By JILLIAN KRISTINA
“This is very bad, but it can get a lot worse. Girls like you just don’t know what you’ve got until it’s all gone.”
There can be danger in being seen. In standing out. In being beautiful. In being powerful. But there shouldn’t be.
“Danger lurks around every corner. Your survival depends on you and only you.”
In Jennifer Reeder’s 2023 coming-of-age bloodbath, PERPETRATOR, teenage girls are going missing left and right. A local student body is paralyzed with fear. And Jonquil Baptiste (Kiah McKirnan), Jonny to her friends, arrives just in time for the action. What she doesn’t know is that she’s about to experience some extreme action of her own – some very personal, very physical, very visceral ancestral action.
“Assume that you are not ever safe.”
After her struggling father, Gene (Tim Hopper), sends her to live with her Aunt Hildie (Alicia Silverstone), Jonny is enrolled in the prep school Hildie herself used to attend. Everything just feels a little… off… about the school, including the self-defense and security simulation-obsessed Principal Burke (Chris Lowell).
“Code Massacre, Level Bloodbath.”
While adjusting to her new life, Jonny starts to experience changes. On the cusp of her 18th birthday, she is slammed with a deluge of hallucinations and visions during her monthly cycle. She plummets into crimson depths, sinking, spinning, not knowing which way is up. Endless red surrounds her. Holds her. Has messages for her. But she’ll have to get over the initial terror if she’s ever to hear them.
“Escape. Evade. Engage.”
Aunt Hildie has prepared a very special cake for Jonny’s birthday – a cake that is tradition. After initially refusing the cake, Jonny comes back to the table after Hildie has gone to bed. She grabs the cake in her hands and begins to dig in – almost like a wild animal. There is a very special ingredient in this cake for sure. This cake is a catalyst, and the dark, thick filling that drips from its core acts as a sort of quickening.
Now, the blood returns. Now, the frenzy ensues.
“It would’ve happened to you without the cake. That’s just fuel for the fury.”
Stained, gnashing teeth. Blood-curdling screams. Madness. Lunacy. Transformation.
Jonny has crossed the threshold from which there is no return. The blood is a portal containing an abyss one must surrender to in order to survive because the blood, well, the blood is life. It beckons us and shows us things. It reveals truths that are drowning beneath the sludge of what we’ve been led to believe the blood means. The blood is power, and so are we.
“I call it Forevering. It’s profound spectral empathy. You are one in a long line. We are proxies, surrogates, mimics, mirrors. We turn, we fake. We follow, we bend. We shift, we shape. We tune way in… We are women feeling all the feelings.”
A swell of blood, swallowing us, bursting forth, encircling us in a drainage of pain and suffering and seemingly insurmountable circumstances. It holds our anger, our sacred rage. When we try to hold the deluge back, we become clogged. When we allow the levee to break and the blood to flow, that is where true power is – our power. This shifting, bottomless pit of blood is Jonny’s battleground. This is where she has leverage. This is where her magick – her unique gift – exposes its monumental, otherworldly strength. As she begins to explore and flex this new muscle, she finds that her sensitivities are the most powerful ally she has in not only staying alive but in finding those who may still be.
“I’ve watched my face turn into another face. My voice was her voice, too. And I could feel her blood leaving her body. And she’s alive, I just don’t know where she is.”
With great power comes great responsibility, but what people don’t talk about is what happens when we deny the power within us, when we deny our truest selves – our most righteous forms. When recognized and embraced, this power enables us to not only survive but to thrive within the chaotic paradigm of existence. When denied, we succumb to the static and chaos, decaying within and crumbling without.
Jonny harnesses her power – her rage. She unleashes the ancestral feral force to track down the missing, and in the process, creates safety in numbers that no one could have foreseen. Just as she reclaims herself, she helps those toeing that liminal line between life and death choose both. And by their willingness to shed and shapeshift, they’ll never have to fear anything ever again.
On this Autumnal Equinox, take a moment for reflection with a few tarot prompts:
What did we harvest over this last season?
What did we unearth?
What were the messages of that pulsating thrumming rising from beneath the soil and roots and worms and rot?
What are we releasing with our final gasps of acrid summer breath?
What is asking to be revealed in the dying light of day to see us through the darkest black of night?
The Samhain fires will be here before we know it, and they demand kindling. What will we have to feed them? Perhaps the answers to these prompts? The time for a new kind of story is nigh, and this coming season offers us the darkest, most fertile soil in which to dig, to touch, to feel, to taste. These are the milemarkers of our new narrative. We must only be brave enough to compost the past and allow the future to rise from the depths.
