Women and Queerness in Horror: Tragedy Girls

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Tragedy Girls.

When I sat down to write for this series, this week, I found myself needing a break. Not from writing though; as I’m sure you’ve all gathered by now, I am generally incapable of shutting up. What I needed a break from was movies that require me to think a lot. This idea came to me after spending two weeks in a row on movies that had a lot to ask of me emotionally, for good (The Perfection) or for ill (Single White Female). Looking over my options, then, I thought: this is a good week for a horror comedy.

Enter Tragedy Girls. For those who aren’t familiar, Tragedy Girls centers on two high school seniors, McKayla Hooper (Alexandra Shipp) and Sadie Cunningham (Brianna Hildebrand), who decide to take matters into their own hands when their “sleepy town” of Rosedale falls under threat from a serial killer (Kevin Durand). What ensues is a desperate, glittering haze of likes, retweets and blase, detached fascination with violence. In short order, they capture and stow away said serial killer.

When he refuses to coach them in how to be serial killers they decide to start a string of murders on their own, and frame him for them after the fact. All so they can be social media famous. Now, Tragedy Girls was released in 2017, and it’s certainly true that several recent horror movies have used the social media landscape as their stage in one way or another. Unfriended (2014) and Friend Request (2016) come to mind specifically, as do the (admittedly less well-received) Deadcon (2019) and Slender Man (2018).

What prevented Tragedy Girls from simply being another entry into a growing line of somewhat obvious and predictable “social media is scary and millennials are vapid and soulless” horror films is, for me, the way it positions its stars. This is namely due to the fact that our protagonists, the eyes through which we view this film, are in fact the slasher villains of yore. In positioning the girls this way, Tragedy Girls both plays by some unwritten rules of the slasher genre, and deliberately breaks others.

It should be said that Tragedy Girls, as avowed by one of its producers, Tara Ansley, wasn’t intended to be queer subtextually or otherwise. It should also be said that there’s enough going on between our titular @TragedyGirls that (in my view) lends itself to a queer interpretation anyway. To the point where I almost find it hard to believe that wasn’t the plan.

This wasn’t a universal experience with the film however, in fact, it was quite the opposite. As per the results of a fairly informal and small-scale Twitter poll, which was perhaps somewhat comically given the movie’s subject matter by Gayly Dreadful’s Terry Mesnard. An average of 36.4 LGBTQ+ viewers saw Sadie and McKayla as best friends, while only 19.5 LGBTQ+ viewers saw them as lovers. An even starker difference (perhaps unsurprisingly) arose for straight viewers, an average of 62.4 of whom interpreted the girls as best friends, while only 11.7 saw them as lovers.

My surprise at these results echoes Mesnard’s own. True enough, the girls never kiss or have any other explicitly romantic exchange, but I’ve watched movies that were a lot less queer than Tragedy Girls and still walked away saying, “these characters are gay because I said so.” We latch onto our scraps of subtext all the time. This is in large part because as Mesnard himself so succinctly expressed — “We’ve been trained for years to pick up on the coded queer language of film because, historically, that’s … pretty much the only representation we got.”

I’d be curious to know what informed platonic readings of Tragedy Girls. I know where I come down on this, and I think there’s a half-joking tendency (that I’ve definitely seen in myself) to grab onto queer or queer-inflected works of media and insist, “this is ours now, the straights can’t have it.” Still, the demonstrable presence of a different interpretation of this movie, including among other LGBTQ+ folks who watched Tragedy Girls, raises questions. If the girls read as straight to you or, at least, as not in love with each other, I’d encourage you to comment below and fill me in. What contributed to your read of the film and the girls’ relationship?

Of course, in the end, I can only speak for myself. Tragedy Girls is, clearly a pretty textbook case of Your Mileage May Vary. At least when it comes to the queer element. Still, for me, there was enough there in the framing and coding to render Tragedy Girls a worthwhile entry into this series. Let’s dive into why, shall we?

The most obvious (and probably the most significant) cue to Tragedy Girls’ queer element is simply in the film’s structure. Though pitched as a horror comedy — which it absolutely is — the film’s structure obeys the narrative shape of a romcom pretty much to the letter, all while dressing it up in very familiar horror terms. This movie is dripping in self-aware meta-humor, throwing in horror references and Easter Eggs left right and center. However, the story’s flow follows a different rhythm altogether.

