Watch Meagan Good and Karrueche Tran Enact a Feminist Revenge Fantasy
LatestMeagan Good celebrated Halloween by directing The Dead Diaries: Massacre, an eight-minute short horror film starring herself, model/actor Karrueche Tran, and Yin Chang (of The Bling Ring and Gossip Girl fame). It’s as purposefully campy and low-budget as any fun/cheesy horror film, but there’s a plot twist: it’s basically a feminist revenge fantasy.
The short starts with a bro-y card game going down in a living room, with an assortment of fellows smoking cigars, drinking beer, and talking about how they are going to eviscerate each other’s wallets. But in the back room, there’s drama: Good’s character, dressed as a cat for Halloween, is having a fight with her boyfriend, who’s stealing money from her purse to pay off some unsavory character named Slick. She pushes him—he pushes her back, and she backs down. Or does she?
Enter her homegirls, played by Tran and Chang, also dressed as cats. They pull up to take her to a party (or whatever), but the second they see her face, there is a look of mutual recognition. The trio pops the trunk, straps on cat masks, and proceeds to murk out every single dude in the house, in a salacious (and facetious) fashion worthy of Killa Season. The subtext is wild—Tran’s boyfriend is Chris Brown, for one—and you get the feeling that Good, at least, has been waiting her whole life to direct a horror film in which she gets to horrifically, metaphorically chop a bad dude to pieces with an axe. Even if the blood does look like water mixed with food coloring. It’s not scary so much as good, corny, belated-Halloween fun. Give it a whirl if you feel like seeing bad acting and terribly fake-looking “gunshot wounds.”