The Gen-Z stare doesn’t have a thing on a long silence spent with the quietly brilliant Alice Maio Mackay. At 21, the Australian filmmaker has already made six features — in just four years. Her latest just premiered at Fantasia Fest, and “The Serpent’s Skin” is the beginning of a romantic new era for the dark fantasist, who’s reserved in-person but ferocious on film.
Maio Mackay’s latest is a demonic lesbian love story that’s inspired by the hazy pop-horniness of “The L Word” and the director’s favorite episodes of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Charmed.” “Everyone’s always telling me, ‘Oh, this is your most personal film,’ and I find that to be such a weird assumption,” Maio Mackay told IndieWire in Montreal. “It’s one thing if I’ve said that, but I haven’t, and these people don’t know me. It’s really bad with male journalists. No shade to them, but starting when I was 16, with every film, they’re like, ‘And this is your most personal film to date!’”
Related Stories
The daughter of two academics, Maio Mackay first announced her film career with a stop-motion cartoon she made using Lego as a kid. By 15, the director had entered Stephen King’s beloved Dollar Baby competition and adapted the horror author’s original story, “A Tale of the Laundry Game,” for just $1 U.S. with her writing partner Benjamin Pahl Robinson. That year, Maio Mackay also crowdfunded her dazzling feature debut “So Vam” — again with Robinson, who’s co-written all six of her features — for $10,000.
“There wasn’t a lot of time, and it was really small, but I knew I had to put everything I loved into that film,” Maio Mackay said. “It’s got drag queens and these extended drag sequences, and a trans vampire in that one as well. You do everything in your first movie in case you don’t get to make another one.”
Maio Mackay likes her cinema “colorful, witty, sexy, and crazy.” You get that impression just watching the pulsing pink credits at the start of “The Serpent’s Skin” — but “So Vam” established her as a genre auteur and powerhouse. After submitting her first film to the Salem Horror Festival in 2021, Maio Mackay got a “surreal” call from the acquisitions team at Shudder. The horror streaming service offered her an exclusive distribution deal that still blows the young filmmaker’s mind today.
“I wasn’t expecting to do anything with that movie,” Maio Mackay said. “Even explaining it now, I can’t believe that happened. We shot it in January 2021, and it kicked off a really hectic few years for me. I look back on it and it doesn’t always sound real.”
Having already skipped a few grades in school, Maio Mackay dropped out before shooting “So Vam.” The emerging director gained production experience working on Australian TV shows, including the drama “First Day” about a trans teenager — but no amount of hands-on learning could have prepared her for a major PR windfall. On August 4, 2021, Maio Mackay turned 17, just as her first film came out.
“The internet is a really weird place to be,” she said, reflecting on the complicated professional milestone four years later. “I’m definitely using my phone less now. I’m not on TikTok. I don’t really check my message requests. I’ll post stuff, but I try to read more than I use any apps.”
Maio Mackay celebrated that birthday with her family, amid a torrent of critical feedback, community support, and transphobic death threats on social media. The eventful release changed her life, for good and bad, but even then, she said, “I know I made the right decision.” She continued, “It was all instinctual. I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, I’ll make this career move with this film to get this where I want to go.’ I just knew that I wanted to make the films that I wanted to make.”
For Maio Mackay’s second film, “Bad Girl Boogey,” the writer/director worked with a similar budget — this time, paid for by Dark Star Pictures. The indie distributor got Maio Mackay busy making her sophomore feature in January 2022, and they started rolling on her third film, “T Blockers,” that July. The dark vigilante comedy was her most overtly political and self-aware work (if not, as those male journalists might’ve put it, her “most personal film”) to date.
“When I made that one, I honestly never thought anyone would watch it,” she said. “I mean, it was called ‘T Blockers.’ It had a trans lead. It was more of a hangout film than a horror film. I just didn’t think it would go anywhere. But it’s definitely my most popular movie, and all the things just felt right when I was doing it. It felt like I had grown up to that point, and I was ready to make it and say what I had to say.”
Dark Star has kept the money flowing for Maio Mackay ever since. Her fourth project, “Satranic Panic,” went ahead that December, and the next year, she made her fifth film — the holiday horror outing “Carnage for Christmas” — introducing Vera Drew as her collaborator and editor.
“The People’s Joker” legend is among Maio Mackay’s best friends in a growing network of trans filmmakers. Drew’s unmissable style helped the 21-year-old wriggle free of her artistic past and start a vibrant new chapter with “The Serpent’s Skin.” Another friend, filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (“I Saw the TV Glow”) took a summer trip to support the world premiere in Montreal.
“This is where I feel like my voice has fully formed,” said Maio Mackay. “I feel like my other films were a little more in your face, but this is the direction I want to go in and what I really want to do stylistically. It’s more grounded and it’s more romantic, but it’s less horror in terms of genre.”
Starring the dreamy Alexandra McVicker and electric Avalon Fast, the slippery sixth feature from Maio Mackay is a classic two-for-one fantasy romance that’s perfect for the modern pansexual. “The Serpent’s Skin” has scary magical elements in it, but the main relationship triangle — between vampires Anna (McVicker) and Gen (Fast), and their unlucky human friend, Danny (Jordan Dulieu) — isn’t horrific.
“What I really want to do is more supernatural dramas that are infused with zombies and vampires and things like that,” said Maio Mackay. “The library was my favorite place to be growing up. I was always picking through the DVD section and trying new books. I liked suspense and I liked love.”
