Bodies Bodies Bodies, A24’s new slasher thriller film, is one that seems to be tailor-made for the Gen Z era, with a whole lot of kills but laughs in between.

Directed by Halina Reijn, the film focuses on a group of friends that hold a party during a hurricane at one of their families’ mansions in remote location. But when a game they play goes wrong, there’s a lot of literal backstabbing.

The film stars Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Myha’la Herrold, Chase Sui Wonders, Rachel Sennott, Lee Pace and Pete Davidson. Shadow and Act spoke with the former six on the film, their characters and what the film adds to the slasher genre.

“I feel like human beings are really driven by fear and love, and kind of the rest of our emotions are born of those two poles,” said Stenberg when describing what may set Bodies Bodies Bodies apart from other films in the same vein, both past and present. “So that’s why I love horror as a genre that I feel can really powerfully explore deeply human themes. What I love so much about this one is how it speaks to the nature of relationships, especially relationships that are born out of this era and this time, and how our relationships with each other and the way that we engage with each other and the conversation we try to engage with is becoming increasingly vapid– because we don’t actually interrogate anything with a real level of depth. We end up operating a lot of the time from a place of fear…fear of judgment [from] other people, fear of how we’re being perceived, what we look like, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear that someone is better than us or has more followers than us, fear of who has or has not watched our story [laughs]. I think like so many other really amazing horror films, this movie hopefully utilizes the horror genre to explore those very deeply human themes.”

Wonders added, “We were talking about all throughout filming how it bends that genre and how it’s so campy but it’s in a smart way. I feel like a slasher is driven by jumpscares and like big, cataclysmic events, and this film, the sneaky engine is all these characters kind of devolving. It kind of makes like the opportunities and options for where it goes, like really endless because you’re just being taken on a ride of each specific character’s journey. In that sense, I think it defies any genre, and it’s kind of in a league of its own.”

Watch the full interview with Stenberg, Bakalova, Herrod, Wonders, Sennott and Pace below:

The film is in limited theaters on Aug. 5 before moving nationwide on Aug. 12.

Maria Bakalova

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