First Blood
2022 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Olivia Loccisano
Genres: coming-of-age, fantasy, horror
A teenage girl's first period awakens a bizarre transformation and an unusual new hunger in her, bringing eerie visions of the boy she likes.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally, a coming-of-age film that doesn't genuflect to the YA formula—instead it weaponizes puberty as body horror and desire as predatory appetite, which is genuinely unsettling in ways that feel earned rather than affected.
Loccisano taps a lineage running from Carrie through Ginger Snaps, but the film's restraint in its visual language and its commitment to ambiguity over spectacle positions it as a more formally considered entry in the menstruation-as-monstrosity subgenre.
The choice to blur the line between metabolic transformation and romantic obsession through subjective, fractured imagery is what transforms a familiar premise into something disorienting—it's all in how the visuals fracture when desire and body meet, and Loccisano finds the exact register where they become indistinguishable.
Reviews
Locciano delivers a not-for-the-squeamish entry into cinematic fear-fare involving menstruation, which includes such predecessors as Carrie and Canada's own Ginger Snaps. Sa gives a solid lead performance, and the chemistry between her and Grajales is believable.