Cicada: I Was a Teenage Horror Movie
United States I 2023 I 69 min I Director: Keil Orion Troisi
In 1997, tweens with a VHS camera filmed a horror epic.
25 years later, they edited it—as a comedy.
Soak in the gloriously glitchy VHS splendor of this remixed horror-comedy that is at once a bloody twist on vampire lore and an endearing portrait of filmmakers coming of "rage," struggling to make an ambitious home movie—each playing multiple roles, spilling dimestore blood in a slew of murder scenes, and testing testicular limits with a homemade zip-line setpiece.
the Director
Keil Orion Troisi has been a filmmaker since childhood. He directed the comedic documentary short "Total Disaster" (2022), which began its festival run in June at San Francisco DocFest, award-winning corporate-horror movie "Human Resources" (2015, feature) and "Mono Generation" (2017, short), and produced and co-wrote "Peace Pipeline" (2021) which won Best Doc Short at Dallas VideoFest, North Dakota Human Rights, Wolf Creek, Skoden, and Jim Thorpe film fests. Since 2012, he has been a core member of mischief-activism collective The Yes Men. He has worked for over a decade as a screenplay ghostwriter, editor, and story analyst, and won a NYFA Fellowship in Screenwriting-Playwriting. His screenplay "Aphids" won Best Overall, Best Drama, and Best Concept awards at Screenplay Summit 2022.