TRAGEDY GIRLS (2017) is a colorful, rollicking horror comedy that doubles as biting social media satire
For psychopathic teen serial killers Sadie and McKayla, the anti-heroines at the heart of Tragedy Girls, going on a murderous rampage and offing their classmates sounds like the perfect way to rack up some social media fame in a world obsessed with shares, likes, and retweets. They start out as “fans” of the serial killer who’s terrorizing their small town of Rosedale, and when they uncover his identity before anyone else, they kidnap him and keep him as their new pet, asking him for advice.
Because, you see, the girls are behind the locally-famous online true-crime brand @TragedyGirls (follow now on twitter and tumblr!), which is Rosedale’s go-to source for news about the Rosedale Ripper. When they realize their new hostage is a screaming, unhinged maniac who’s not really “dying to impart a little of [his] experience on a few ambitious up-and-comers,” the besties decide the smartest way to stay on top of the true-crime trend is to be the ones in control of who dies next; if you know who the next victim is before anyone else, you have more time to think up a respectful hashtag to memorialize them!
Brianna Hildebrand (Negasonic Teenage Warhead in Deadpool) and Alexandra Shipp (Storm in the new X-Men films) play Sadie and McKayla, respectively. They’re fantastically watchable, turning their sadistic killer characters into funny, stylish, fast-talking villains you love to root against. The film, which is streaming now on Hulu, is directed by Tyler MacIntyre, who helmed 2015’s Patchwork. Unlike that movie’s throwbacky, 80s horror sensibility, Tragedy Girls is all modern, filled with cell phones, social media, superimposed text messages, and even those floating heart/smile/thumbs-up emojis that bob across the screen during a Facebook Live video.
It’s fun to watch how MacIntyre drops in glimpses of the social media scrolling across the characters’ phones. The characters have a warped view of the world, where taking someone’s life is justifiable if it gives you a few more views on YouTube, so it makes sense that the movie’s visuals reflect the way they look at their surroundings through a social media-drenched lens. For the most part, it feels natural, unobtrusive, kind of like how social media on our phones really affects our daily life. We pull out our phones while talking to people and may register that we have a notification of a new follower, as in the gif above, while still carrying on a conversation about something completely unrelated. Or, we may see someone out and about, and instead of their name, what might jump to mind first is their Instagram handle.
In a negative review of the film for The Hollywood Reporter, Frank Scheck situates the film in the lineage of Clueless, in that it’s about “self-absorbed high school girls.” That’s true, but as Alex McLevy points to in The AVClub, a better predecessor is the far nastier Heathers, about nihilistic high schoolers killing the popular girls. Closer still would be Jawbreaker, the candy-coated 1999 film where self-absorbed high school girls manage to turn a murder cover-up into soaring popularity for themselves. Like all of these films, the dialogue is snappy, campy, and quippy; Tragedy Girls is just the bloodiest of the lot.
And boy, is it bloody. A lot of horror fans watch films for the creativeness of the kills, and Tragedy Girls has a number of fun tricks up its sleeve, including but not limited to a table saw and some nasty gym equipment in addition to your usual stabbings, slashings, and shootings. There’s nothing quite as elaborately-designed as the Final Destination franchise, despite one of the girls calling someone’s death “some Final Destination shit,” but it’s fun to watch the movie try to surprise with each new murder. The film’s final setpiece is a stunning, nightmarish prom that’s one part Carrie, one part Spring Breakers, and one part cliché high school slasher film denouement, winkingly lifted right out of the 90s. It’s a blast.
If you view Tragedy Girls simply as a satire of social media-obsessed youth, sure, it’s been done before and this incarnation is not particularly effective. However, the film actually functions as a satirical, twisted version of social media itself, especially in the wake of communal tragedy, as everyone rushes to show their #support and brands fill their pages with #content. The movie’s authority figures explicitly call the main characters “parasites,” in that their whole online presence revolves around exploiting the trauma of others for a few clicks —and the character who uses the word is unaware of just how far the girls are going for a follow. Sure, it’s silly to see them take extra care to slice up a body so it’s clear it wasn’t an accident, or to watch their ~quirky~ YouTube explanations of the difference between a serial killer and a spree killer, but there’s an uncomfortable thrill of recognition in just how quickly the girls are able to whip the town into a frenzied real-world mob with a well-deployed online hashtag.
It’s all insincere, exploitative, and manipulative, just like social media tends to be after something like this past week’s tragedy in Parkland, Florida, for example. Twitter timelines fill with everything from insensitive memes designed to shock, to graphic photos of victims that would be better left un-shared, to fake GoFundMe pages ostensibly set up for affected families designed in actuality to swindle well-wishers. Tragedy Girls is a heightened, fun-house mirror version of all that, for sure; we haven’t seen anyone orchestrate a grisly massacre just for the tumblr reblogs.
…Yet.
