From director Tyler MacIntyre (Tragedy Girls), It’s a Wonderful Knife has arrived on DVD and Blu-ray, proving that a queer holiday horror film isn’t just for Christmas: it’s for life. The physical media release comes gift-wrapped with a host of special features, including an all-new making-of documentary called Better Off — and Santa must’ve come extra early this year because we’ve got an exclusive clip to share with you!
As seen on the subscriber-exclusive cover of FANGORIA #22, It’s a Wonderful Knife follows Winnie Carruthers (Jane Widdop), a teen who saved her town from a psychotic killer. A year later, Winnie’s life is less than wonderful, but when she wishes she had never been born, she discovers just how much worse the world would be without her in it. Now she must team up with the town misfit, Bernie (Jess McLeod), to stop the killer she wasn’t around to take down and get back to her own reality. Oh, and maybe fall in love along the way.
That’s right: It’s a Wonderful Knife is gay as hell, as Better Off’s director, Alice Xandra Thirteen, was well aware from the get-go.
“I knew from the script that the dynamic between Winnie and Bernie had a special subtext,” they explain. “There’s a fascination between them that I could relate to personally. What audiences don’t know is that it wasn’t written as an explicitly queer relationship. It became one as Jane and Jess got on set and started working together. Now the movie feels like a sapphic adventure to me, and that’s something the world needs a lot more of.”
McLeod agrees that they helped shape and direct the queerness of It’s a Wonderful Knife, which writer Michael Kennedy (Freaky) had already been playing with in the screenplay.
“When I auditioned for the first time, I was already playing it like Bernie was in love with Winnie, because that’s what I got from the script,” they told us. “And when Jane and I read for Tyler, the director, the first time, it was just super clear immediately that that was coming through for both of us. We had a lot of chemistry in that read already, and we were lucky enough to be working with people who were able to see what we were seeing, feel what we were feeling, and see that it supported the story. And a lot of it was already there [laughs]. They just kind of cemented that and said, ‘yeah, we’re going to commit to this — this feels right, this feels real.’ So it kind of came from Jane and I and our interpretation as queer people. And then it became a part of the story in canon, which was amazing.”
And the queerness wasn’t just in front of the camera. Better Off documents the making of It’s a Wonderful Knife “as told by the filmmakers, queers, enbys, and trans people who brought it to life.” The nonbinary representation behind the scenes was especially meaningful to Widdop and McLeod, as you’ll hear in the exclusive clip below:
If your heart didn’t just grow three sizes, you might want to get it looked at.
“Working on the film meant spending a month on set surrounded by complete strangers,” Thirteen adds. “But it was an actively queer-friendly set, and so for me as a trans person, it also meant being gendered correctly every day. That’s not something I was used to. Experiencing that changed my expectations of other sets, my relationship to euphoria, and honestly changed the trajectory of the rest of my life.”
In addition to the talking heads you saw in the clip, Better Off features interviews with MacIntyre, stars Joel McHale and Katharine Isabelle, and other members of the cast and crew. You can watch the full documentary on the DVD and Blu-ray of It’s a Wonderful Knife, available wherever you get your physical media fix.
