‘T Blockers’: Teen Filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay Expands Queer Horror Universe With A New Take On Bodysnatchers
Mary Beth McAndrews
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On the heels of her award-winning feature debut So Vam releasing on VOD and coming to Shudder next month, 17-year-old transgender filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay has wrapped production on her third feature film, T Blockers.
“In So Vam, we subverted the vampire narrative from its origins in the demonization of minorities to their empowerment. In Bad Girl Boogey, we flipped the conservative message of the slasher into a powerful allegory for the struggles of the LGBTQ+ community,” Mackay stated. “With T Blockers, we subvert another subgenre, horror sci-fi in the vein of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Village of the Damned to show how hate, violence, and oppression rise from the lowest and most base part of our psyches and spreads.”
Read the T Blockers synopsis below:
When ancient parasites that thrive on hatred rise from beneath a small town, taking the most fearful and susceptible as hosts, a young trans filmmaker struggling to transition in increasingly hostile times for LGBTQ+ people, finds herself the only one who can sense the possessed, and rally the resistance before the horror escapes and spreads.
Alice Maio Mackay directs a screenplay co-written by Ben Pahl Robinson and lensed by cinematographer and editor Aaron Schuppan. Trans femme actor Lauren Last and non-binary actor Lewi Dawson star in T Blockers. Etcetera Etcetera from Rupaul’s Drag Race Down Under appears as a tv horror host. There are also cameo voice-overs by trans actor Joni Ayton-Kent and comedian Cassie Workman.
“T Blockers adds to a thematic trilogy of deeply resonant and explicitly queer, cross-genre allegories with an authenticity we rarely ever get to see. Alice Maio Mackay is more than a young filmmaker. She is the future of horror,” states Kay Lynch, founder and director of the Salem Horror Fest.
Mackay’s second feature Bad Girl Boogey will have its Northeast Premiere in Salem Massachusetts on Thursday, October 13 with the world premiere of her new short in tribute to Ed Wood called Howl of the Werewolf.
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