T Blockers (2023):
Director: Alice Maio Mackay
Screenwriters: Alica Maio Mackay & Benjamin Pahl Robinson
Starring: Lauren Last, Lewi Dawson, Toshiro Glenn, Lisa Fanto
The Plot: In small town Australia, an ancient parasite is turning local men into violent, raving bigots. Transgender filmmaker Sophie (Lauren Last) discovers that she has the psychic ability to sense the possessed. Together with her best friend Spencer (Lewi Dawson), bartender friend Storm (Lisa Fanto), and possible love interest Kriss (Toshiro Glenn), Sophie sets out to stop the infestation before it spreads.
Continuing our unofficial Octoberween theme of young filmmakers, Alice Maio Mackay was seventeen when T Blockers was released. The film is a little rough around the edges, but it’s clearly the work of a talented filmmaker and passionate movie lover. Unlike Backrooms, this movie pulls from a wide range of influences and features realistic characters to boot. Periodic black and white addresses from drag queen Etcetera Etcetera call to mind Vampira or Elvira. Characters reference Ed Wood and John Waters, while 1950s B movies and the works of Gregg Araki can be felt as visual touchstones. There’s even a sequence containing footage from a fictional lost 1990s film that really nails the feel of ultra-low budget filmmaking from that era.
Mackay is a transgender woman, and her protagonists are mostly either trans or queer; the details of their lives have the ring of truth (the title itself is a reference to testosterone blockers taken by transgender women during hormone therapy). Those details range from the mundane, like Sophie’s dead end minimum wage job sweeping up popcorn in a movie theater (been there), to the sublime, like the tight-knit community at the local queer dive bar.
The film only suffers a little from Mackay’s relative inexperience. Some scenes are awkwardly staged, with an editing rhythm that feels off. Mackay and Robinson have the tendency of young writers to leave in the bits of conversations that most movies cut out, the filler statements and repetitive sentences. There are a few too many scenes of people hanging out and doing drugs; I’m not a total square, but if you’ve seen one “getting high” sequence you’ve pretty much seen them all at this point. Some of the performances are more polished than others—Lauren Last is a solid lead, and Lewi Dawson is charismatic—but awkward line deliveries and stiff acting are part of the charm in B-horror movies.
T Blockers mostly benefits from the low budget and lack of technical polish (the film cost around $10,000). Like other successful indie horror films, this one leans into its limitations. Heavily stylized lighting and editing work with the punk rock soundtrack to give the film a DIY, ’90s feminist zine feel. The campy special effects soften some of the real world hardships worked into the narrative without trivializing them: Estranged family members, a hostile government, predatory “chasers” (guys who treat trans women as fetish objects instead of human beings), outright violent thugs…compared to all that, an evil parasite seems almost simple*.
Hollywood, in its recent attempts to pivot from either demonizing or ridiculing transgender people (or both at the same time), has tended to take a somewhat condescending approach: Just acknowledging trans people deserves a pat on the back and the warm satisfaction of having eaten one’s cultural vegetables. There’s something to be said for “rainbow capitalism”, if only as an indicator of broader societal acceptance, but stories about found families fighting back against violent bigots have more impact when they aren’t made by Disney or Amazon.
T Blockers, for all its limitations, offers far more than buzzwords. If stories from marginalized voices are a vital part of building a more equitable world, then this is what that looks like: Independent, messy, angry, and a little silly at times. The film succeeds on its own merits as a fun, schlocky horror flick about a woman teaming up with her friends to beat the ever-loving shit out of some bad guys and an evil parasite. When you get right down to it, isn’t that what Octoberween is all about?
*I mean, literal brainworms would explain the hard right pivot of certain beloved public figures turned anti-trans crusaders…
