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| The Serpent’s Skin Photo: Fantasia International Film Festival |
Australian director Alice Maio Mackay is still barely out of her teens but her films have become a fixture at gene festival around the world. This year it’s The Serpent’s Skin that is thrilling audiences, though it’s a little more on the romantic side, and less gory, than some of her previous work, focusing as it does on the relationship between two women who are in the process of discovering supernatural abilities. When I spoke with her at Fantasia 2025 she was accompanied her her two stars, Alexandra McVicker and Avalon Fast. The three of them squeezed onto the couch in the green room, laughing and excited, looking less like they were at a work event and more like they were on a night out. It was immediately apparent where some of the magic in Alice’s films comes from.
The director’s two most recent films, The Serpent’s Skin and Carnage For Christmas, have benefited from editing work by The People’s Joker director Vera Drew, and I note as we begin that I think her style clicks really well with Alice’s and is bringing out the best in her work. Does Alice feel that it has changed things?
“I think so,” she says, making it clear that she doesn’t want to discredit other editors she’s worked with. “Having Vera from an accent perspective is really cool. She's not involved in the shoot. She reads the script. She knows my vision. We share a lot of similar tastes. Sometimes she'll get the dailies and she'll reshape the footage into something that I didn't even think was possible, while also still catering to how I want to control my film, so that's a really special thing to have.”
They have very similar tastes in terms of color palettes. I ask Alice what’s behind the distinctive look of her films.
“I think I always just love awful, wild painting, you know?” She laughs, a little shy. “Despite the film being more grounded than others, I think the world is still colourful. I still wanted to make it magical and romantic, and it's a throwback to Nineties cinema and TV that I love, which is very girly pop.”
Alex tells me that she met Alice through producer Louise Weard. “One day we met for coffee in New York, and we talked. A few months later, she sent me a voice memo, and I listened to it. And in the voice memo, she was asking if I wanted to play this part in her film. And of course, I was so excited and wanted to do it, and then went to Australia to work on the movie. It was great.”
“I feel like my story is so similar,” says Avalon. “Alice and I met three or four years ago now in New York, and then we were hanging out again in Vancouver, and Alice was telling me about this movie and said it would be cool if I was there. And I said it would be cool if I could act in it, maybe, but I imagined that would be a small role. But then, yeah, I got a voice note about the role of Gen, and it was super exciting.”
“I think the environment slightly influenced it in a way,” says Alex of her performance. “I think being away from everything that's familiar to me definitely was helpful.”
Avalon nods. “Yeah, I feel the same way. Being in a new world and us meeting for the first time in person, it definitely added to a dynamic and a chemistry.”
“I think also, when working on a movie, especially away from your home, you immediately get really close and bonded with a lot of the people you're working with,” Alex adds. “I think that was really great between the two of us.” She looks at Avalon. “Also, just your personality, I feel like we meshed so well.”
Avalon smiles warmly, and I note that I've always been impressed by the chemistry of groups of friends in Alice’s films. Is that because those friendships are there on set as well?
“Yeah,” says Alex. “I think also, everyone is just so welcoming and so warm, and Alice keeps a really light environment. It just lends itself to connection.”
“The film is about the connection to people, but there's also deeper things in there,” says Alice. “I put ‘a transgender film’ at the start because I just think it’s the state of the world. It's an inspiration from Gregg Araki and what he used to put at the start of his films. Seeing that when I was younger really changed how I see film. Now I can make films, so that is an homage to that.”
There are still very few films about trans people that are not all about being trans, and transition, and so on. Does she feel that it's important to tell different kinds of stories?
“Yeah. And I feel like where I'm at in my life is the story that I want to tell. When I made T Blockers, that is not a transition film, but it's more focused on trans experiences and horror and stuff like that. Whereas in this, she's a trans woman, and that's not the most important thing about her character. She's a witch and she's in love with this other woman, and that's cool. And there's love triangles and she's artsy and stuff like that.”
I note that some people have described The Serpent’s Skin as a vampire film. She doesn’t see it that way.
