All Cheerleaders Die (2013)

Official trailer

All Cheerleaders Die is Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson’s 2013 American supernatural horror film depicting four high school cheerleaders resurrected by witchcraft after a car accident kills them and seeking revenge on the football players who caused their deaths. Caitlin Stasey plays Maddy Killian.

Sianoa Smit-McPhee plays Leena Miller. Brooke Butler plays Tracy Bingham. Amanda Grace Cooper plays Hanna. Reanin Johannink plays Martha Popowich. Tom Williamson plays Terry Stankus. Leigh Parker plays George. Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson wrote the screenplay.

Image Entertainment distributed the film in June 2014 to limited theatrical release and wide later home-video distribution. Lucky McKee had previously directed May (2002) and The Woman (2011), with considerable cult reputation among horror enthusiasts.

I come away from this one liking about half of it and shrugging at the rest.

The premise has teeth, and McKee clearly has something to say about football-team predators and the girls they wreck. Then the film swerves into camp, then into fantasy, and I never quite know which movie I’m supposed to be watching. A 6 feels right for that mix of nerve and mess.

All Cheerleaders Die is a remake of McKee and Sivertson’s earlier 2001 film of the same title. The 2013 feature expansion applies their established feminist-horror sensibilities to the cheerleader-horror crossover subgenre, with the witchcraft-resurrection premise treating the cheerleaders as both victims of male violence and as supernatural avengers who reclaim agency through their post-death existence. The film’s tonal balance between sincere horror, dark comedy, supernatural fantasy, and revenge thriller produces something that works at the same time across multiple genres without fully committing to any single one.

The result is a film that horror enthusiasts have considerably divided opinions about, with the production’s distinctive ambitions and its uneven execution both real.

Lucky McKee’s Feminist Horror

McKee had built his reputation through May (2002) and The Woman (2011), with both films treating female protagonists with considerably more dramatic seriousness than horror cinema’s broader conventions allowed. All Cheerleaders Die applies the same approach to a cheerleader-protagonist horror premise. The four resurrected cheerleaders are the film’s actual subjects instead of victims-then-objects for the audience’s gaze.

The cheerleaders’ revenge against the football players who caused their deaths works as supernatural-thriller plot and as serious commentary on the male violence the team represents. McKee and Sivertson’s screenplay treats the football players as actual predators instead of as cardboard antagonists, and I respect that more than anything else in the film. The revenge has force because the film takes the harm seriously, and I found myself wanting the girls to win.

The Witchcraft Mechanism

Leena’s witchcraft sequences give the screenplay its distinct supernatural-horror structure. The character is a Wiccan classmate who loves Maddy from a distance and resurrects all four cheerleaders through ritual magic that depends on their bodies sharing crystallized soul-essence after death. The mechanism is both supernatural fantasy and real metaphor for the bonds among the cheerleaders that survive their deaths.

The witchcraft-resurrection sequences are the film’s strongest setpieces. Leena’s ritual work, the cheerleaders’ gradual awakening and the fallout of the shared-soul mechanism all show real visual creativity, squeezed out of a modest budget through inventive practical effects. These are the scenes I’d point to if someone asked what McKee does well, and I’d happily have watched a whole film about Leena and her magic.

The Tonal Inconsistency

The film’s tonal balance between sincere horror, dark comedy, supernatural fantasy, and revenge thriller produces sustained inconsistency that divides horror enthusiasts. Some sequences are real horror, others deliberate camp, others supernatural fantasy without horror tone. The screenplay never fully commits to one tone, with the multi-genre positioning operating as both feature and limitation.

Viewers who expect cohesive horror cinema will be frustrated. Viewers who accept that the film is deliberately unstable across genres get considerably more out of it. I’m somewhere in between. The camp stretches bored me, and each lurch in tone knocked the air out of the horror just as it was building. The inconsistency is partly artistic choice and partly budget, with limited resources producing tone shifts that more polished productions would have smoothed.

Is All Cheerleaders Die worth watching?

It’s a 6 because the ideas are sharper than the execution. The revenge has real anger in it and the witchcraft scenes show off inventive effects work, but the film can’t settle on a tone long enough for any of it to hit as hard as it should. It deserves its cult standing, and I’d recommend it to McKee fans and anyone curious about cheerleader horror, with the warning that it wobbles.

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