Bella Thorne & Izabel Pakzad Talk About What Makes ‘Find Your Friends’ Different From Other Horror Movies [Video]

From Laurie Strode to Sidney Prescott, final girls run horror movies. But it’s only recently that final girls have become more complex and colorful. Earlier this year, we got a movie like Is God Is, where the women are as imperfect and vicious as the cards they’ve been dealt. If you like revenge thrillers with murderous leading ladies, another horror movie that needs to be on your watchlist is Find Your Friends. The film, directed by Izabel Pakzad, follows a group of friends in their (365) partygirl era, from a doomed sunny day on a boat to the isolated terror of the California desert.

Find Your Friends, which Dread Central previously toasted as an “explosive debut,” feels like a fever dream: Equally alluring and horrifying. Pakzad has previously spoken about the eerie, IRL events that inspired her to write Find Your Friends, which makes the viewing experience chilling. But what truly sets the film apart isn’t how Pakzad creates horror. It’s how she handles women on screen. “Generally speaking, it seems like the same formula: The final girl is this sweet, innocent, fits-into-a-pretty-little-box girl, and you kind of always know who it is at the beginning of the movie,” director Izabel Pakzad said of horror movies past, adding that she was “sick” of this final girl trope. Pakzad said she wanted to create “these young, female characters who are bold, and unapologetic, and vulgar, and embracing talking about sex” because audiences “rarely get to see that.”

Even the most glamorous parties have a dark underbelly, which is something Amber (Helena Howard), Lavinia (Bella Thorne), Zosia (Zión Moreno), Lola (Chloe Cherry) and Maddy (Sophia Ali) find out all too quickly. But Pakzad is sure to craft her final girls in a way where they do encounter the more unsavory aspects of the West Coast party scene, but they don’t fall victim to horror movie science, where they’re not punished for being loud or unladylike or slutty. In fact, the group comes out on top, triumphant.”To have these women — without giving anything away —make it to the end and get their power back in this sort of fucked-up way is super inspiring,” she added.