Brooklyn Horror 2026 Review: SLAY, Witty Tribute to Classic Slashers

While AI obviously (and rightfully) suppressed pretty much all other dangers to humanity as the villain of our times, the rabbit hole that is social media and influencer culture is still too great a fodder for filmmakers to pass up.

The paradoxical nature of this bubble, inhabited by people whom we call “content creators”, but who mostly produce something entirely ephemeral, is great material to have all kinds of fun with. Which is exactly what Kyra Elise Gardner’s second feature, Slay, is doing, mixing the digs at the Gen Z-brand of pop culture with classic tropes of the good, old “slice and dice” subgenre.

At the center of it all is our influencer final girl – Chloe Cruze (Zoey Luna, who also co-wrote the story Gardner and Jimmi Simpson then turned into a script), who rose to social media stardom after coming out as trans. While her friend, Harmony (Reise Alexander), continues being a vocal advocate for the community, Chloe has moved on to more generic, fluff content.

Recently, she decided to ditch her internet show altogether for a chance to make it as a horror film actor, despite some reservations from her manager mother (Aya Cash). When Harmony is slayed by a masked killer, Chloe and her friends, including her insufferable boyfriend Blake (Beck Nolan), head for a vacation to where all teens come to die in slashers – a cabin in the woods.

With her previous feature work, the documentary Living with Chucky, Kyra Elise Gardner established herself as a filmmaker who obviously has lots of love for classic horror films, and it shows here. Among multiple affectionate references and nods, one stands out above all – Scream, both the 1996 original and the following franchise as a whole. Apart from some intentional narrative parallels – Chloe even has her own journalist nemesis (Shawnee Smith) and an obligatory geeky guy (Sean Giambrone) with a hopeless crush on her – the main similarity stems from the meta-irony ingrained in the film’s tone.

Slay actually leans harder into satire than Wes Craven’s film and its successors ever did. While the characters in Scream cracked jokes about horror movie tropes and ironically compared themselves to the cliched archetypes in those films, the characters in Gardner’s movie seem to be fully aware that they are, in fact, playing certain roles in the narrative. Thus, it doesn’t come off as forced or over the top that the heroes in this story are more or less walking clichés – of course, they are, since they exist within a reality that progressively resembles an illusion where nothing is ever fully true.

It’s all about how things seem to be – not what they actually are. Everything can be turned around and rebranded, as it happens with the doomed trip into the woods, which is initially planned as a celebration of Chloe’s budding acting career, but is later reframed as an event to honor Harmony. In this sense, the final killer reveal, which admittedly could’ve been executed in a less clunky manner in terms of dialogue, fits the overall trajectory of the film quite nicely.

Even putting meta stuff aside, Slay remains an easy-to-watch, fun ode to classic slashers, with a sharp modern spin, creative kills, and a mask that is honestly a stroke of post-ironic genius.

The film screened at the 2026 Brooklyn Horror Film Festival.