[Pride 2021] In Defense of All Cheerleaders Die

When I first watched Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson’s All Cheerleaders Die (2013), I thought it was a fun, if not terribly high-quality, horror-comedy romp. But the longer I spent ruminating on this goofy horror film, the more I realized I unironically loved it. It took me some time to figure out what exactly it was about the movie that I found so compelling and enjoyable, why it wouldn’t leave my mind for weeks after I watched it. 

If you haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend taking a quick 90-minute break to check it out. Otherwise, here’s a brief rundown: 

When a group of football players, including team captain Terry (Tom Williamson) cause four cheerleaders to crash their car into a lake, wannabe witch Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) pulls the girls out of the water and uses magic gemstones to bring them back to life. Now Leena’s ex-girlfriend Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) and three other cheerleaders are super-strong zombies, driven by impulse and hungry for blood. Things quickly get out of hand as the girls kill various members of the football team, and eventually Terry gets wise. He picks the girls off one by one, absorbing their powers. When Terry is about to kill Maddy, Leena’s magic erupts to a new level that kills Terry and saves Maddy from death—again. 

All Cheerleaders Die falls into the same category of horror as such iconic films as The Craft (1996), Ginger Snaps (2000), and Jennifer’s Body (2009), something I like to call “weird girl” horror: outcast teenage girls who wind up with a usually monstrous power on their hands that spirals out of control. All Cheerleaders Die has some great homages to its predecessors, including a slo-mo dramatic walk down the school hallway — if you’ve seen any of the three movies mentioned, you know what I mean. Leena even has intense makeup that calls to mind Nancy’s look in The Craft.

As you’d expect, all of these “weird girl” horror movies feature girls who are in some way outcast, strange and unusual. They don’t always fit into the mold of heterosexual femininity—see Ginger and Brigitte in Ginger Snaps, Nancy in The Craft, Needy in Jennifer’s Body. Because of this, it’s easy for a queer viewer like me to read these characters as queer (and in the case of Jennifer’s Body, it’s on the screen, not just viewer projection). 

What immediately stood out to me about All Cheerleaders Die is the way that the lead “weird girl,” the outcast, is blatantly and textually a lesbian. Leena, the catalyst of the film’s undead events, is unabashedly weird and occult-obsessed and also very, very gay. The driving force of her actions throughout the film is her love for Maddy. The power of gay love literally propels this movie’s entire narrative. 

The thing that really gets me about this film, though—the reason it stuck in my brain long after the credits had rolled—is that All Cheerleaders Die completely flips the expectations built by these prior “weird girl” horror movies when it comes to the fate of the weird girl in question. I’ve come to expect a certain narrative arc in these kinds of movies: the power, while initially making the girl alluring and untouchable and confident, eventually sours into something evil that has to be stopped, usually at the expense of her life. So it goes, the message that these powers are corrupting and corrosive. Jennifer and Ginger must be killed; Nancy must be locked up in an asylum.

As I watched All Cheerleaders Die, I kept waiting for the same fate to befall Leena. She had used magic recklessly, inadvertently creating murderous zombie cheerleaders. Surely the film would remind us (as these films so often do) that the weird girl, no matter how much we may sympathize with her, cannot be allowed to win. She becomes the monster, and she must be stopped.

But Leena is never the monster, no matter how out of control things get. Leena is, time and time again, the savior. Her love for Maddy, even when she believes it to be unrequited, is what ultimately saves Maddy, both from her initial death and from Terry’s murderous intent.

Now, I’m not saying this is a perfect movie by any means. It’s pretty low-budget, a lot of the dialogue is ridiculous, and besides that there are some narrative flaws I take issue with. We don’t really get a clear sense of why Leena and Maddy broke up in the first place, which makes Leena come off as clingy and a little stalkerish for half the movie, and it seems like Maddy doesn’t reciprocate her feelings until literally the last five minutes. It’s not exactly the ideal representation of gay love saving the day. But that it happens at all, and in a movie where I fully expected Leena to die, or at least to lose Maddy as a punishment for meddling in powers she didn’t understand—it was, frankly, a revelatory experience. Gay characters don’t often get to be happy at the end of horror movies, if they’re even still alive, or if they’re even on the screen at all.

All Cheerleaders Die sits at a 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 34% audience score. It’s far from a horror fan favorite, but I think it deserves more love than it gets. Watching Leena and Maddy embrace, the last two girls standing when all is said and done, I had this moment where I thought, oh. It can be like this. It’s not that I didn’t think such stories could exist. It was just that I hadn’t realized one already did. 

It took far too long for me to stumble across this movie, because I don’t really see people talk about it. It’s not on many top horror lists, but it’s now on mine. It filled a void in the weird girl canon that I’ve been looking for all along. These stories don’t have to end with the weird girl, the gay girl, succumbing to evil and being destroyed. She can live—she can be happy, even.

She can win. 

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