Satranic Panic
Directed by Alice Maio MacKay
Written by Alice Maio MacKay, Cassie Hamilton, Ben Pahl Robinson
Starring Cassie Hamilton, Zarif, Lisa Fanto, Chris Asimos
Unrated
Runtime: 80 minutes
Available digitally

by Jo Rempel, Staff Writer

The term “deadname” has a very obvious meaning. As a part of their transition, a person may change their name, thus “killing” their name given at birth. The name may still linger on the tongues of those who don’t know better, on legal documentation renewed to avoid the burden of money and paperwork; and certainly it will be cultivated by those revulsed by the very idea of transition. In all these cases, the use of a deadname will refer back to a person who does not exist.

I’m not bringing this up with regards to Satranic Panic because of the scene in which a transphobic parent deadnames his dead son, Max. It is a strange moment, if only for the unbelievable “reveal” that Max had named himself simply by swapping his birth name’s gendering (to all the trans people who actually do this... I salute you). Despite the fact that this is Max’s father, his villainous delivery reads more like when online TERFs try to invent a deadname to volley at a trans person, in true DIY cyberbully action. The mere act of conflating a real person with an unreal person—any unreal person—is half the battle.

But what actually got me thinking on the meaning of a deadname was the very premise of writer/director Alice Maio MacKay’s latest feature. Knowing that Max was killed by a demon cult, friends Aria (Cassie Hamilton) and Jay (Zarif) embark of on a road trip to avenge him. Jay was Max’s partner while Aria considered him a brother; one is wound up tight by grief while the other stays fabulous with her Buffy-like demon detection and general penchant for ass-kicking. This is to say that while Jay is on the road because they need to find out why Max was killed, Aria does it because vengeance is always a good time. I may be generalizing, but what’s undeniable is that Aria is always the centre of attention, and that MacKay is all about letting what’s fun subsuem what’s necessary. It’s this setup that reminded me not just of the dictionary definition of a deadname, but of two bifurcating retroactive etymologies I’ve seen online as well: it’s called deadnaming either because a) that’s how they’ll refer to you in the obituaries or b) because if you do it, you’ll lose your head.

As one may expect, a lot of demons—human skin suits who start looking scabby once the disguise is dropped—get the axe. Mackay throws CGI blood splatter and tongues of flame as cherries on top of some resplendent colours. Nearly every shot is pulsing with a palette or two. The prioritizing of bathing the cast before they get to anything close to kick-assery could just be a way of distracting us from the film’s low budget; yet even if MacKay had the best fake fire that money could buy, she’d be using thick colours to show a trans existence that’s real beyond reality.

You’ll notice that while Santranic Panic evokes the 80’s Satanic Panic with its title: yet these are real demons we’re talking about here. There’s a long tradition of horror that connects queerness with the undead and undead and otherworldly from Bride of Frankenstein to Nightbreed, though in this case the human/monster, good/evil dichotomy isn’t problemacized in quite the same way. Within a very explitly “queer and trans film,” as the opening title reads, being allegorized as “monster” ruins trans life’s essential vibrancies. I’m not talking about “trans people being alive” but about a transcendant way of living beyond the bare life defined by capitalist patriarchy. The Matrix Resurrections and I Saw the TV Glow, other Explicitly Trans Films of the 2020’s, have also fought against the temptation to be merely alive. The undead serve a tool of dysphoria, the matrix, whatever name you want to give the system which seeks only to perpetuate itself and no more. In this case, excess is what breaks and resists.

Aria works as a drag performer, and the film’s very opening is when it pulls out all the stops for her performance, in preparation to reign it in a bit while flexing the road movie form. At first we only see Aria as a performer, and only see Jay as her audience, as she struts around the stage redoubling herself in 3D red and blue tints, mostly purple though as they blur. She’s in solidarity with herself, or the crowd, shattering the singular gaze in split screen and spectral overlays. This is the film’s main marker of trans joy, that drag might break free of narrative and topple time, if only for the length of a radio hit. Likewise, if Satranic Panic never quite makes sense (there are some abrupt shifts in characterization around the third act that get brushed off by the end) it’s because genres are best when they flaunt reality.

Back to the dead, I’m stuck with the flashback where Jay is weeping over Max’s picture, with lighting so harsh that the polaroid is completely washed out by the camera. We never really see Max, even as we cross the barrier of time; in another flashback to the night of his death, he’s partially shadowed in the dingy bar. There’s something very tragic in the notion that remembering a loved one could be as foggy as remembering your own childhood. Yet there’s strength in letting the tragedy name itself.