BREAKING NEWS: DREAD CENTRAL | First poster reveal for new slasher "Frankie, Maniac Woman"

I’m not saying anything particularly new or ground-breaking when I say that our society is inherently fatphobic and terrified of the idea of being fat. Maybe my wording is harsh, but it’s honest, just like Pierre Tsigaridis and Dina Silva’s new extreme slasher Frankie, Maniac Woman. Their film, written by Silva and Tsigaridis, is a confronting piece of horror cinema unafraid to truly interrogate societal beauty standards and the kinds of hatred that fat women experience both externally and internally. And it’s all paired with buckets of blood, gore, and other bodily fluids.

Francis (Silva) is a fat woman fighting her way through the entertainment industry to make it as a singer. While she’s booked some regular gigs, bouncers still don’t believe she’s a performer at their club, and her agent begs her to lose weight. On top of it all, a strange man (Tsigaridis) appears, telling her to do terrible things and whispering violence in her ear. She goes on a rampage, killing those who either wronged her or made her feel ugly. It could be as simple as looking at her the wrong way at the gym. Francis is full of rage, and the only way to exorcise it is through murder.

These violent desires lead Francis, who eventually goes by Frankie, through a hellscape of her own creation, one filled with suicidal ideation, messy death, and dream-like sequences that ask the viewer to simply close their eyes and join Silva on this gnarly ride. Since this is all from Frankie’s perspective, time passes in fits and spurts, with events only vaguely connected as she sings and slices her way through Hollywood. Yes, she is still concerned about her singing career even as she kills countless Los Angeles hotties in her apartment.

Frankie, Maniac Woman is messy and imperfect, but it’s honest in a way that we never see in the horror genre or in cinema as a whole. The horror genre is the perfect place for this story, as it lets Silva and Tsigaridis really examine and illustrate what this specific kind of rage and self-hatred can look like in its most extreme forms. Many may not like what this film has to say, but that doesn’t lessen its impact or the importance of its messaging around the monsters society creates.

Silva is the film’s beating heart as its creator, writer, and star. She creates the next great cinematic serial killer, one that we’ve never really seen in the horror genre. She pours everything into making Frankie both a sympathetic yet repulsive character who’s wading through decades of abuse and ridicule in the only way she knows how: with an axe. Frankie is a messy character, and Silva knows that, which makes her performance all the more fascinating as she plays a character constantly fighting for recognition in this world, even if it’s through death.

As I previously mentioned, Frankie, Maniac Woman is rough around the edges and not as polished as Tsigaridis’ previous films. That rawness does help with the film’s tone, but it does lead to some gaps in narrative logic. It can be written off as Frankie’s perception of time, but some events feel barely strung together, several disparate stories solely linked by our anti-hero’s bloodlust.

Tsigaridis continues to prove his ability to craft confronting pieces of extreme cinema that aren’t afraid to dissect the darker parts of humanity. This collaboration with Silva is especially poignant as Silva crafts a raw, disgusting, imperfect, honest story about navigating the world as a fat woman, a world that’s conditioned to hate you. This is the kind of horror story worth elevating, dissecting, discussing, and celebrating because it’s not afraid to get messy in the name of gouging out the eyes of the viewer.