Alice Maio Mackay, Alexandra McVicker, and Avalon Fast on what it means to be trans in horror, and why The Serpent’s Skin is arriving right now
Horror has a long, complicated history with trans bodies. Most of it is exploitative. Some of it is genuinely interesting. Almost none of it has been made by trans people. The genre built its mythology around certain kinds of transgression, and trans bodies got folded into that mythology in ways that ranged from lazy to actively harmful. The killer in drag, the twist reveal, the monster whose horror is rooted in a body that doesn’t match expectations.
That history sits in the background of every conversation about trans filmmakers working in horror right now, whether anyone mentions it or not.
Alice Maio Mackay is twenty-one years old and has made six feature films. Her latest, The Serpent’s Skin, opens in theaters across New York, Los Angeles, and a run of cities that surprised even her. Alexandra McVicker, who plays the film’s lead, is a trans actress known from Vice Principals who came out publicly after that role and stepped in front of the camera again for the first time here. Avalon Fast, who plays the other half of the film’s central relationship, is a filmmaker in her own right and found the production arriving at a personally significant moment.
I talked to all three of them before the theatrical run. What follows is about the film, but more than that it’s about what it looks like when trans people are the ones deciding how trans stories get told.
The Demon Comes From Inside
Mackay’s earlier films locate the threat externally. Transphobia becomes a vampire in So Vam, an alien body-horror invasion in T Blockers. The monster is always something coming for the trans characters from outside. In The Serpent’s Skin, for the first time, the demon is summoned from within. It rises from the unresolved insecurities the central characters are carrying into their relationship. I asked her why she made that shift.
“I think it was just time to part from my usual thing. The last few films it’s kind of been like the political landscape, the outside being the evil and the villainous thing, and the characters have to defeat that. This time I wanted to take it inwards. It’s still a political movie, but I wanted the queer characters to look inwards and defeat their own traumas and personal demons, and how those might transpose onto others around them.”
That’s a more exposed kind of filmmaking than locating the danger in the world. The world being the enemy is legible and satisfying. Your own unhealed wounds being the thing that summons the danger is something else.
The film is also consciously in dialogue with the late-90s supernatural girl-power television Mackay grew up watching. Buffy, The Craft, Charmed. Those shows had queerness present but rarely named, power that read feminist without ever quite committing to the word. I asked what she took from them and what she wanted to correct.
“There are issues with some of those shows. Often you look at Buffy and like, Joss Whedon was the creator, there are those kinds of things. But for me I wanted to make the film through the lens of those shows, taking the tropes and sometimes the hidden queerness, and just make that the text. Make it as explicit as possible rather than hiding anything or keeping it to metaphors, which those early shows did with their queer themes.”
That’s the project in a sentence. She takes the nostalgic framework and finishes the sentences those shows left open. The queerness is text, not subtext. The trans identity is the weather the story lives in, not the twist at the end.
The Room That Gets Built
Mackay is public about her commitment to queer and gender-diverse cast and crew on every production. Most interviewers ask her why. The more revealing question is what it actually changes in practice.
“I’ve been on sets that haven’t had those environments and you can still make something great, but you still have to explain why you’re doing something, what this means. Whereas if you have a predominantly trans or queer cast and crew, it kind of eases off the pressure. You all believe in the story, you all understand the themes and elements, no one’s having to stop at a scene and be like: what does this mean.”
Fast, coming to the film as a director herself, described something similar from the other side. Her director brain essentially switched off once she was on set, which she credited to the environment Mackay built.
“I went into this just purely as an actor and that is what I wanted to do, and I really found as soon as I was on set the background of production had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel any responsibility for it and I was able to just completely be in the world of being an actor. Alex and I were big divas on set. We definitely didn’t have any role in the directing side of things.”
The Weight of Being a Corrective
The harder version of this question: horror has a long history of using trans bodies badly. Mackay is part of a generation of trans filmmakers shifting who actually holds the camera. Does she feel that weight?
“I don’t know. I’ve never really felt that pressure, or a pressure in that sense. For me, ever since I was a child I’ve always just wanted to be a storyteller and tell stories. From my first feature to this one, I’ve kind of just wanted to write what I wanted to see reflected on the screen and haven’t really worried too much about outside voices or pressure.”
She didn’t start making films to correct the record. She started making films because she wanted to make films, and the trans experience happened to be her experience, so that’s what ended up on screen. The politics arrived as a consequence of the authenticity, not the other way around.
There’s a follow-up worth pushing on. If the audience is primarily queer people who already agree, is there a risk that the monster-as-transphobia metaphor works too smoothly? That someone can enjoy it without ever having to sit with what it’s actually about?
“I feel like it means a lot, it’s really special, when a trans or queer person has a connection to the films. But my work has played at genre festivals that aren’t queer-specific, and a lot of the audiences range from young to middle-aged men who just love horror. With T Blockers, them coming and being like: I never thought about a trans person in general, seeing them and what they have to deal with. I think that is equally special. I’m not making something educational, but it’s kind of nice having two ends of the spectrum seeing different things and picking up on different parts of the stories.”
She’s not claiming the films convert anyone. She’s saying they work on multiple frequencies, and different audiences catch different signals from the same film.
