Buffy Meets The Craft and Gregg Araki in the Trailer for Witchy Sapphic Horror Film The Serpent’s Skin

Alice Maio Mackay’s new chiller will open in New York and Los Angeles

By Alex Kaan 28 February 2026

IFC and Shudder

Dark Star Pictures has unveiled the trailer for indie queer horror film The Serpent’s Skin.

The sixth feature from Alice Maio Mackay, the star of our Issue 4 cover story, finds the T-Blockers Carnage for Christmas director exploring a witchy love story between two young women with a tone reminiscent of 90s film and television like Charmed and The Craft. The film follows a new-girl-in-town (Alexandra McVicker) who develops dangerous supernatural abilities—powers that she shares with her mysterious love interest (Avalon Fast).

With six features under her belt at only 21, Maio Mackay has already cemented herself as an indie trans horror auteur. The director has already lined up her next project, a sci-fi horror film produced by Jane Schoenbrun (I Saw the TV Glow), whom she shadowed on the set up of the upcoming meta queer slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma with Gillian Anderson and Hannah Einbinder.

“I wanted to make something that felt like a TV movie but was still cinematic,” Maio Mackay told us in Milan last October, reflecting on her influences for The Serpent’s Skin. “Like a two-part Charmed episode.”

The Serpent’s Skin opens in New York on March 27th and in Los Angeles on April 3rd, with Maio Mackay and special guests in attendance for the opening night. The film is also screening at BFI Flare starting March 21st.

Watch the trailer below.

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