Perpetrator is what happens when a teen coming-of-age movie, a feminist horror-noir, and a midnight film with a twisted sense of humor all get tossed into the same witch’s cauldron and boiled on high. Written and directed by Jennifer Reeder, the 2023 Shudder original follows Jonquil “Jonny” Baptiste, a reckless teen who turns 18, gets magical family powers, and immediately discovers that her small town is a buffet line for a serial kidnapper targeting girls. You know, normal adolescence.
This is a horror film that plays like a curse placed on patriarchy and high school at the same time. It’s messy, stylized, and completely uninterested in playing nice. That’s the fun of it.
Jonny Baptiste: Teen Angst, but Make It Supernatural
Kiah McKirnan’s Jonny is not here to be likable; she’s here to be interesting. Tossed to live with her estranged Aunt Hildie, Jonny is already balancing petty crime, attitude issues, and a general dislike of authority when her eighteenth birthday hits—and with it, a family spell known as “Forevering.”
Forevering is basically puberty reimagined as a body-horror art project: bleeding at random, hallucinating, shifting identity, fangs, the works. Instead of “your body is changing,” it’s “your entire sense of self is dissolving in neon goo, good luck.” Jonny’s transformation is funny, disturbing, and strangely empowering. The film treats the grotesque changes of womanhood as something that’s terrifying but also a weapon—a biological “Don’t mess with me” sign stapled to her DNA.
McKirnan plays her with a mix of deadpan defiance and vulnerable confusion. She’s not the pure-hearted Final Girl; she’s the girl who might steal your wallet and then save your life, rolling her eyes the whole time. It’s a refreshing change from the usual horror heroine who seems surprised that the world is dangerous. Jonny has always known it’s dangerous. Now she’s just dangerous back.
Aunt Hildie: Alicia Silverstone, Chaos Aunt
Then there’s Alicia Silverstone as Hildie Baptiste, the estranged aunt who might be a witch, might be a scammer, and is definitely operating on a different frequency from the rest of the human race. Silverstone plays her like your weirdest relative merged with an occult life coach: part nurturing, part menacing, all energy.
Hildie isn’t your standard horror mentor spouting solemn exposition. She’s arch, stylish, and just unsettling enough that you’re not sure if she’s saving Jonny or weaponizing her. Their scenes together hum with this hilariously toxic family chemistry—like a magical version of “You’ll thank me when you’re older,” except the implied “thank you” involves blood and a missing principal.
Silverstone leans into the heightened tone, chewing on Reeder’s dialogue with gleeful precision. She’s the type of aunt who would absolutely send you a birthday card containing both a spell and unsolicited life advice written in red ink.
A High School Where the Monsters Have Tenure
The town itself is a character: a place where girls go missing and everyone reacts with the kind of numb resignation usually reserved for bad cafeteria food. Jonny’s school is a pastel-filtered nightmare run by Principal Burke, played by Chris Lowell with chilly, smiling menace.
Reeder leans into the surreal: corridors that feel too long, lighting that veers into dream logic, and social dynamics that are somehow more horrifying than the abductions. The horror of Perpetrator isn’t just the masked kidnapper—it’s the institutional apathy that allows it to keep happening. The girls are watched, judged, disciplined… and then disappeared. It’s not subtle, but then again, what about growing up female is subtle?
The missing girls aren’t faceless statistics, either. Jonny’s classmates—Elektra, Aviva, Avalon, Darby—may have stylized names, but Reeder gives them enough personality to feel like real kids in a rigged system. That makes the disappearances feel less like plot devices and more like an indictment.
Body Horror, But Make It Political
On the surface, Perpetrator is about a teen discovering her supernatural abilities. Underneath, it’s very loudly about bodies: who owns them, who violates them, and who profits from pretending that youth is an endlessly harvestable resource. The town’s predator isn’t just kidnapping; they’re experimenting, reshaping, taking literal pieces of girls in the name of staying young and powerful.
If you’ve ever looked at anti-aging culture and thought, “This feels like ritual sacrifice with extra steps,” this movie agrees with you. The body horror isn’t just viscera; it’s a metaphor with sharp teeth. Jonny’s metamorphosis becomes a counter-ritual: if her body is going to be a battleground, she’s going to be the one firing shots.
The film’s gore and surreal visuals have a jittery, dreamlike quality. Faces warp, blood becomes symbolic as much as physical, and the camera often fractures the image like a cracked mirror—Reeder’s way of showing a world where identity and reality are constantly being sliced up.
Tonal Chaos as a Feature, Not a Bug
Some critics called Perpetrator tonally uncertain, but that’s part of the charm. The movie veers from deadpan comedy to dreamy horror to earnest teen drama, often within a single scene. It feels like living inside a teenager’s head: everything is heightened, contradictory, and one emotional beat away from total collapse.
Reeder isn’t interested in a clean, polished narrative. She prefers jagged edges: scenes that feel like fragments, dialogue that loops around in strange, stylized rhythms, humor that undercuts horror instead of smoothing it out. The result is a film that sometimes plays like a cursed YA pilot, sometimes like an art-house experiment, but somehow hangs together through sheer personality.
If traditional horror is a straight line from setup to scare, Perpetrator is more like a scribble that eventually draws a knife.
Feminist Horror with a Mean Streak
Beyond the style, the film is very clear about its priorities. It’s about girls and women: their relationships, their anger, their power, and the way the world keeps trying—and failing—to contain them. The men here are often weak, complicit, or outright monstrous. The women are complicated, flawed, and, crucially, allowed to be morally messy.
Jonny doesn’t become a saint when she gains powers; she becomes more herself, just turned up to eleven with fangs. Hildie is nurturing and terrifying. The kidnapped girls aren’t just victims; they’re the catalyst for a violent rebalancing of power. The film doesn’t gently suggest that the system is broken; it picks the system up, shakes it, and asks where it buried the bodies.
A Beautiful, Brutal Little Spell
Visually, Perpetrator bears the marks of its Chicago shoot—cold, urban edges and a sense of lived-in decay—but it’s filtered through Reeder’s hyper-stylized lens. What could have been a simple missing-girls thriller becomes something stranger and more tactile, like an occult comic book about weaponized girlhood.
That strangeness may alienate some viewers, but for those tuned to its wavelength, the film feels like a blood-soaked love letter to anyone who’s ever felt their body and identity being pulled in opposite directions. It’s horror as hex, aimed squarely at the people and structures that treat girls as raw material.
In the end, Perpetrator doesn’t just let Jonny survive; it lets her transform, accept, and sharpen what makes her different. The monster isn’t the girl with the fangs. It’s the world that thought she’d never bite back.
If you like your horror a little weird, a little political, and a lot feral, Perpetrator is absolutely worth your time. Think of it as a messy, bloody empowerment fantasy—like a dark spell cast at the patriarchy, with a smirk and a mouth full of sharp new teeth.