The First Time on Camera as Yourself
Alexandra McVicker played Robin Shandrell on Vice Principals. She came out as a trans woman after that. The Serpent’s Skin is the first feature she’s made since.
Anna’s story begins with an act of leaving: she gets out of her transphobic hometown and doesn’t look back. There’s an obvious parallel in McVicker’s own life, and she spoke to it directly.
“The theme of leaving an environment that restricted you is very true for me. I was able to explore and understand myself more when I left home, when I wasn’t around my family and the area I grew up in. That was a theme I could relate to for sure.”
On what it was like to step back in front of the camera as herself:
“Acting was such a huge part of my life, and I buried myself in it so deeply before because I felt like it was the only thing I had to explore and feel, to get away from myself a little bit. Outside of acting I didn’t care about life in a lot of ways, because I was so uncomfortable in myself. Now stepping back into acting has been really strange. My life feels so much more full in other ways that sometimes I feel really distracted, and that intense drive that I had before is still there, but it’s not the same.”
What the performance actually does is specific and difficult: she’s playing someone who is hiding, from the inside, while not hiding herself. That distinction carries the film.
Divinely Timed
Avalon Fast directed Honeycomb at nineteen and Camp in 2025, both award-recognized. She came to The Serpent’s Skin as a peer of Mackay’s, not just as a cast member.
On what the film meant to her outside of the craft:
“It came at a really important time for me. I wasn’t necessarily closeted before, but I definitely wasn’t open as a queer person. Finding this role and having the opportunity to work with Alice and Alex felt really important to that time, completely removed from being an actor or a director. Just personally, it felt really important, and kind of divinely timed.”
On keeping Gen from going flat, since a grounded and confident character can read as inert without something real underneath:
“There was such a conflict that came up early, and it didn’t have to do with our relationship. It was something inside of me that I’d put onto somebody else, which becomes a deep conflict within the story. I think when you try to be interesting it can come off a little strange. I just tried to be really honest with her character. I resonated with this feeling of having something like evil inside of you. I think it’s a common female, or maybe just a human experience, to feel fundamentally wrong, to have this thing inside of you that you can’t understand.”
Playing Outside New York and LA
The Serpent’s Skin is opening wider than Mackay expected. It’s playing in Texas. It’s playing in cities that weren’t on the original list. Mackay called it surreal.
“It’s my largest release, and the film is playing in places I wouldn’t expect it to. There’s something really special to me that my film is playing outside of the New York and LA areas. Having that broader reach, I hope outside of queer audiences, cis straight men see the film and find it something different as well.”
Across six features, made between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one, Mackay has built a body of work where the trans experience is never the tragedy, never the twist, never the thing the film is secretly really about beneath the supernatural scaffolding. It is just the story. The horror is horror. The love story is a love story. The monster is a monster.
That sounds simple. It is not simple. Almost no one in the history of the genre has done it.
When McVicker and Fast were each asked what they want someone to carry out of the theater if they saw themselves in the film, they gave answers that rhymed with each other without having coordinated.
McVicker said: stop blocking yourself. Believe that someone else might be able to see you in a light you can’t see yourself in.
Fast said: the possibility of finding a love that feels safe and comfortable, and lets you see parts of yourself you couldn’t see before.
Both were talking about the film. Both were also talking about something else.
—The Serpent’s Skin is now playing in New York and Los Angeles.
Here’s the rundown of the theatrical dates:
3/27 – 4/2 — Brooklyn, NY – Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn
As part of Fantastic Fest Presents showcase
** Opening night Q&A w/ Maio Mackay, McVicker, and Fast moderated by Jack Haven (I Saw the TV Glow)
3/28 — Catskill, NY – Community Theater
** Q&A with Maio Mackay moderated by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow)
4/2 — San Francisco, CA — Roxie Theater
** Q&A with Maio Mackay moderated by Frameline Executive Director Allegra Madsen
4/3 – 4/9 — Los Angeles, CA – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema DTL
** Opening night Q&A with Maio Mackay moderated by Misha Osherovich (Freaky, She’s the He)
4/4 — Los Angeles, CA – Vidiots
** Q&A with Maio Mackay and Vera Drew moderated by comedian Roz Hernandez
4/10, 4/11 — Denver, CO – Sie FilmCenter
4/11 — Boston, MA – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Boston Seaport
4/11 — Chicago, IL – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Wrigleyville
4/11 — Dallas, TX – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Cedars
4/11 — Denton, TX – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Denton
4/11 — New York, NY – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Lower Manhattan
4/11 — Yonkers, NY – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Yonkers
4/11 — Raleigh, NC – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Raleigh
4/11 — San Antonio, TX – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Park North
4/11 — San Francisco, CA – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema New Mission
4/11 — Santa Clara, CA – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Valley Fair
4/11 — Woodbury, MN – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Woodbury
4/11 — Naples, FL – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Naples
4/11, 4/13 — Denver, CO – Alamo Drafthouse Cinema Sloans Lake
4/11, 4/14 — Austin, TX – Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar
4/25 — Sacramento, CA – The Dreamland Cinema
5/14 — Sebastopol, CA – Rialto Cinema
6/8 — Portland, OR – Clinton Street Theater