At just twenty-one, Australian filmmaker Alice Maio Mackay has achieved what most artists spend decades attempting: an instantly recognizable voice.
Her work merges DIY intensity with radical sincerity, balancing the intimacy of friendship films and the assertiveness of horror allegory. She creates stories not about transness as spectacle but transness as lived, felt, and fierce reality.
Her newest feature, The Serpent’s Skin, continues her thrilling, rebellious streak, sitting comfortably within her filmography yet glowing more brightly. Like her earlier works, it unfolds through genre playfulness, part horror, part coming-of-age odyssey, but its ambitions feel larger.
Here, Mackay fuses the supernatural with the political and the erotic with the rageful, crafting a defiant piece of queer cinema that burns with life and danger.
Edited by Vera Drew, the trans filmmaker behind The People’s Joker, The Serpent’s Skin becomes a creative bridge between generations of trans artists. It feels handmade yet assured, pulpy yet meaningful, a love letter to those who find safety in community and terror in rejection.
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Mackay positions her film’s title as both metaphor and identity: the serpent’s skin as the act of shedding, transforming, and reclaiming one’s body.
The Story: Power, Vulnerability, and Trans Rebellion
The luminous Alexandra McVicker stars as Anna, a young trans woman forced to leave home after her parents deem her “wayward.” Their voices, faint and sharp behind closed doors, echo throughout her journey, reminders of the violence of erasure.
Seeking refuge, Anna arrives in Adelaide to live with her sister Dakota (Charlotte Chimes), who tries to guide her toward a quieter life but cannot quiet the chaos trailing close behind.
Anna soon meets Danny (Jordan Dulieu), a cisgender man whose gothic allure, painted nails, black curls, and easy charm initially disarm her.
Their connection unfolds quickly, driven by attraction as much as longing for recognition. His casual acceptance, “that’s fine,” he says of her gender, rings hollow, an early sign that not all allies carry understanding.
Finding work at a record shop provides Anna with brief solace, but danger intrudes in the form of a petty thief. When he attacks, something inside her ignites. A flash of neon pink floods the frame as the aggressor collapses, bleeding from the eyes and mouth.
This eruption of power becomes the film’s hinge, shifting The Serpent’s Skin from grounded drama into supernatural queer myth.
Enter Gen (Avalon Fast), a mysterious stranger and part-time prophet who recognizes what Anna has done and what she can become. Gen explains that Anna has “popped” an innate defense mechanism triggered by mortal threat. The act is exhilarating yet perilous, representing both empowerment and potential destruction.
In Gen’s care, Anna learns to channel her force with intention. What begins as mentorship grows sensual, philosophical, and spiritual relationship at once tender and revolutionary. Together, they combat external threats and internalized fear, redefining survival as shared rebellion.
Love, Power, and Horror Through a Trans Lens
The Serpent’s Skin uses horror not as spectacle but as expression. Mackay reframes violence against queer people into a metaphoric transformation. When Anna sets a piece of transphobic propaganda aflame using her new powers, it feels like catharsis made literal.
The film’s genre trappings, witchcraft, vampirism, and satanic cults reimagine old misogynistic fears about women’s bodies and queer magic as sources of empowerment rather than danger.
What makes Mackay’s horror distinct is her blend of warmth and fury. The blood and neon don’t exist for shock; they symbolize brightness forcing its way through pain. Anna’s journey isn’t framed as a fight for acceptance from society but as an affirmation of existence and the right to be seen, desired, and free.
The love scenes, which center on trans intimacy, are particularly striking. They neither conceal nor fetishize. Instead, they present queer desire as sacred and ordinary, bodies meeting not to prove something but to feel.
When Anna and Gen hold each other, their closeness flickers between affection and ritual, both sensual and transformative.
There’s rage underneath the tenderness. “We’re still in hiding,” Gen says one night. “As if the witch hunts are still onto us.” Anna’s reply is soft but unflinching: “They are. They’ve just changed their names.”
It’s one of several moments that ground the fantasy in contemporary trans experience, threading political consciousness through psychedelia and poetry.
A Visual Spell of Neon and Shadow
Stylistically, The Serpent’s Skin is electric. Mackay and her cinematographer coat every frame in saturated tones of amethyst, turquoise, and shock pink, turning Adelaide’s drab corners into dreamscapes.
The low-budget aesthetic becomes a strength; grain, flicker, and handheld framing lend the movie a tactility absent in studio horror.
The metaphysical glow running through the visuals mirrors the characters themselves, unpolished yet luminous, precarious yet radiant. Rather than aiming for realism, Mackay opts for texture, evoking 80s VHS grit crossed with mystical surrealism.
The effect feels both nostalgic and defiantly future-facing, a reclamation of DIY queer cinema where imperfection equals authenticity.
Key moments play out like paintings come to life: a broken window shimmering with moonlight as Anna confronts her nightmare; the faint hum of a record player while Gen speaks about transcendence; the ouroboros tattoo crawling across Danny’s neck as he succumbs to violence and obsession.
Each image reinforces Mackay’s instinct for tying the personal to the mythical.
Even when the story teeters toward chaos, the direction never loses coherence. Mackay embraces maximalism without apology, wielding color and sound like emotional weapons. The dreamy synth score pulses like a heartbeat, guiding the viewer through love, fear, and liberation.
Alice Maio Mackay: A Voice for Trans Horror’s Future
The impact of The Serpent’s Skin stretches beyond its story. Mackay’s filmography, though still young, feels like a manifesto for trans authorship. She echoes Gregg Araki’s early independence and energy but moves past queer cinema’s historical defensiveness. Her queerness isn’t explained; it simply exists, audacious and self-assured.
By aligning trans identity with mysticism, Mackay offers more than metaphorical empowerment; she constructs a new mythology. The idea that queer individuals hold hidden, magical energy serves both as fantasy and truth. It reclaims the very superstition once used against women and trans people, transforming persecution into prophecy.
Within underground cinema, Mackay’s rise signals a larger shift. Trans creators are telling their own stories not as subjects studied from a distance but as vivid protagonists wielding agency, humor, and rage. The Serpent’s Skin may wear its lo-fi charm proudly, but its emotional and political resonance feels world-class.
Alice Maio Mackay’s work arrives at a critical cultural moment, reminding audiences that horror, so long used to demonize difference, can also celebrate it. As Anna learns to harness her power without losing her tenderness, Mackay demonstrates what real creative magic looks like: fearless imagination.
The Serpent’s Skin hypnotizes through its glowing turmoil, a film both fierce and fragile, haunting yet jubilant. It stands not just as queer horror but as queer liberation, expressed through artistry that feels instinctively alive.
Mackay understands that to tell trans stories through horror is to reveal both the beauty and brutality of transformation. Her cinema pulses with life even in darkness, a reminder that survival itself can be an act of creation.
At twenty-one, Alice Maio Mackay isn’t just directing films; she’s rewriting what horror can mean when it belongs to those once hunted by it.
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