It opens on two best friends being thick as thieves, living their quote unquote best lives — at the expense of everyone else’s — and being, it seems, completely indivisible from each other. Sadie and McKayla are a two for one. They’ve known each other all their lives. Tragedy Girls even throws in a Dirty Dancing, 10 Things I Hate About You-reminiscent socioeconomic disparity between the girls, where McKayla lives in a spacious, airy upper-middle-class home with two loving, supportive parents and Sadie lives with her single father in a mobile home.

The bond heightens and intensifies as they navigate their shared hobby. In this case, veiling their own murders behind the coverage of their true crime blog. The titular Tragedy Girls, in the pursuit of likes, retweets, and above all else, attention.

That’s it. That’s the motive. In a rejection of the idea of the tragic villain who has suffered some great injury from “normative” society that explains their actions, there is literally nothing wrong with these girls. There’s no trauma. Their home lives are fine. Sadie’s home life being the child of a single parent in a different financial bracket from McKayla and most of her peers is never presented as a cause of suffering; it’s just her life. Yet her constant assuring her father that there’s food in the fridge vaguely suggests an imbalance of who’s really the guardian in that relationship.

McKayla’s parents are warm and supportive. The girls are popular. They’re cheerleaders. They’re young, and sprightly, and beautiful. They perform just fine academically, even if their true crime fixation alternately worries and frustrates their teachers and authority figures. The people they kill haven’t even done anything wrong. They simply got in the way and made themselves convenient targets for the ongoing pursuit of the girls’ goals.

Scattered throughout the film are exchanges with boys and men. These men largely exist to be plot devices, obstacles in the way, and ultimately disposable bodies. However, they also figure in as the presence of heterosexuality in the film that complicates or even threatens Sadie and McKayla’s perfect bubble relationship.

The first instance in which we see this follows McKayla talking to her ex. Toby (Josh Hutcherson) is a motorcycle-riding charmer who seems to spout nonsense under the guise of being a “sensitive type.” He defends his own true crime coverage — which is diverting attention away from the Tragedy Girls — as important for community solidarity. This is accompanied by him blathering on about how the community needs him and that it would feel “off-brand” for him to give the girls’ own site a shout-out.

Meanwhile, Sadie looks on with mounting hostility before she interrupts the flirtation between the two and tears McKayla away. The scene then (almost immediately) cuts to Sadie insisting that they “so need to kill him,” ignoring a still moony-eyed McKayla’s admittedly lackluster objections. No surprise here: they do kill him, first by attempting to cause a motorcycle crash. Then, when the impact doesn’t kill him, they resort to stabbing him. They stab him a lot.

There’s a lot that’s comedic in this scene. The comment of “If I’m going to be murdered I’m glad it’s you” when Toby realizes McKayla is half of the duo made me laugh out loud for example. The funniest thing about it might be just how bad at this the girls are. For all the time they’ve spent following true crime, you’d think they might have learned something about where and how to fatally stab someone instead of just poking around in his abdomen and hoping for the best. Apparently not.

Later, this scene is mirrored back through a conversation between Sadie and Jordan Welch (Jack Quaid). Jordan is the socially acceptable, supportive and well-intentioned sheriff’s son who’s been helping the girls edit the videos they produce for their site. This scene places another Scream (1996) reference front and center, with McKayla and Sadie’s body language echoing this scene between Billy and Stu nearly to the letter.

With how pervasively aware this movie is of every meta joke and horror reference it hits, I find it so hard to believe no one involved in the writing and directing was aware of the homoeroticism a lot of queer Scream fans have read into the Billy and Stu relationship. Tell me I’m not just making this up. That had to be on purpose. Right? Shortly afterward, McKayla presses Sadie about her relationship with Jordan, who has been helping the girls edit their videos for their site. Sadie dismisses her concerns, stating that they’re just friends, and joking that McKayla might be “jelly”. McKayla responds darkly that she most certainly is not jelly, in a tone that makes it painfully obvious she is lying.

