Slay Down is a campy horror musical short set on the opening night of a scrappy regional theater production of Shirtwaist! The Musical, where ambition, desperation, and performance collide. As the cast of “Shirtwaist! The Musical” prepares for opening night, one overzealous ensemble member plots to make herself the star of the show.
The film is both a love letter to and a satire of the theater world: a heightened, genre-bending exploration of backstage life that captures the chaos, absurdity, and deep emotional investment that come with making live performance. Beneath the blood and comedy, Slay Down is rooted in real experiences - drawn from stories of overworked, underpaid artists navigating systems that often fail to support them, yet continuing to create out of passion and necessity.
Created by a team of theater kids turned filmmakers, this project is driven by a desire to bridge stage and screen. Slay Down merges the immediacy and theatricality of live performance with the visual language of film, featuring an original musical woven directly into the narrative. The short serves as a proof of concept for a larger feature-length project, introducing a vivid world of characters, music, and tonal ambition that will be expanded in the future.
At its core, this film is about artists: their hunger, their resilience, and the fine line between devotion and obsession. It’s about what happens when the desire to be seen goes too far - and how performance can become both an escape and a battleground.
This project is also deeply collaborative and community-driven. I am working with a network of emerging artists (aka my dear friends!) across disciplines, many of whom are overlooked despite their immense talent. This project is as much about creating opportunity for those artists as it is about telling this story.
Following completion, the film will be submitted to festivals and screened through community-based exhibitions, with the goal of building momentum toward a feature film. Your support helps bring this story, and the artists behind it, to life.