I wanted to have magical powers when I was very young. I gravitated towards art about witches such as television shows like Sabrina the Teenage Witch and films like Kiki’s Delivery Service. I also became enamoured with the X-Men because their awareness of a mutant gene separated them from everyday society, and their mutant abilities were usually powerful in their own right. It all felt a little bit like my earliest understandings of transness. My first grade teacher in elementary school once had us engage in a writing prompt where students were told to structure their piece around the question of superpowers. I remember most of my classmates wishing for super strength or flight or speed, but I wanted to transform like the shape-shifter Mystique. In hindsight, my fascination with witches was born of an identification with girls who were not like everyone else, but it was also a cry-for-help, because I felt powerless, and I wished I had the strength to do something to enact change in my day to day life.
The facts of my childhood are usually fuzzy, and my life since transitioning has occasionally felt like a suspended state of adolescence, because of my second puberty and with the realization that I probably need at least one more surgery before my body will feel like it belongs to my brain. This is all to say that I’m particularly prone to admiring Alice Maio Mackay’s latest YA-adjacent romp about two witches who have fallen in love with one another and fight off threats to their queer community. While watching The Serpent’s Skin I couldn’t stop thinking about how much I would have obsessed over a movie like this one when I was thirteen or fourteen, because I loved The Craft and Ginger Snaps and May, but in all of those movies I had to create a makeshift representation and find notes of my transness through cis women. The new trans cinema gives me so much hope because trans teenagers today do not have to do this. They have movies made for them by trans people who understand the absences of our adolescent experience, and the longing, the joy, and the exhaustion that comes with being a trans person. It’s a cliche to say that I wish I had a movie like this one growing up, but it’s probably healthy to afford myself some grace, and relish in the fact that the statement is true, because even now, in my thirties, I am happy to have loved The Serpent’s Skin.
The Serpent’s Skin is actress Alexandra McKiver’s first film since transitioning and she stars as Anna—a tender, but sardonic young woman looking to escape her abusive stepfather after moving in with her older sister Dakota (Charlotte Chimes). They have a lovely chemistry with one another, and the camaraderie of their relationship is shown to us in an early humorous moment when Anna stumbles upon a framed autographed portrait of shock-rocker-turned-transphobe Alice Cooper. Dakota makes an excuse that she got that before he went full boomer, and Anna quietly replies, “we’ll always have Teenage Frankenstein”. Little moments like that go a long way for endearing an audience to character dynamics. Mackay has always had a good sense for the way that women speak with one another, and she has only grown more confident in her filmmaking, giving characters time to breathe in moments of conversation. Anna settles into town after getting a job at a record store, and she quickly discovers that she has supernatural abilities after she uses her mind—Scanners style—to fend off a robber. But her innate magical powers are not strictly rendered through the guise of superheroics. It’s rooted in something far more sensual: a dreamy link she has with another supernatural woman in town named Gen (played by Canadian filmmaker Avalon Fast).
Fellow trans filmmaker Vera Drew once again returns as editor after working with Mackay on Carnage for Christmas, and her maximalist tendencies mesh with the genre phantasmagorie of Mackay’s work nicely. She foregoes stock-standard edits for scene transitions, and indulges in De Palma style overlay techniques, as seen in the realization that Gen and Anna are romantically intertwined via cross-cutting. In that sequence, her bedroom encounter with “the only hottie in her apartment complex” Danny (Jordan Dulieu), is overlayed with Gen touching herself in her bedroom. Gen seeks out Ann shortly thereafter, and much of the film chronicles their budding relationship with one another as witches and as lovers. The easiest point of comparison to make with The Serpent’s Skin is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Mackay has stated that she is a big fan, pointing to its character development, and the emotional turmoil, driven by genre elements, as a point of profound inspiration. Buffy is older than she is, and in addition to the syndicated glory of having grown up with the Slayer, it’s also fair to say that there’s a little bit of the cheesy, but genuine odes to eternal love of Twilight in her work as well. Mackay has always been smart about the way that she uses genre as a means to elucidate the potential absences of a trans coming-of-age within those modes, and to comment on the political struggles of her characters without it becoming overbearing. There is a lightness of touch to Mackay’s work that is really energizing, not just within the scope of queer cinema but in horror at large. This can be seen in a moment when Gen and Anna are standing by a flyer that’s been stapled onto a women’s restroom proclaiming it a space for REAL WOMEN while Gen shows her how to pull energy from her body into the tip of finger in the shape of a flame, and she promptly lights the signage on fire. It isn’t just a political scene, but a moment of foreplay between the two, when they find themselves in the bedroom listening to the rhythm of each other’s bodies shortly thereafter.
Mackay’s films are refreshing in the scope of modern horror cinema, because she is bound to the integrity of her characters and the film itself, rather than opting for a deconstruction of the genre in pursuit of serious minded thematics and meaning. This isn’t to say that she isn’t serious, but that she is great at uses her political intelligence with a light touch. There’s plenty of resonance within important subject matter in her films, and this is especially prudent in how her films casually place characters around transphobia, and in moments, where they are confronted by it, but Alice’s fleet qualities mean that they reside within the film as a recognizable exterior element, rather than a dominant one. As a result, her films retain a purity of fun, almost b-movie genre expression through her own point of view. They invite us to think about what transphobia means for her characters, and what her films are communicating through the scope of queerness in horror without it only being about that political element.
It would be unfair to say that The Serpent’s Skin is only about combating transphobia, in the same way that it would be unfair to say that any trans person’s life was dominated by that political fight. The ambient quality of potential transphobia isn’t ignored, but she allows her characters to have an inner-life that isn’t beholden to thinking about it 24/7. In The Serpent’s Skin, Anna has bigger things on her mind, such as her blossoming romance with Gen, and the revelation that her fling with Danny has become supernatural and dangerous. Gen and Anna and Danny are in a poly relationship of a sort, and after Gen tattoos a snake on the back of his neck, it unlocks a demonic presence within him, and he has proceeded to suck the souls out of Anna and Gen’s friend group one-by-one. They’re husks of their former selves, and their souls can only be returned by extinguishing the demon. It’s classic vampire logic, and is relatively low-stakes compared to the literal transphobic brain worms in T-Blockers, and the serial murder of the Rob Zombie-inspired Bad Girl Boogey. When they confront Danny, who now has the scowl and fangs of a made-up vampire from Buffy, it never seems as though they won’t save the day. We sit and wait for that to happen so they can get back to the hazy, soft-focus of their bedroom, and kiss, and quietly talk to one another about everything that matters and anything that might seem important.
McVicker and Fast have the kind of supple and understated chemistry that we watch movies for. In a few short acting appearances Fast has shown that she is an exceptionally good listener, and responds to her onscreen partners in an organic and detailed way that amplifies their performance. She’s brilliant as the prickly, hesitant, and conservative partner of a newly-out trans woman in Castration Movie III, and she is equally strong here as a mentor and a friend and a lover. McVicker acts in a way that is more cautious, guarded, and curious. It’s as if she is waiting to open up completely, and it is ultimately the journey the film takes to her self-realization. Like the very best episodes of YA-adjacent TV from the 90s, The Serpent’s Skin is worth watching because it shows us characters who change within and around genre elements. The greatest triumph of Anna and Gen isn’t about removing the demon from their friend, but in the way that we see Anna begin to believe in the possibilities that she is strong enough, and good enough, as who she is, and that Gen will care so deeply about her that Anna will realize all of her greatest virtues within the reflection of their love. It’s the type of movie that any teenager would be lucky enough to see, but I’m so happy that trans teenagers in particular will be able to gain confidence through a story like this one.
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