Of course, following from this point onward, this seemingly idyllic bond doesn’t last. In true romcom fashion, the picture-perfect outer shell of the girls’ relationship splinters apart as the attention and exposure puts too much pressure on the underlying cracks, spurring the two away from each other and toward men. Sadie starts pursuing the hetero-normative experience, beginning to date Jordan, taking over the prom committee, and positioning herself as Tragedy Girl, singular. She starts referring to herself as Tragedy Girl when the community in which she lives lauds her for saving Jordan’s life from the film’s first serial killer, Lowell. Meanwhile, McKayla essentially swaps Sadie out to partner up with Lowell, bringing to fruition a wedge that he had tried to push between them earlier in the film when he attempted to convince McKayla that Sadie would betray and abandon her.

It’s not long after these turning points that we first see the girls really argue. Much like Terry Mesnard, I had a hard time not picking up on the coding here. Again, maybe it’s incidental. Maybe we’re reaching. Still, it was hard for me to overlook the reverberations of McKayla pushing her way insistently into the frame of Sadie’s newly hetero-normative life choices to confront her about her betrayal and abandonment.

Of course, the “codespeak” the girls use here is because they’re talking about their murderous hobbies in public, but come on. “We need to talk,” McKayla insists. “Not now. We’re at school,” Sadie objects, intensely aware of the (presumably straight) girls looking on as they argue. “Who cares?!” “Lower your voice. They’re watching me.” Just as Mesnard points out, take this conversation out of its context, and suddenly you’re watching two closeted girls trying to keep their fracturing relationship on the #downlow.

The rejection with which this argument culminates, Sadie biting back that “I’ve never needed you”, turns the threat of burgeoning queerness from older horror movies (The Lost Boys, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge, Fright Night, etcetera) on its head. Because Tragedy Girls positions characters that would normally be slasher villains (the outside threat) as the protagonists, we see that Sadie wants to give up the murderous activity that, from queer slasher villains, usually represents the danger posed to the monogamous, hetero-normative nuclear family and the white-picket-fence society that favors it.

In short, Sadie wants to hang up her mask, machete, and her newly-confusing sexuality to closet herself by dating Jordan because it seems “safer”. Being with McKayla has gotten “too real.” Cue the breakup montage, showing the girls doing things alone that they used to do together. They look morose and unfulfilled as they try (and clearly fail) to move on. This is another very familiar romcom device, backed with the appropriately maudlin “Lost” by Sorcha Richardson, carrying lyrics like “Forget that girl who broke your heart.” Need I say more?

Of course, we can’t call it a romcom if our lovers don’t get back together after the tension reaches its peak heading into the third act — which, surprise surprise, they do. McKayla finally decides to pursue Sadie once more. Not to kill her, despite partner Lowell’s intention to get revenge for the girls abducting and imprisoning him, but to “save her.” From Jordan, from the prom, from following the “sheep.” In essence, she wants to save her from the closet. Thanks, kid.

This only comes about after a tearful speech from McKaylathat, much like the girls’ earlier argument, feels laden with coded speech. I admit, I froze when McKayla implored, “Do you remember our first time?” before I realized she was revealing that the girls had killed someone (Jordan’s mother) together when they were much younger. “M-Kay, don’t.” “Don’t what?” “It was an accident.” I can’t have been the only one getting flashbacks to Jennifer’s Body’s “We can play boyfriend-girlfriend like we used to” and Needy’s ensuing rejection of Jennifer, can I? “An accident? Is that what you tell yourself? Because we both wanted it …” I’m being flippant, but seriously, what is the straight explanation for that?

To Jordan’s absolute consternation and confusion the girls finally throw themselves into each other’s arms, making up like they’d never fought. In a scene that reverberated perhaps more strongly with the sensibility of coming out than anything else in the movie, Sadie calmly and bravely brushes off Jordan’s insistence that she’s not like McKayla. She brushes off his insistence that he knows and loves the “real” her. “Oh, Jay. You don’t know me at all.” You tell him, baby girl.

The girls, newly reunited, have summarily dispatched both Jordan and Lowell, and then decide to abscond together. However, not before setting the prom venue on fire and padlocking the doors so everyone in the room burns to death. Obviously, this is a nod to Carrie. Instead of being at the center of the destruction, the girls walk away hand-in-hand, and are later celebrated as the heroic survivors of the massacre. They don’t just get away with it; they’re applauded, and have a whole successful future ahead of them.

