The trailer for Tragedy Girls, a new slasher satire about teen girls who go on a murder spree to boost their joint social media account, landed today. At first glance, I’m delighted by all the movies that it brings to mind: Mean Girls, Scream, Heathers, Clueless, and more. I love how bright and filtered and perfectly framed some of these scenes look, and the two young leads look hilarious and wry. (You’ll remember Brianna Hildebrand as Negasonic Teenage Warhead in Deadpool, and Alexandra Shipp as Storm in X-Men Apocalypse.)
However, some parts of the official synopsis have me curious. “Best friends Sadie and McKayla are on a mission,” it reads, “to boost their social media fandom as amateur crime reporters hot on the trail of a deranged local serial killer. After they manage to capture the killer and secretly hold him hostage, they realize the best way to get scoops on future victims would be to, you know, murder people themselves. As the @TragedyGirls become an overnight sensation and panic grips their small town, can their friendship survive the strain of national stardom? Will they get caught? Will their accounts get verified?”
Now, when I read that a script written by two dudes and directed by another will examine “the strain of national stardom” on a young female friendship, my Spidey senses do start to tingle for a potential sexist trash fire – and I recognize that’s a little unfair. The trailer, thankfully, doesn’t look like it’s going that way, and the early reviews seem pretty pleased. But with a premise like that, this movie needs to have something interesting, funny, and honest to say about high school girls and their relation to social media – and LOL-ing at and condemning teen girls as a class is NAHT an interesting take.
I’m definitely hopeful based on the trailer, but this movie’s only going to go one of two ways: (1) it’ll be a misogynist trash fire which posits at its core that teen girls on Instagram are the true root of modern evil and all female friendship is a catty contest for domination (2) it’ll be a bloody, funny, and smart satire of slasher films, flipping the script on a genre that’s so often predicated on women’s victimhood and isolation by making its women clever, nightmarish monster-friends instead.
Tragedy Girls first premiered at South by Southwest back in March, where initial buzz was pretty great and it was picked up for wider release on October 20, 2017.
What’d you all think, though?
(Via Entertainment Weekly; image via screengrab)
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