In 2001, Lucky McKee made his first film, the straight-to-video slasher All Cheerleaders Die, co-directed with Chris Sivertson (they would remake it in 2013). His first solo film was May, a constantly surprising and very twisted love story about a painfully shy young woman, a terrific turn from Angela Bettis, and her extreme solution to being rejected by potential or actual lovers. It mixes bits and pieces cribbed from Carrie (1976) (later in 2002, Bettis would appear as the eponymous character in a television remake), Frankenstein and even perhaps Juan Piquer Simón’s Mil gritos tiene la noche/Pieces (1982).

A fantastic a disorientating opening shot has May (Bettis) screaming in agony at a mirror, clutching at a bleeding eye socket (it’s a seemingly irrelevant shot that pays off later), before disconcertingly flashing back to her childhood which was mostly spent wearing an eye patch to correct a lazy eye. Ostracised by her schoolmates, her only friend is Suzie, a creepy doll in a glass case made by her doting mother (Merle Kennedy). This opening sequence was meant to much longer but was trimmed back for pacing reasons.

As an adult, the frail, bird-like and socially awkward May works as a vet’s assistant but has few friends. She becomes attracted to a mechanic, Adam (Jeremy Sisto), especially to his hands which hold a special fascination for her. Her colleague, the much more outgoing Polly (Anna Faris) is attracted to her and begins flirting with her, giving her a pet cat she names Lupe. After May over-enthusiastically bites Adam’s lip while kissing after watching his student film, Jack and Jill, about a couple who cannibalise each other during a picnic, Adam goes cold on her, and a heart-broken May overhears him telling his friends that he’s glad to be shot of her. A brief fling with Polly also ends in heartbreak when it turns out that Polly is seeing another woman, Ambrosia (Nichole Hiltz). To distract herself, May starts volunteering at a school for blind children which ends with Suzie’s case being shattered and the children being badly injured by the broken glass. A now thoroughly deranged May remembers her mother’s advice on making friends (“If you can’t find a friend, make one”) and sets about assembling a new friend from the body parts of those around her…

For all her extreme behaviour, May is surprisingly endearing, thanks in no small part to Bettis‘ excellent performance. She’s awkward, socially inept and possessed of some very odd ideas but you still end up wishing that she’d found a better way. She simply has no idea how to behave in any given social circumstance and her response to rejection is almost a textbook example of madness, but you just can’t help feel for her. It’s all down to Bettis of course who brings a charming vulnerability to May in the early scenes (she remains completely unaware of the fact that she’s deeply odd as she’s never really had anyone to compare herself to) that rapidly grows darker as her behaviour and, eventually, her physical appearance changes. By the last act, her confidence has grown thanks to her anger, rage, and murderous intent and she emerges on Halloween glammed up and literally dressed to kill.

There are clues scattered throughout the film as to what May will eventually get up to. He seems to be attracted not to people as a whole, but to their constituent parts. She admires Adam’s hands (when she first sees him, she rubs her face against them while he’s dozing at a restaurant), tells Polly that she has a nice neck, is more interested in the tattoo of the Frankenstein monster on the arm of Blank (James Duval), a punk she meets in the park, than in Blank himself and comments that Polly’s other lover Ambrosia has shapely legs (“nice gams!”) It’s clear from early on after her mother makes Suzie for her the path that she’s on was firmly set in her sad and lonely childhood. This has led to some readings of the film as a satire on the quest for physical perfection and the growing interest in body modification to achieve that state of perfection.

There are some very funny bits of business scattered here and there, like an early running gag about a young man whose dog has lost its leg (it later turns up, bloodied and not looking terribly fresh, in a nearby bush) and Adam’s growing unease at the enthusiasm with which May details surgery on another dog’s twisted colon is amusingly played by Bettis and Sisto. She proves to be too far out there even for horror-loving Adam whose achingly pretentious film about cannibalism (he signs it “regia di Adam Stubbs”) triggers odd appetites in May and who has a shrine to Dario Argento on his apartment wall. And there’s something witty about Ambrosia constantly and patronisingly referring to May as “doll,” oblivious to the fate awaiting her. Some of the humour falls a bit flat but for the most part it’s subtle and very effective.

The sudden shift from the psychological horror of the first half of the film to a more body horror approach in the latter (signalled by Suzie’s case and May’s psyche both shattering at the same time – the case, like the state of May’s mind, had been slowly cracking throughout the film) isn’t entirely convincing and sometimes McKee tends to linger when he should be moving things along a bit. But overall, May is a fine solo debut with plenty to commend it. It’s possible to read the second half of the film as entirely hallucination, the image of the newly confident and made-over May nothing more than a figment of her now fractured-beyond-repair psyche. In the end, whether it’s real or just the product of her broken mind, May seems to find, in the film’s oddly touching final moments, something like the love and intimacy she can live with.

In the hands of anyone else, May might have been just too absurd to work, but McKee does a fine job walking the line between grim horror and the darkest of humour and Bettis is a marvel in the leading role. She appeared in a string of horror films thereafter (the aforementioned Carrie remake, Tobe Hooper’s remake of Toolbox Murders (2004), Sick Girl (2006) (McKee‘s episode of Masters of Horror (2005-2007)), Scar (2007), McKee‘s The Woman (2011) and others) but had a busy enough career outside the genre to avoid the “scream queen” tag. McKee himself, apart from his work with Bettis, made The Woods (2006) (for which Bettis supplied the voice of the eponymous stretch of landscape), Kindred Spirits (2019) and contributed sections to two holiday themed anthologies, Tales of Halloween (2015) and Deathcember (2019).

Crew
Directed by: Lucky McKee; © 2002 A Loopy Production, LLC; 2 Loop Films presents; Executive Producers: Eric Koskin, John Veague; Produced by: Marius Balchunas, Scott Sturgeon; Co-producer: Richard Middleton; Written by: Lucky McKee; Director of Photography: Steve Yedlin, Jaron Presant; Edited by: Debra Goldfield, Rian Johnson; Composer: Jay Barnes-Luckett; Production Sound Mixer: James Dehr; Costume Designers: Marcelo Pequeño, Mariano Diaz; Key Make-up Artist: Kati Urszuly, Eva Lohse; Special Effects Make-up: Randy Westgate, Eva Lohse; Make-up Effects by: Zach Passero; Special Effects: Virgil Sanchez, Ric San Nicholas, Scott Nifong; Production Designer: Leslie Keel; Casting: Shannon Makhanian

Cast
Angela Bettis (May); Jeremy Sisto (Adam); James Duval (Blank); Merle Kennedy (Mama); Nichole Hiltz (Ambrosia); Nora Zehetner (Hoop); Will Estes (Chris); Rachel David (Petey); Chandler Riley Hecht (young May); Roxanne Day (Buckle); Brittney Lee Harvey (Diedre); Kevin Gage (Papa); Anna Faris (Polly); Samantha Adams (Lucille); Connor Matheus (kindergarten boy); Mike McKee (optometrist); Ken Davitian (foreign doctor); Bret Roberts (distraught man at veterinarian office); Traci Burr (short girl); Jude McVay (zombie); Tricia Kelly (Amy); Norwood Cheek (guy on bench)