Freaky and Feminist is a month-long series examining the social and political implications of horror’s most interesting filmmakers. 

Rape revenge runs a different course in All Cheerleaders Die, the first of many Lucky Mckee films to appear on this list. As with many female-fronted horror films, the inciting incident is one of violence against women. Outcast and filmmaker Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) decides for reasons at first unknown to infiltrate the cheerleader clique at her high school, with her sights set on football star Terry (Tom Williamson), whose life she plans to ruin. After she drives his girlfriend Tracy (Brooke Butler) away from him, Terry runs Maddy and the other cheerleaders off the road, causing the car to careen over a cliff. Lucky for them, however, Maddy’s Wiccan girlfriend Leena sees the whole thing and manages to bring them back to life using magic stones, turning them all into blood-sucking BFFs.

All Cheerleaders Die runs parallel in many ways to Jennifer’s body; the undead girls, the evil boys, the sexualized violence, and yet the tone is completely different. The love that these girls have for each other is relentlessly sincere and the boys who become prey are more than friendzoned dicks, they’re violent. They threaten girls’ lives in a real and tangible way, even before the superpowers come into play.

Throughout the film we see the boys act as a pack. They refuse to defend the girls when Terry becomes violent, seek out other girls to prey on, and eventually conspire to kidnap and kill Maddy and Tracy, the stubborn bitches who refuse to die.

Th flip side of this of course is the way that the girls rally around each other. Once turned, they act as a team when selecting victims and and through their united powers can feel pain and pleasure as one. Additionally the lesbian subplots are treated with genuine respect. Their kisses are not for the male gaze. They’re intimate, filled with the kind of compassion that arises when sexual partners make real attempts to understand and please each other.

It’s not a perfect film and there are certainly moments where the violence feels sexualized,but there’s an argument to be made that those acts are seen through the perspective of the boys whose immaturity lead to their death in the first place. Ir may be a bit of a cop-out, but then, so is the justification of rape revenge in the first place.

Allison Hart