In what is probably Tragedy Girls’ very last movie reference, the last scene feels like an inversion of Thelma & Louise’s denouement. Though this scene was missing the kiss that Geena Davis’s Thelma and Susan Sarandon’s Louise exchange, I have a hard time believing I was the only one to think of it while watching the girls drive away at the end of the film. Instead of driving off a cliff to avoid capture, though, they drive off into the horizon together. They drive into their new lives, united and intact, presumably to do this all again in a new place and time. All while taking their lessons from the previous spree’s clumsiness with them.

Here’s where my interpretations get a little more abstruse. You may very well disagree, and I won’t blame you. The first thing I want to unpack here is the particular way in which McKayla and Sadie lure (or attempt to lure) the men they have eyeballed as their intended victims. In each case, they clearly understand the normative scripts of heterosexuality and the expectations of gender and sexuality they’re meant to perform. They know, in short, what men like, or at least what men are supposed to like. They know their lines. They know how to flirt with, entice, and distract boys.

Where we diverge is the why. They play these roles in the pursuit of desires that are completely alien to the men in the film. Their social media presence and the goals they chase are (by and large) incomprehensible to their principal (a man), to the sheriff (a man), to Jordan (a man), to Lowell (a man) … I could go on. In summation, their murderous extracurriculars are positioned as impenetrable to men, and therefore not for male consumption. I’ve already talked about the coding of the girls’ murderous activity as tied to their burgeoning queerness, which is, again, not for or about men.

The second thing I want to look at is the particular manifestation of their motive in a wider context. Given how much time Tragedy Girls spends referencing other horror, specifically slasher movies, I don’t think we can really wrap up a conversation about this movie without situating it within the broader arena of slasher canon. Not to mention what that means for the queer element of the film, assuming you think there is one.

As I hinted at earlier, and as Mesnard — who, at this point, has pretty much hit the nail on the head of everything I was thinking and feeling while watching this movie — further expands, Tragedy Girls specifically calls to a body of horror movies from the 1980s whose moral center ultimately requires the rejection of the homosexual “threat,” and flips them on their heads. Elm Street’s Jesse wrestles the gay metaphor back into the closet after being kissed by a girl. Fright Night’s Charley can only solidify his relationship with his girlfriend after defeating the vampire next door that has caused him so much sexual confusion. The queered, non-normative “found family” of The Lost Boys’ vampires has to be uprooted and destroyed to preserve the more “conventional” family at its core, and saving Michael’s life literally depends upon “curing” him of the vampiric (queer) “virus.”

In each of these films, the horror is only resolved by removing or thwarting the threat to straight, nuclear life and heterosexual reproduction of the family. Tragedy Girls rather deliberately ignores that expectation. Sadie and McKayla destroy what is perhaps the pinnacle of high school heteronormativity: the senior prom. They kill their boyfriends. They emasculate the aggressively straight serial killer Lowell over and over again. They do all of this, and get away with it. Instead of being killed at the end of the film, thus restoring the normative balance by vanquishing the “evil gays”, they tear the closet and the institutions that maintain it into pieces. They set it on fire, and ride off into the proverbial sunset together, presumably to do it all again somewhere else.

For all this analysis, the plot of Tragedy Girls isn’t very deep, but honestly, it doesn’t need to be. Trying to craft something really substantial here probably would have just felt out of step with the film’s glitzy, acid, splashy tone. I’m glad it didn’t go ham on trying to moralize excessively or say something painfully clever. It said what it needed to about social media influencer “branding.” It didn’t need to mention Jack the Ripper or Son of Sam for us to imagine how they might have pitched themselves if they’d had a Twitter account to masquerade behind. It said what it needed to about how easy it can be to get desensitized to violence through fixation on true crime and serial killer worship spread as exploitative clickbait without meandering into something maudlin that would have felt just as slimy.

The rest was just schlocky fun set dressing for what you may or may not read as a love story. We — and by we, I mean queer feminine people — don’t have a lot of romcoms available to us. The only ones I can think of, really, are Imagine Me and You, The Half of It, and Feel Good, if we’re including TV series. Marrying romcom genre conventions with campy neo-slasher nonsense in a movie about two young women is definitely something targeted for a very specific audience. This is supported by its fairly middle-of-the-road IMDB and Metacritic scores. Emerging on the other side, I’m pretty sure I’m that target, and while it might not have quite hit the bullseye for me, I have to echo Letterboxd user deah here, “the real tragedy is these girls never got to kiss each other.” I still had more fun than I was expecting. Sequel, maybe?