Written on the heels of a “Sense8” rewatch (with several “very corny” Meatloaf songs in mind), “The Serpent’s Skin” indicates a hopeful next chapter for the bright-eyed filmmaker. Producer Louise Weard (“Castration Movie”) found Maio Mackay her two sapphic leads, but the director pushed herself by including a main character who is a man. Masculinity is typically reserved for supporting roles in Maio Mackay’s movies — but Danny’s inclusion suggests a bid for a wider queer audience and narrative growth.
“The film is mainly about Anna and Gen’s connection, because that’s where the power comes from,” said Maio Mackay. “But when Danny and Anna meet, he’s integral to that plot and she winds up loving him in a different way. It’s really sweet, and you don’t often seen trans women hooking up with men in film, let alone casually. I knew that was important to me going into it too.”
Embodying the ideal alt-boy heartthrob, Dulieu transformed during pre-production and bulked up for the part significantly. Maio Mackay wanted Danny to look like “the ultimate 2000s boyfriend,” and in the end, she had more trouble managing the continuity of his fake tattoos than any of her film’s creature effects. “The Serpent’s Skin” was shot last fall and Danny’s unforgettable “FUCK TRUMP“ ink was added as a last-minute attempt to vent about the results of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
“It wasn’t negative energy, but it was definitely out of frustration,” said Maio Mackay. “Alex is from New York and she had to go back to America after filming, so it was just this small thing we could say. In the same way that we hid a pro-Palestine message on the wall in our bathroom scene. It’s a little moment.”
Asked if the gothic Y2K style that makes “The Serpent’s Skin” so tempting comes with nostalgia for that decade — one Maio Mackay and her fellow Gen-Zers were mostly too young to remember — she said no. Yes, modern pop stars like Madison Beer and Tate McRae are “throwing it back to Britney,” and Maio Mackay has the music references to know that. But the director also has friends who outright “refuse” to watch entertainment from the last century, and ultimately, she thinks her peer group’s obsession with the 2000s is “mainly aesthetic.”
“I’ve always been adventurous when it comes to my tastes, and I love to fall down rabbit holes with actors and directors. The ’70s and ’90s are my favorite eras,” she said. “But I’ve always found it weird when someone says they won’t try any of it at all. It’s not even about quality. It’s just their interests. Why do they feel that way?”
She’s equally baffled by the widespread use of artificial intelligence. “I am vehemently against AI,” said Maio Mackay. “It’s killing the environment, and I feel like people, especially in my generation, are becoming almost brain dead. I never thought in my life I would hear someone at 20 being like, ‘I needed AI to write an email to my manager.’ It’s like, you have the job for a reason. You are capable of doing that. I hate every aspect of it in every industry.”
“The Serpent’s Skin” is rooted as much in Maio Mackay’s lifelong appreciation for Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys as it is the consistent influence of Gregg Araki. (Naturally, she’s a fan of “The Doom Generation.”) Recently, the director picked up transcendental meditation — a famous practice of the late David Lynch — from her friend, Vera Drew. Maio Mackay tends to connect with more established artists because they know who they are already, and she likes to maintain a strict schedule.
“Everything in film is so stressful,” she said. “Yes, making a movie is the best, but you’re dealing with so many things at the same time. Having a routine just resets everything every day and it allows you to move forward with your thinking. It’s 20 minutes, twice a day. That drastically changed my life.”
Having a plan asserts self-respect as much as maturity. For Maio Mackay, it also harkens back to a girlhood that was punctuated by TV production call times. The artist shared what should have been her high school lunch periods chatting with adult creatives, and you can see that perceptiveness constantly at work in her eyes. Even wondering about the prom she didn’t attend, Maio Mackay prefers the song and dance of the film industry. Again, she’s optimistic.
“There are definitely so many issues, and so many filmmakers who are minorities working really hard to compete with mediocre straight white guys — and that’s heartbreaking,” the filmmaker said. “It shouldn’t be surprising, but every time I hear about it, I think, ‘That’s someone’s heart and that’s their life.’ It’s tragic. But at the same time, places like Fantasia and companies like Dark Star and Shudder are uplifting filmmakers from different areas and that’s also really great.”
Maio Mackay sometimes gets flack for being too prolific. She finds that criticism strange, particularly when it’s coupled with the assertion that every movie she makes is her “most personal.” A kind of “Ginger Snaps” for the hornier half of Gen-Z, “The Serpent’s Skin” heads to FrightFest in the UK later this month.
For her 21st birthday, Maio Mackay also had a few wishes. She’s dying to work with her favorite actress, Bella Thorne, and the genre lover can’t recommend Janell Shirtcliff’s “Habit” enough. “It’s my favorite film ever made,” she said. “It’s incredible. It’s pulpy. It’s everything. She basically has sex with God.”
Maio Mackay still wants an ALEXA Mini (“It’s the camera for this genre,” she said), and someday soon she’d like to write and publish comics. Of course, the director is also hoping for more money to make the film she’s writing now. Shooting on location in Italy would be a dream come true for any visionary, but the future of filmmaking can be found wherever Maio Mackay is quietly having a fantasy.
“I want to tell the same stories, only bigger,” she said. “So many men get to do those kinds of films, and I worked so hard to get here already. It’s scary, but as a female filmmaker, I want to outrun those risks and see where it takes me.” And we’re guessing that will be personal.
