Allina Green (Helena Hoard) is a writer, and blocked. She has been offered a dream gig to script a reboot of The Red Mask – an iconic, and iconically basic home invasion slasher from 1982 which spawned a hugely successful franchise. Alli lives and breathes horror, but she is also female, Black and lesbian, and just cannot find that sweet spot between going back to unreconstructed Reagan-era basics and updating the film to something more self-consciously meta (in the post-Scream era), more feminist, more queer and, as one of her many online detractors puts it (amid death threats), “super fucking woke”.
As Alli internalises familiar horror community discourse about the clash between ‘real’ and ‘elevated’ horror, between simple T&A and complex psychologisation, she is also externalising it. For with her fiancée Deetz (Inanna Sarkis), in a literal cabin in the woods on loan to them from Deetz’s cousin Jerry (Joey Millin), Allina is cos-playing multiple variations of the series’ codified tropes in an attempt to nail (and stab, and hack, and saw) a satisfactory ending for her script, via a creative system that one character will later, with considerable accuracy, term “method writing”. All this is a way to lend a vividly engaging form to Allina’s writing process – something which would otherwise be inherently non-cinematic and dull to watch – so that her essaying and elimination of ideas is made to look just like a regular horror film, simultaneously dramatised and deconstructed. Meanwhile, with Allina rôle-playing the origjnal film’s final girl Karina while Deetz is the red-masked killer, these two lovers are ironing out the kinks not just in Alli’s draft, but in a relationship that Deetz has been keeping hidden in the closet from her disapproving father. In other words, Alli is testing the rules of the franchise’s received formula, while also bringing to the script a part of her personal experience, writing, as they say, what she knows.
Even as these two ring the changes on home invasion scenarios, two strangers will indeed arrive at the cabin. In a riff familiar from Zach Creeger’s Barbarian (2022) and Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s Bone Lake (2024),Jerry would appear to have accidentally rented out the AirBnB to Claire (Kelli Garner) and Ryan (Jake Abel) at a time that overlaps with Alli and Deetz’s stay. Once Alli has been persuaded, against her every instinct, to let this couple in, the four get to know each other better. Claire and Ryan are also horror aficionados, with Ryan in particular harbouring a nostalgic sense of ownership over the original The Red Mask, which is both the first slasher he ever saw, and his all-time favourite film from the genre. As Ryan and Claire argue with Alli over which materials are – and are not – appropriate for inclusion in a reboot of a beloved old-school brand, Claire proposes that they join Alli and Deetz’s play-acting of scenes from the OG The Red Mask to settle their differences and maybe help Alli find an acceptable finale. As the murder game blurs with something more real, things will not end well – although in a way, they will end perfectly.
Ryan wants a remake that is “authentic to the franchise” and will abide by “the core tenets”, and is opposed to anything resembling a “late-period Wes Craven cover band with a Red Mask title plastered on it,” whereas Alli wants to create something “sophisticated, smart, twisty” that will take the franchise in a new, more progressive direction, and will focus on the emotional growth of the protagonist-turned-writer. These positions may seem irreconcilable, yet director Ritesh Gupta’s own debut feature The Red Mask, written by Samantha Gurash and Patrick Robert Young, manages to be all these things precisely by reflexively staging them all in the one film. For it is at once a home invasion slasher with all the subtlety of an axe to the chest or a pitchfork to the head, and a convoluted postmodern poioumenon tracking its own composition from numerous namechecked sources. Indeed, it is Exhibit A for the possibility of horror that looks both backwards and forwards, offering something for everybody.
The Red Mask had its world première at FrightFest 2025
