Slay world première at FrightFest, 27th August 2026
“I grew up on horror movies and Clueless, which explains a lot,” says Chloe Cruz (Zoey Luna) near the beginning of Kyra Gardner’s Slay. Her words certainly explain a lot about the movie itself, which is pitched precisely between sassily scripted saga of teen rivalry and romance, and straight-up slasher. Yet Chloe herself is at something of a crossroads. Prominent online from a very early age, first as a young trans girl (Sebastian Esquivas) whose transition was chronicled and celebrated on the social media pages of her doting mother Christine (Aya Cash), and then on her own site SoChloe as a micro-influencer, fashion icon and soft advocate for trans issues. Now on the cusp of adulthood – a different kind of transition – she wants to quit her vlogging, to leave the nest in Ohio for Hollywood, and to become a cinematic scream queen, even as her friends Kat (Malina Pauli), Finn (River Alexander) and Finn’s twin sister Faye (Talia Jackson) are contemplating college, while her adoring friend Jordi (Sean Giambrone), who directs all her online videos, wonders what the future holds in Chloe’s absence.
After her trans co-host Harmony (Reise Alexander) is brutally murdered, Chloe and her friends retreat to a remote luxury rental cabin in Shawnee Hills, along with Chloe’s boyfriend Blake (Beck Nolan), and Skye (Ruby McCollister), who is the kind of comedy stoner that has no real place in this social grouping but is required by genre and brings a lot of curveball fun to the narrative. There are pranks, games of Truth or Dare, a wake for Harmony, and all the tensions and jealousies to be expected from adolescents – but the killer is there too, dressed grotesquely in a Nicole Kidman mask. Even though these kids do everything that you should under such circumstances, barricading themselves in, trying to call for help, staying together as much as possible, it is not long before a massacre is underway, as the killer, along with some home truths, comes out of the shadows.
While there is something of Clueless in the smart, ironic repartee of Gardner and her co-writer Jimmi Simpson’s screenplay, building on a story from Catherine Clark and Luna (herself, like the character she plays, a transgender Latina), the biggest influence here is Wes Craven’s Scream series and its recent ‘requels’, right down to the brashly intrusive Gale Weathers-a-like reporter Jenna Wolfe (Shawnee Smith), the Meeks-Martin-mimicking mixed-race twins, and less welcomely, the killer’s drawn out exposition at the end (although it is delivered with considerable humour, all the funnier for being so wrong in its context). What perhaps is most interesting here is the presentation of the heroine/final girl Chloe herself: for no matter how much we may want to like her (even if her own intradiegetic audience is decidedly divided), her relentless narcissism, self-centredness, obsession with image and cutthroat attitude towards her supposed friends are repellent qualities all of which make her closely resemble the masked murderer.
Slay offers a cynical skewering of online culture, and in raising the question of who influences the influencer, offers a more complicated message than first meets the eye. What in the end Slay has to say about trans identity, however, is even more troublesome the more you think it through, with implications that are equally empowering and offensive. For while Chloe may slay as a highly visible young trans woman (although, or perhaps because, she is steadfastly superficial and no activist like Harmony), there is the suggestion (and nothing more) that her very identity might, as much as her online career, have been managed and manipulated or at the very least exploited. In a humiliating televised interview, when asked by Jenna if her transness is a need or a want, Harmony replies: “I have a take on what it feels like to be me, but my question is, why the hell do you get to have one too?” Yet Gardner’s film pushes us to have one, interrogating our positions and prejudices while leaving us to wonder if we might have just watched an updated, un-closeted reimagining of Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp (1983) where Chloe, like Angela Baker, was made not born. This is difficult material, well-suited to horror.
strap: Kyra Gardner’s Scream-like teen slasher carves up all that has contributed to a trans influencer’s identity
© Anton Bitel
