Bring It On… From the Dead
You know a film has ambition when it opens with a cheerleading accident so gory it makes Final Destination look like a gymnastics PSA. All Cheerleaders Die, the 2013 horror-comedy from Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson, starts with the tragic death of a cheerleader and then gleefully asks: “What if Bring It On was remade by the witches from The Craft and scored by Rob Zombie?”
The result is a movie that’s part satire, part supernatural revenge flick, and all glorious nonsense. It’s a glitter-coated middle finger to high school tropes, gender politics, and the entire concept of subtlety.
The Spirit Squad from Hell
Caitlin Stasey stars as Mäddy Killian — which already sounds like a name you’d find carved into the lockers of a haunted high school. She’s a vengeful ex-cheerleader turned avenger-in-yoga-pants who decides to infiltrate the cheer squad after her best friend dies in a horrific stunt gone wrong. Her motives? Revenge. Her tools? Seduction, secrets, and an extremely well-lit camcorder.
Mäddy isn’t your typical horror heroine. She’s calculating, morally gray, and has the social warmth of a vampire on keto. She’s also bisexual, which the film handles with a refreshing nonchalance — until the whole “lesbian necromantic resurrection” subplot kicks in, and then it’s just delightfully unhinged.
The cheer squad itself is a cocktail of clichés served with a demonic twist. There’s Tracy, the queen bee whose pom-poms could probably double as weapons; Martha and Hanna, the uptight Christian twins who accidentally swap bodies after a resurrection spell (yes, really); and Leena, Mäddy’s witchy ex-girlfriend whose spellwork makes Sabrina look like a Girl Scout with scented candles.
High School Hierarchies and the Walking Dead
The movie takes the sacred institution of American high school and treats it like a buffet of chaos. Football players are violent idiots, cheerleaders are beautiful disasters, and the faculty are nowhere to be found — presumably because they’ve already transferred to a safer district.
But what begins as your typical revenge setup takes a hard left turn into necromancy. After a drunken night leads to a fatal car crash (thanks, Terry, you absolute psycho), Leena resurrects the dead cheerleaders using glowing Wiccan stones — because who hasn’t tried to fix a bad night out with dark magic?
The girls wake up confused, angry, and craving blood. They soon realize they’re undead, invincible, and still forced to attend high school. Honestly, it’s the most accurate depiction of adolescence ever filmed.
Blood, Gore, and Glitter
Let’s be clear: this movie doesn’t just dip into the absurd — it does a full swan dive into a pool of red corn syrup and sequins. The tone swings between genuine horror and gleeful self-parody, like Heathers with fangs.
The violence is cartoonishly fun. Cheerleaders rip out jugulars between math classes, football players get punished with righteous fury, and every death is accompanied by either a snarky one-liner or a perfectly timed music cue. The movie never apologizes for its chaos — it embraces it, like a homicidal pep rally that refuses to end.
Cinematographer Greggory Hatanaka deserves credit for making the entire film look like it was lit by Satan’s ring light. Every shot glows with saturated color and supernatural heat, giving the sense that hell might actually have a decent art department.
Feminism with a Bite
What makes All Cheerleaders Die more than just a campy bloodbath is its sly, dark humor about gender and power. This isn’t your typical “girls die, guys live” slasher flick. The girls own the violence. They aren’t victims — they’re reanimated metaphors with pom-poms, hunting down their abusers one touchdown at a time.
Terry, the film’s football-star-turned-rapist villain, embodies every toxic jock stereotype in existence. By the end, he’s swallowing glowing stones and screaming like a man who just discovered feminism exists. It’s glorious.
McKee and Sivertson have always been interested in women’s rage (May, The Lost), and here they turn it into a full-blown apocalypse. The film’s best moments aren’t the kills, but the small, sinister smiles — the satisfaction of seeing a horror movie where the monsters are justified.
Performances: Deadpan and Dead Right
Caitlin Stasey carries the film with the perfect blend of irony and sincerity. Her Mäddy is both predator and confessor, a morally murky heroine who understands that revenge doesn’t cleanse — it just resurrects different demons.
Sianoa Smit-McPhee (Leena) plays her witchy ex with the kind of wounded intensity that makes you wonder if she’s one bad breakup away from summoning Cthulhu. Brooke Butler’s Tracy starts as a stereotype and ends up as a tragicomic icon — part Regina George, part zombie prom queen.
Tom Williamson as Terry brings an over-the-top menace that makes him both terrifying and hilariously dumb. He’s the kind of villain who monologues about destiny while holding a severed limb — and you love to hate every second of it.
A Cheerful Descent into Madness
All Cheerleaders Die is a movie that knows exactly what it is: trashy, smart, and self-aware. It flirts shamelessly with camp while delivering just enough pathos to make you care when someone loses a limb.
The film’s humor isn’t just surface-level parody — it’s a scalpel aimed straight at genre conventions. When the girls feed on blood, it’s less about survival and more about reclaiming hunger — for justice, for agency, for the power denied them in life.
And yet, it’s also funny as hell. Lines like “I can’t die, I’m vegan!” or “You can’t spell ‘cheerleader’ without ‘dead’” might as well be stitched on a throw pillow in Lucifer’s living room.
Ending on a High (School) Note
By the time we reach the film’s bloody climax, it’s clear McKee and Sivertson aren’t playing by traditional horror rules. Instead of wrapping things up neatly, they drop a post-credit tease that hints at an even crazier sequel — featuring a resurrected Alexis crawling out of a corpse like she’s auditioning for Carrie 2: Electric Boogaloo.
It’s a bold, audacious ending — and it works. All Cheerleaders Die doesn’t want closure. It wants chaos. It wants you to laugh, wince, and pump your fist at the same time. It’s the cinematic equivalent of discovering your high school yearbook has been possessed by Satan, and honestly, that’s refreshing.
Final Verdict: Pom-Poms and the Apocalypse
All Cheerleaders Die isn’t perfect — it’s too weird, too loud, too gleefully stupid for that. But it’s also one of the most entertaining horror comedies of the 2010s. It’s a film that juggles tone like a blood-slicked baton: feminist satire, teen melodrama, undead carnage — and somehow, it never drops the ball.
If you like your horror smart but slutty, your gore laced with glitter, and your cheerleaders resurrected by moonlight, this one’s for you.
Rating: 8 out of 10 bloody pom-poms.
Rah-rah, sis-boom-blood — long live the undead spirit squad!
