potent and unnerving. The violence enacted on the protagonists by the killer(s) manifests itself beyond the direct actions of the murderer - it also appears in nightmares and in self-harm, the trauma going beyond the physical violence and infecting every aspect of their lives. Hate creates violence beyond the physical, and that's something that Mackay conveys so indelibly. Bad Girl Boogey's rough patches feel less intentional than what we see in MacKay's other films. However, it still contains elements of the sublime - a uniquely queer reclamation of slasher horror, a genre already deeply embraced by the queer community, that examines it through a new lens.
I have already written at length about Mackay’s 2023 feature, Satranic Panic, but here once again we find the filmmaker expanding her subversions of transphobic tropes. 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 Mackay upends 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 anathema to the evil forces of Hell. The 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.
Adeline Ophelia Last in T-BLOCKERS (2024).
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. Its chaotic style feels rebellious - 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. Transness as a superpower resurfaces in T-Blockers, a film where the villains are literal brainworms. It’s a familiar theme for Mackay - trans people are superheroes in a world gone mad, and transphobia is a kind of infectious disease that must be eradicated at all costs. Yet T-Blockers shifts gears again, existing in the world of another of Mackay’s strongest influences - Gregg Araki, with its languid depiction queer alienation, allowing us to share space with queer characters who are allowed to simply be queer, to be messy, to make mistakes and then learn and grow from them.
Despite its apocalyptic plot, T-Blockers is essentially a hang-out movie featuring queer people just existing, trying to navigate dating while trans, friendships, and familial relationships. Mackay has such a keen understanding of the specific anxieties of being trans in a cisgender world, never knowing how new people will react to your transness, whether or not potential partners are really attracted to you as a person, or are simply fetishizing your identity. That the protagonist is herself a transgender filmmaker reveals how personal this film is for Mackay, essentially a self-insert in which she and her friends use their queerness and their art to combat ignorance and hate. These are characters dealing with hopelessness in the face of rising fascism - something that is all too familiar for queer people of all kinds right now. Yet rather than wallow in despair, Mackay’s characters get to fight back, taking back their power from the self-loathing incels and Nazis who seek to destroy us.
Yet, that sense of queer alienation is most keenly realized in her most recent film, Carnage for Christmas (2025), in which a transgender true-crime podcaster (Jeremy Moineau) becomes embroiled in a murder mystery of her own when she returns to her intolerant small town for Christmas. It’s a part of a grand tradition of Christmas-themed horror, from Black Christmas to Silent Night, Deadly Night - grindhouse classics that undercut and rebuke the WASP-y respectability of the typical Christmas movie. There’s a world-weariness here that seems somehow beyond the perspective of a 20-year-old filmmaker - but it also speaks to the constant trauma inflicted upon trans people simply for existing. It’s exhausting - especially as each new day seems to bring a fresh round of institutionalized hate aimed at further marginalizing us. In Carnage for Christmas, Mackay explores the way transphobic trauma can haunt us even when we put up a strong and confident front. That unhealed trauma itself is the source of the evil here that must be confronted in order to be defeated.
Jeremy Moineau in CARNAGE FOR CHRISTMAS.
While the masked killer is something of a throwback to Bad Girl Boogey, Mackay is using the aesthetic of a slasher film for a different purpose, a symbol of past trauma rather than mask through which to express hidden hatred. What the films share is a common theme of reckoning with the past - and how the lingering effects hatred can reverberate through the lives of those who have faced it. It is a nearly universal queer experience, grappling with the residual pain of suppressing identities or being hated for them once they’re out in the open - using that as a source of strength is what makes these films feel so game-changing. This isn’t queer trauma porn - it’s queer empowerment.
Rather than employing the supernatural as she does in her previous films, Carnage for Christmas is more grounded, examining how small-town bigotry and childhood trauma converge even when we think we're beyond them. Mackay also specifically turns a withering eye on chasers and how the fetishization of trans people leads to dehumanization. While not quite as stylistically invigorating as her previous films, it maintains the inherent queerness of Mackay's perspective, looking to 80s slashers to give us a unique twist on a familiar genre with a developing maturity that is fascinating to witness.
Her films may be rough around the edges, but you can feel Mackay learning and growing as an artist, finding her voice amongst the patchwork quilt of B-movie horror influences she so skillfully stitches together. Her work feels very much of Our Moment because she so keenly understands the anxieties and threats facing the trans community. They are also profoundly personal artistic statements about growing on one’s own terms, being allowed to explore, to fuck up, to become who we're meant to be without fear of judgment or reprisal. Watching a Mackay film feels revelatory - as if we are witnessing something that wasn’t possible 10 or 15 years ago. Her films are populated by primarily queer casts, many of whom appear in multiple films. In a time when being visibly queer is becoming a liability, seeing queer actors so fully embraced in both trans and cis roles. If we don’t tell our stories - who will?
Mackay stands at the vanguard of a new independent queer cinema; filmmakers like Jane Shoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), Vera Drew (The People’s Joker, and who also served as editor on Carnage for Christmas), Theda Hammel (Stress Positions), Louise Weard (Castration Movie), and many others who are telling our stories on their terms with limited (often crowd-sourced) budgets. Queer cinema is certainly not a monolith, but it’s invigorating to see so many new trans filmmakers asserting their own unique voices. For Mackay, directing five feature films before the age of 21 is an impressive feat in and of itself, but since she’s grown up in an era of both increased trans acceptance and increased anti-trans rhetoric, her films have a sense of laid-back defiance and a general sense of distaste for cishereronormative expectations. That they are such radically inventive works speaks to what a generational talent she really is, a transgender Gen Z firebrand asserting herself and claiming space in a world that increasingly seems as though it trying to hide us. She takes psychotronic VHS exploitation horror and rebrands it into gleeful deconstructions of binary gender narratives, a queer punk synthesis of horror tropes, and B-movie aesthetics electrifyingly rebranded for a new generation.
