Every little thing I do
Never seems enough for you
You don’t wanna lose it again
But I’m not like them-N’Sync, “It’s Gonna Be Me“
This Spooky Season at BBP, we’ve been thinking about the period of horror covered in Clark Collis’s book, ‘Screaming and Conjuring’ and the films that were released between 1996’s Scream and 2013’s The Conjuring. This period casts a pretty wide net of horror in every sense and my mind immediately drifted to one of my favourite films (of any genre, really) that falls right in the middle of that range that, for some reason, I’ve never really written extensively about even though I’ve certainly thought deeply about it over the last 20ish years. Lucky McKee’s 2002 feature debut May is an important movie and milestone for me as a horror fan, and it informed my tastes – not just for horror – in so many ways.
May is a movie that I came across at random at my local video store, back in the early 2000’s when both video stores and discovering movies at random on the shelves therein was a thing. I guess this is kind of the same thing as one does when scrolling through the titles on one’s streaming service of choice (minus the tactile feeling of picking up the sometimes-sticky box), but my first impression of May was its striking cover art. The cover is, at first, a pretty simple one and relies heavily on May’s star Angela Bettis and the magnetism of her riveting stare and high-contrast, ghostly-white visage against a black background. It puts all the focus on her gaze which seems to bore right through you. If, like May herself, you feel like you aren’t being seen, then the DVD cover is obliged. But looking closer, the aura around May is composed of scalpels and scissors, both of which she uses extensively in the movie. It’s both subtle and unsubtle at once, and heck if that’s not my vibe.
It’s not long before you’re drawn in and into McKee’s clutches. After a brief but shocking scene of present-day eye trauma that will make itself clear later, we flash back and are introduced to May Canady as a child. She has a tough time at school due to her lazy eye, and her looks-obsessed mother encourages her to hide it from her classmates if she’s ever going to make friends. When this is – predictably – not successful, May’s mother presents her with a family heirloom in the form of a handmade doll named Suzie that’s encased in a glass display case that May is instructed to keep intact. Suzie also comes with some motherly advice: “if you can’t find a friend, make one.” This iconic line feels innocent on the surface but, as will become a theme of May, will ultimately read as sinister foreshadowing. Suzie will stick with May throughout her life and play dramatically into the film’s ending, which is one of my favourites of all time.
May becomes infatuated with local mechanic Adam, who’s played by perennial early-aughts hunk Jeremy Sisto. May is especially attracted to Adam’s hands and her fetishization of them soon becomes impossible for her to conceal as the two start hanging out some more. He has, at first, a lot of patience for May’s introversion and for their decidedly one-sided conversations and he fancies himself something of a “weirdo” himself. When Adam shows May his extremely mid student film that features a couple going on a date and ends up with them literally cannibalizing one another, May is fascinated while Adam seems creeped out by her reaction. He ends up turning on her as she playfully bites and draws blood from him, perhaps revealing that his sexy serial killer vibes are more of an act than anything else. An overheard conversation with his friend reveals to May that he’s creeped out by her, and despite that seems to want to keep May in his orbit.
All this time, May continues to receive advice from Suzie, still in her glass case at home. Suzie embodies every bit of both the scorn and the companionship that her mother – now dead, presumably – once provided to the lonely May. We see May try everything at her disposal to fit in, to rekindle things with Adam, to spark up a friendship (or something more) with the well-meaning punk Blank (James Duval) and even to connect sexually with Polly, only to be disappointed at every turn. May even volunteers in a classroom of visually-impaired children and this ends up in a macabre disaster so out of left field that it becomes almost funny (to me, a sicko) when it absolutely shouldn’t be. And this is yet another way in which May wormed its way into my heart. Its ability to mine a kind of perverse humour from the most unexpected places became something I aspired to.
May reframed films that I already loved like Lynne Stopkewich’s Kissed (1996), John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps (2000) and ones that would become favourites of mine like Sean Byrne’s The Loved Ones (2009), Richard Bates Jr’s Excision (2011), and Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012) years later that all share a bit of DNA with May. Women protagonists exploring their way out of being outcasts with social subversion and graphic violence have always been something I’ve been drawn to in my horror, but it was never a conscious choice until McKee and Bettis made me see their themes and aesthetic as a lens through which I view a lot of the films I enjoy. For films like the ones I saw soon after May and even recent ones like 2025’s Sugar Rot and Fucktoys, I recall thinking to myself that they all have big May energy during my first viewings of each, thinking about how the women in the lead roles in those films grab the world that scorned them and start literally carving their own path through it. Ultimately, the common thread running through all these movies is the desire to be seen, to be accepted in a society that simply refuses to do either. For May, her happy ending – such as it is – and ultimate goal is a non-binary Frankenstein’s monster of both male and female parts, including parts of herself. Once constructed, she finally feels as though she has a kindred spirit and a friend that truly understands her. It’s one of my favourite endings of any movie and even though I’ve seen it dozens of times now, it never fails to elicit an audible gasp from me. It’s my ur-example of an ending that’s both shocking and completely earned, all at once.
It’s brain-breaking to me that May is Lucky McKee’s first feature. Knowing this, the most compelling part of the movie for me is that it lets you into its protagonist so fully and openly, and how it thoroughly and almost clinically explores every aspect of her crushing loneliness. I can’t imagine sharing this story with May and not feeling some twinge of sympathy, if not more, for her even as she engages in some extremely dark shit as the film draws to a close. One thing that has always fascinated me with May is that, structurally, it keeps its horror cards close to its chest until fairly late in the film. Sure, there’s the presence of a creepy doll and a little macabre imagery from the vet clinic but things don’t really descend into the truly horrific until the last act when it begins to careen into all kinds of violence. Until then it’s mostly a romantic drama and occasional comedy about a marginalized woman and her off-kilter co-worker and love interest.
The N’Sync song that I reference off the top here predates May by a couple of years, and it would be frankly nuts to assume that McKee was thinking at all about it when penning this story about a young woman’s loneliness and Frankensteinish proclivities. But it’s fun to think about Justin and his henchmen channeling May Canady as they wail, “you’ve got no choice…There ain’t no time to waste…You’re just too blind to see…It’s gonna be me.” It strikes the kind of dissonant chord that attracted me to pick up that DVD from the shelf at the video store in the first place. Even with the wealth of options now available in 2025 – your V/H/S‘s, your Trick r’ Treats, and the cornucopia of great horror of all sorts – there’s always a place that I go back to each Halloween. This Spooky Season? It’s gonna be May.
Note: A version of this piece originally appeared over at the Cultural Gutter.
