Slay

There is something almost comforting about a slasher movie that understands exactly why audiences keep returning to masked killers, isolated houses and groups of friends making catastrophically poor decisions. Kyra Elise Gardner’s Slay does not pretend that these ingredients have suddenly become new again. Instead, it embraces their familiarity, dresses them in the bright colours and self-conscious language of the social-media generation, and then starts pulling at the relationships beneath the surface. Presented at Tubi FrightFest 2026, where it had its world premiere in London, the film arrives as Kyra Elise Gardner’s scripted feature directorial debut after Living with Chucky. The frequently used description of Slay as Clueless meeting Scream initially sounds like convenient festival shorthand, but it proves surprisingly accurate: this is bubble-gum horror with sharp objects hidden underneath.

At its centre is Chloe, played with considerable charm by Zoey Luna, a teenage influencer who has essentially grown up in public. Her life has been transformed into content through “So Chloe,” leaving little distinction between the person and the persona her followers consume. When Chloe decides to step away from her online career and pursue the rather appropriate ambition of becoming a scream queen, tragedy intervenes. Following the murder of a close friend, she retreats with her circle to a secluded cabin in the mountains, ostensibly to grieve and reconnect. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of slashers knows how reassuringly terrible an idea that is. Slay has fun with that inevitability, but the screenplay—credited to Jimmi Simpson, from a story involving Catherine Clark and Zoey Luna—is more interested in what happens when a carefully curated friendship group is forced offline and its members can no longer control the narrative.

One of the film’s cleverest decisions comes very early. A dense montage reconstructs Chloe’s journey from childhood to online celebrity through fragments of videos, posts and digital memories. Beyond being an amusingly convincing imitation of a life lived through screens, it performs an enormous amount of narrative work without feeling like conventional exposition. Chloe’s mother and friends become familiar before the film has properly settled into its horror mechanics, and that matters once suspicions begin circulating. Sean Giambrone, Beck Nolan and Malina Pauli Weissman inhabit characters that deliberately recall familiar teen-movie specimens, but Slay understands that archetypes are most entertaining when the people inside them have enough personality to surprise us. The movie therefore plays an amusing double game: we recognise the jock, the loyal friend, the stoner and the outsider while gradually discovering that the labels are far less reliable than they first appear.

The crucial ingredient is Zoey Luna. Chloe could easily have become unbearable: privileged, self-absorbed, permanently conscious of an imaginary audience and conditioned to turn experience into material. Instead, Zoey Luna gives her an appealing vulnerability that slowly becomes more visible as Chloe’s polished world disintegrates. There is a little Cher Horowitz in her comic obliviousness and inevitably some Sidney Prescott in the survivor she is forced to become, but the performance never feels like an impersonation of either. Particularly welcome is the film’s handling of Chloe as a transgender heroine. Her identity exists and informs elements of her public life, but it is not reduced to a plot mechanism or transformed into the explanation for the violence directed at her. She simply gets to occupy the position that countless horror heroines before her have occupied: the young woman who eventually has to confront the monster. That casual normality is considerably more effective than turning representation into a screenplay announcement.

Kyra Elise Gardner also has horror running unusually close to home. Her documentary Living with Chucky explored not only the Child’s Play franchise but her own relationship with it through her father, veteran effects artist Tony Gardner. Bringing him into Slay as makeup effects designer gives the film a pleasing generational connection to the practical-effects tradition it celebrates. Once the bodies begin accumulating, the kills are gleefully physical, inventive and sometimes absurd, but crucially they remain consistent with the movie’s candy-coated personality. Kyra Elise Gardner understands that gore can function as a punchline without becoming weightless. There is a tactile quality to the wounds and practical mayhem that makes the violence land, even when the situation around it is deliberately ridiculous. The result feels less like a cynical reconstruction of 1990s horror than something made by people who genuinely enjoy the mechanics of the genre.

That affection extends to the supporting cast. Aya Cash brings formidable energy to Chloe’s pushy mother, while Shawnee Smith is particularly well suited to the role of Jenna Woolfe, a television host whose appetite for a headline evokes the more predatory side of Scream’s Gale Weathers. Andrew Bowser and Jimmi Simpson add further eccentricity around the edges. The latter’s involvement is especially interesting because Slay depends upon a difficult tonal trick: making the audience laugh immediately before asking them to react to something vicious. At the FrightFest Q&A, Jimmi Simpson reportedly described precisely that intention—to create comedy that leaves viewers enjoying themselves just before a stabbing interrupts the mood—and it explains why the film’s best passages have such mischievous momentum. Slay does not alternate between being a comedy and a horror film so much as allow one to ambush the other.

Not everything is equally sharp. The abundance of genre references and recognisable character types occasionally makes Slay feel as though it is ticking items from a particularly affectionate slasher checklist, and viewers exhausted by meta-horror may initially wonder whether another masked-killer whodunit can really surprise them. Yet the screenplay keeps complicating its apparent setup, allowing revenge, friendship, jealousy, performance and competing agendas to overlap. More importantly, the film possesses something increasingly valuable in contemporary horror: a lack of cynicism. Even while making jokes about influencer culture and the commodification of trauma, it does not simply sneer at its young characters. Behind the followers, branding and questionable choices are friendships that mean something, which gives the eventual betrayals considerably more bite. As other responses from FrightFest have noted, the mystery itself also remains sufficiently busy to keep the identity and motivations behind the carnage from becoming immediately obvious.

Slay ultimately succeeds because Kyra Elise Gardner knows the difference between recycling a genre and playing with it. The secluded cabin, masked murderer, doomed teenagers, final girl and spectacular deaths are all present and accounted for, but they are filtered through a world in which identity is constructed publicly and friendship can become part of a personal brand. Beneath the neon, jokes and blood lies a surprisingly sincere film about people discovering how little they know about those closest to them. At 89 minutes, it moves quickly enough that its excesses become part of the pleasure rather than a burden. It may proudly carry the DNA of Scream and Clueless, but Slay earns an identity of its own: funny without becoming parody, bloody without becoming oppressive, inclusive without turning its heroine into a symbol, and nostalgic without simply living in the past. For slasher devotees, this is exactly the sort of lively, knowingly ridiculous genre filmmaking that deserves an audience beyond the festival circuit.

Slay
Written and directed by Kyra Elise Gardner
Produced by Alan Lastufka, Bailey Sloan, Bradley Sloan, Brian Simonds, Catherine Clark, Cutter White, Deven Bromme, Dwayne Jarrell, Florence Bruemmer, Harrison Rothman, Jimmi Simpson, Kyra Elise Gardner, La Donna Perry, Marek Jarosinski, Mary Kate van den Berg, Mary Simonds, Michael Pankratz, Philip Makotyn, Scott K. Foley, Sean Cleary, Tanaha Smalls, Zoey Luna
Starring: Zoey Luna, Aya Cash, Malina Pauli Weissman, Beck Nolan, Shawnee Smith
Cinematography: Evan Butka
Edited by Kathryn Prescott
Production companies: Umbrella Pictures
Distributed by 
Running time: 89 minutes

Viewed on August 22, 2026 (Tubi Frightfest 2026 press screener)