Fangoria Magazine
"May" Article - March 2003
(Part 3)

Article Written By:  Jeremiah Kipp w/ Fangoria Magazine

A side pleasure when seeing May at various film festivals was spotting the moments where audience members chose to walk out.  The surreal sequence where blind childern crawl over broken glass would make sense, or perhaps the scenes where May starts getting artistic with her trusty scalpel.  Not so, McKee points out.  "The thing I find hilarious is that May kills four or five people in the film---and yet the thing that makes most people walk out is when she's dragging around this dead cat.  Isn't that the weirdest thing?  She stabs someone in the neck, then stabs someone else in the temple, but when she kills the cat it's too much for people. And I hate cats!" McKee laughs.  "Those cat scenes are just me letting out all my rage."

Unlike filmmakers who hide in the lobby while then films screen, McKee enjoys the instant gratification of finding out what works and what doesn't.  "When do they scream and when do they laugh?  For me, it's like studying for my next film," he says.  He also notes that screening May has allowed him to hobnob with some of his favorite genre filmmakers, like George Romero and Stuart Gordon. 

"Meeting these guys is such an honor," McKee says.  "When I heard that Wes Craven liked our film and was going to give us a quote for the DVD, I couldn't believe it.  A nightmare on Elm Street was one of my favorite influences, so it's an amazing honor.  I've learned so much from those classic filmmakers, and like them I want to make a lot of horror movies."  His next genre film will be the psychological chiller The Woods (based on a David Ross screenplay), which he loosely compares to Suspiria and is currently in the works at United Artists.

"Most of the horror films coming out of Hollywood in the past 10 years have been pretty bland," McKee says.  "They aren't scary, and they're too concerned with being self-conscious about  the genre.  It's too bad they aren't taking it more seriously, like the films still busting out of Italy, Spain and Japan.  With May, I wanted to stay true to horror conventions and allow the characters to have some depth." 

Tracing the roots of the genre back to Grimm's Fairy Tales, May echoes the grisly and dreamlike way those stories treat the human condition.  There's also an element of the absurd in May, particularly in the final moments.  "[The climax of May] is pretty ridiculous when you consider what actually happens," McKee says.  "It's completely unrealistic.  I liken it to the original Cinderella, where the sisters are cutting off their heels to fit them into the glass slipper.  They're doing something that is physically violent and bloody, but it has a warped logic because they want to marry the Prince.  In my story, May is killing all these people [in her neighborhood] not because she's a murderer but because she need their parts.  She wants to make herself a friend, and it's the only way she can figure out how to make herself happy."

And the survivors all live happily ever after---one of them minus an eye.   ¤