Dead Teenagers
Written and Directed by Quinn Armstrong
Starring Jordan Myers, Maya Jeyam, Tony White, Mary Charles Miller
Runtime: 1 hour and 20 minutes
On Demand & In Theaters September 10, part of the Fresh Hell trilogy

by Christopher La Vigna, Staff Writer

Dead Teenagers, the third film in writer/director Quinn Armstrong’s loose “Fresh Hell” trilogy (preceded by The Exorcism Of Saint Patrick and Wolves Against The World), throws some interesting questions at you; questions such as: “What happens when the characters in a horror film realize that they’re in a horror film?” Followed immediately by: “What happens when this awareness throws a wrench in the story as it was previously scripted? What changes then?” As the film unfolds, the chilling answer to this question appears to be: “Not much. They’re doomed no matter what.”

Dead Teenagers begins on an upbeat note, as we follow our lead character Mandy (Jordan Myers) through her morning routine, getting showered and ready for the day as she listens to a cheery pop song on the radio, one with lyrics that seem to be written just for her. When she exits the bedroom and enters the main area of the cabin, we’re quickly introduced to the friends she’s spending spring break with: Jamie (Maya Jeyam), Her snarky but caring friend (who’s frequently characterized as “willing to do anything to survive”), Ben (Tony White), soft spoken and good natured Nicole (Mary Charles Miller), a meek girl who’s religiosity appears to be her entire personality, and finally Ethan (Angel Ray), Jamie’s cocksure jock boyfriend who’s already relegating her to his blindside as he sets his sights on a bright future at Notre Dame. The archetypes are all established effectively, and the audience is primed to see them either meet or subvert expectations.

The low stakes drama of a messy breakup between Mandy and Ethan is quickly forgotten when a hulking psycho clad in a welder’s mask and wielding an acetylene torch attacks the cabin. Things go terribly wrong from here, but not in the ways you might expect. The killer is easily dispatched, with no dead teens. Shortly after, Ethan discovers a screenplay, titled Dead Teenagers, and comes to the conclusion that Mandy is the author, penning a nasty piece of fan fiction about her own life. Ethan forces the whole gang to join him in a reading of the script (the fact that everyone agrees to this is either meant to be evidence of his next-level charisma or his friends’ comical capacity for being pushed around), which inexplicably ends in more bloodshed.

After this, the movie truly goes into freefall in the best way possible. The group finds that they can’t leave the cabin (the edge of the property is literally blurred out), boxing them into the film’s malfunctioning reality. Jamie, who was designated as the film’s final girl in the script, responds by treating the text as gospel, insisting that the group must act out the rest of the story, kills and all. Ben and Nicole weakly protest, but are ultimately consumed by Jamie’s will to survive at all costs.

Meanwhile, Mandy becomes obsessed with figuring out a new narrative for herself and her friends, sitting down at a typewriter, writing new screenplays in different genres in an attempt to save them all. Alas, none of them take, and Mandy is caught in a loop of failure; the pop song on the radio becomes increasingly distorted, a sonic signal of the growing rot. In the press release for the Fresh Hell trilogy, the copy provided for Dead Teenagers briefly describes the story as being one in which “...ill-fated teens take control of their own narrative.” But there’s no real sense of control to be found. 

One of the threads that ties the Fresh Hell trilogy together is its use of a cabin that serves as the central location for all three films. Dead Teenagers is the sole film that shoots the space with any kind of brightness or warmth, matching the joy and optimism Mandy naturally exudes at the film’s start. Once things go off the rails, the film’s color palette dims considerably.  Off-center and out-of-focus shots randomly pop up in the frame, some of them looking like actual outtakes edited in to enhance the disorientation and further degrade our grasp on the film’s sense of time and space.

In the film’s final sequence, Mandy stands at the dark edge of the property, framed at bottom center of a massive wide shot, dwarfed by the impenetrable darkness of the night sky behind her. While she continues to just stand there, various crew members pop in and out of frame, setting up lights, handing her props, checking the focus. Armstrong himself makes a fourth-wall-breaking cameo by approaching Mandy and offering this cryptic piece of direction: “What you’re doing here is a gift, okay? This is the only way out for you and your friends.” By now, Mandy is no longer a character; she’s a vessel for the entire film’s brutality, for the senseless cruelty of the masked killer, for the tragic fates that befall her friends. Forced to enact the film’s third act as both the killer and the victim(s), she is reduced to nothing, and finds herself standing at the edge of this filmic prison, screaming out at those of us watching from the other side of the screen. There is no lesson for her to learn, no big trope to subvert to satisfy an audience that believes itself to be smarter than the movie. Nowhere for her character to grow. There is only suffering, and chaos.

If Dead Teenagers and the cinematic triptych it completes is to be read as an artist’s statement, then it becomes clear that Armstrong is not necessarily interested in simply making straightforward genre films. Rather, his creative impulse is to use the premises and and promises of certain subgenres – possessions, werewolves, and of course, those good ol’ fashioned slashers –  as a launchpad to explore more nuanced, character-driven stories (In the case of Dead Teenagers, he deconstructs the concept of “character” to the point of irrelevance). In this way, the Ohio-based filmmaker just might be our generation’s Larry Fessenden. Both auteurs share a zeal for taking a more idiosyncratic and offbeat approach to the genre and its narrative conventions. While this might alienate those who are looking for simple scares, adventurous viewers will be rewarded with a palpable sense of existential fear and dread that will cling to them long after the credits have rolled. I know Mandy’s last scream is still echoing in my ears…