“I love True Blood and Twilight and pretty much any romantic vampire film, TV, book, whatever. To me, it was more of a reference to Charmed and Buffy and those demons that seduce and take souls and stuff like that, rather than vampires. I think, without spoilering that character too much, his design is definitely the vampire Buffy kind of look that we wanted to go for.
“For this film, I don't think I was inspired that much by horror films. I mention Buffy and Charmed a lot in everything I ever talk about, and that was a big inspiration. Also, I was listening to a lot of Meat Loaf, like Bat Out Of Hell. I’m intrigued, musically, by those songs, and how they portray love and romance really inspired me, I would say, more than any kind of film.”
“When I was reading the script, I realised right away how essential the love between those characters was,” says Avalon. “To me, that's the whole story, and that's also what made me really excited to work on it. It's my first real acting role, so to be able to go to a place of love and deepness, it's such a nice place to start, and there was so much there.”
Alex agrees. “In the little bit of acting I've done before, I've never done any sort of intimate relationship in a film at all, so that was totally new for me and really exciting to explore.”
Some actors who feel that they were thrown in at the deep end with all the love scenes in the film, but she says that she felt very safe throughout.
“We were working with an intimacy coordinator on the film, and she would really talk through things with us and kind of choreograph the scene like a dance before we would do it. That was helpful to work through this. It felt like learning a dance. But also, I think with the intimate scenes between Avalon and I, there was such a built in comfort and closeness...” She turns to her co-star. “You and I had conversations about how we were so ready to say ‘Okay, you can do whatever you want.’ And then you were, like, absolutely the same. So there was that level of trust and comfort between the two of us.”
“I feel like that happened almost right away,” says Avalon. “Maybe I was nervous to be on camera, but never nervous to have those intimate scenes with you.”
“Yeah, we were laughing,” Alex recalls.
Avalon nods. “Actually, that might have been the hardest part, was because we had such a funny friendship relationship, to get serious and get intimate and stop giggling was probably the hardest.”
Neither of them found it difficult to get into the witchy side of their characters.
“For me, when I read the script, I really just focused on the intuitive nature of Anna's abilities and her experience with it,” says Alex. “I feel like throughout the story, she is learning about her abilities and she's not so sure of what she has, so I didn't do so much, heavy research into that aspect of it. It was more of just really trying to understand the feeling of someone that feels really different and maybe views it as a negative thing and has all these thoughts running through her head.”
“Yeah, yeah, same, I think,” says Avalon. “I don't know if I dived into the witchcraft aspect of it or took it as like a metaphor for just like having strange, complicated feelings as a person falling in love and just like, as a person in general. I feel a little bit inherently witchy anyways.”
“When I was a kid, I always wanted to be a witch on Halloween,” says Alex, recalling the years when people assumed she was a boy. “My parents would say ‘You can be a warlock. Getting to finally be a witch now is really exciting.”
Alice is an extraordinarily prolific filmmaker, and I ask her how she manages that.
“I don't think anyone would be making a film like this if they didn't really care about what they were doing or how much they loved the story,” she says. “I just love film. Making films is my life. I love watching film and I love being on set and I love telling the stories. I don't know – it’s just how I live and breathe and it makes me so happy. And getting to work with people like this makes me really happy as well. So it's stressful at times, but also naturally, I love it.”
She’s enjoyed enormous support from the horror community, especially at festivals.
“Yeah, it's really amazing,” she says. “It's the first time I've been at Fantasia in person, but I remember them playing like my earlier two films as well. I remember them liking T Blockers and I was so surprised when I got that email. Just that such a dream was possible. It was just so cool to be playing alongside films that I love as well. They took a chance with that and have continued to do so. I feel really grateful.”
She’s been enjoying her time there so far.
“I saw Fucktoys for a second time, which I think is like one of my favorite films of the century. It’s kind of fun, it’s genius. I saw Find Your Friends. I love that. There are so many amazing women and queer directors at this festival. It's been really cool to see that.”
Avalon seconds her support for Fucktoys. “I haven't seen a movie that great in a long time.”
Alice assures me that she has other projects in the works, but she prefers to keep them secret for now. In the meantime, she’s keen for fans who missed The Serpent’s Skin at Fantasia to check it out next month when it screen as part of Frightfest.
