Summary
- #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead
premieres tonight, June 8, at Tribeca Film Festival with a twisted, fun horror storyline set at a music festival. - Director Marcus Dunstan aims to balance originality with his influences from the
Scream
franchise in his new slasher film. - #AMFAD
injects humor, kinetic energy, and brutal gory scenes into classic slasher genre tropes for a killer cinematic experience.
“We did our damndest to give you something you haven’t seen before that’ll feel like raw voltage in that theater,” beamed Marcus Dunstan, director of the new teen horror film, #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead. The chilling tale finds a group of college friends renting an Airbnb during a huge music festival, but their party weekend soon takes a wicked turn. One by one, the posse gets murdered — according to their sins. The film follows Dunstan’s lengthy career in the horror genre as the writer behind four movies in the Saw franchise, the horror comedy franchise Feast, Piranha 3DD, and the writer and director of 2022’s Unhuman.
#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead has its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival tonight, June 8, and you can find showtimes and information here. stars Jade Pettyjohn (Little Fires Everywhere, Big Sky), Jennifer Ens, Ali Fumiko Whitney, Michaella Russell, Julian Haig, Justin Derickson, Cardi Wong, Jack Doupe-Smith, and Jojo Siwa. Dunstan was jazzed by the twisty script penned by Josh Sims and Jessica Sarah Flaum, but was acutely aware that today’s horror genre is highly competitive. We spoke with him ahead of the film’s premiere, and he pointed out the difficult balance of being influenced by the Scream franchise while also trying to do something original, noting:
“
Scream
had such an impact that it was like throwing the best rock into the lake, then you’d see the
Scream
imitations come out. And I thought, ‘Now wait a minute.’
Scream
is its own individual that was also respecting everything that came before it but creating something new with that. That’s what I wanted to do.
”
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“I was a movie theater projectionist in Iowa when the Scream movies came out, and I watched from the window,” continued Dunstan. “I watched the silhouettes of people jump and shriek, and I would turn up the volume [on the movie] because I knew when Ghostface was coming.” He added:
What did I take from that?
I wanted to recreate that reaction in the audience
,” he added. “Some of the places, it didn’t have to be people talking about movies within movies [in
Scream
]. It had to be, ‘
Is your guard down? Are you laughing?’ Wham! I got you. I was ruthless
.
#AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead Is a Slasher at a Music Festival
Tribeca programmer Matt Barone sums up #AMFAD: All My Friends Are Dead this way:
“It should be the best party of the year: Karmapalooza, a massive music festival. When a group of college friends score tickets to the event, they set out on a road trip, packed into a minivan stashed with all the booze and weed they need. But a vehicular mishap forces them to spend the night inside an isolated Airbnb, which seems cool enough — after all, where better to party hard than in someone else’s house? Not so fast. Being stuck indoors together causes their internal rifts and shared past to surface. Even worse, an uninvited guest joins the party and decides they need to pay for their transgressions by murdering them in extremely gory ways tied to their specific sins.”
1:59
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“Full of energy and sharp, biting personality, #AMFAD injects a heavy dose of blood red, cannabis-flavored bubblegum into slasher horror. Directed by Saw franchise veteran Marcus Dunstan, this playful whodunit utilizes the classic franchise’s kinetic energy and brutality while mixing in giallo-minded visual flourishes and a wicked sense of humor,” continues Barone. “It’s a killer cinematic party.”
#AMFAD will be released in select theaters and on digital and on demand on August 2, 2024. Watch this space for our full interview with Marcus Dunstan and Jade Pettyjohn for the film and our review closer to its theatrical release.
