In Bloody Axe Wound, a Teenage Slasher Becomes the Final Girl

Bloody Axe Wound, the new Shudder horror comedy from writer-director Matthew John Lawrence, may owe its existence to a DM from Walking Dead star Jeffrey Dean Morgan.

The new film is about high schooler Abbie Bladecut (Sari Arambulo), who wants to follow in the bloody footsteps of her father, Roger Bladecut, who kills local teenagers and sells videos of the slayings at his video store. It opens with a movie-within-the-movie in which Morgan plays killer Butch Slater, and he and his wife, Hilarie Burton Morgan, are also among the producers of Bloody Axe Wound.

The Morgans discovered Lawrence's work when they happened across his 2020 film Uncle Peckerhead, about a demonic roadie for a punk band.

"Jeffrey Dean Morgan was so instrumental in getting the movie made," Lawrence tells MovieMaker. "He was a big fan of Uncle Peckerhead, and it was crazy — something that I never would have imagined would happen. We released the movie during the pandemic, and it just so happened, a couple of months or a month after it got released, I was DMed via Twitter by him and his wife, Hilarie Burton, who loved the movie.

"And they asked me, 'What are you working on? Do you have any projects?' So I sent them some scripts. They liked two of them, and they signed me to a first-look deal of just shopping around the screenplays. And it took off from there."

Adds Silver Sound's Cory Choy, the re-recording mixer and supervising sound editor of Bloody Axe Wound: "Can we just pause real quick? How f---ing cool is it that Matt got DMed on Twitter by someone who's a fan of his cult classic, and then ended up making this? That's the dream, right? You put something out into the world that people love so much that they need to make another one with you."

Bloody Axe Wound, produced in association with Choy's Emmy-winning Silver Sound, arrives in theaters this Friday — right between Christmas and New Year's Day.

Besides getting a boost from Morgan, it may also benefits from a recent Netflix pop for AP Bio, the high school comedy that includes Arambulo in its stellar cast.

Bloody Axe Wound and DIY Filmmaking

What unites Lawrence's films — and helped cement his long relationship with Choy — is music. And not just music, but also a very punk, DIY approach to filmmaking. All of Lawrence's horror comedies are filled with sonic experimentation.

"Matt came to his films," says Choy, "with these killer soundtracks."

Lawrence and Choy first worked together on the 2010 short documentary Enter the Beard, about the 2009 World Beard and Mustache Championships in Anchorage, Alaska. They stayed in touch as Choy embraced the challenge of building sound around the many needle drops in Lawrence's films, starting with his debut feature, 2014's Two Pints Lighter, about a vampire drawn to a punk-rock girl.

After Two Pints Lighter, Choy remembers thinking, "I want to work with this dude forever."

Both Lawrence and Choy started making music as teenagers, and Lawrence was grateful to connect with a sound expert early in his career.

"It's half the audience experience, right?" Lawrence said.

He added that for many films, "sound is often an afterthought," but that because of his work with Choy, with each of his films, "I got to start those talks about sound and how we want the film to operate sonically during pre-production."

Lawrence's brother, Mike Lawrence, is a former music booker with deep musical connections who helps ensure Matthew John Lawrence's films are packed with new artists.

"You could listen to any of his movies as an album easily," says Choy. "And he came to it with the licensing costs that most music supervisors would get you half a song with. So when you have these killer soundtracks with bands that you really want to discover.... we all of a sudden had this really fun playground to play our sound design in."

Original music plays a big part in Bloody Axe Wound as well.

In the film, Abbie's love interest is Sam (Molly Brown), a very cool girl in a band. Their music is written by Jeff Riddle, a veteran of Uncle Peckerhead, with Acid Cat. Riddle also wrote other songs for Bloody Axe Wound.

"I'd give him some musical influences, songs that basically set the tone or the vibe for that scene or that moment," says Lawrence. "And what's amazing is Jeff, even lyrically, would mirror or kind of accentuate some of those feelings that characters are going through without having it be didactic or heavy handed in its lyricism."

Bloody Axe Wound Director Matthew John Lawrence on Meta Horror

For all the killer music, Bloody Axe Wound also delights in great kills — even while it offers a running commentary on horror conventions around gender. The first conflict in the film is that Sam's dad (Billy Burke) doesn't believe she can be a great killer — because she's a girl.

Sam realizes her high school is a "target rich environment" for a killer. But she also discovers there's more to life than death — and that selling videotaped murders may not be her destiny.

Though Bloody Axe Wound has meta elements, Lawrence noticed as he worked on drafts of the screenplay that it was becoming more and more sincere. What always stayed core to the film, he says, was the idea of "a slasher transforming into the final girl by the end."

"I realized, in early drafts, I was kind of lifting, or kind of a little too influenced, by other meta horror films," Lawrence says. "And I wanted to make this a little bit more heartfelt and a little bit more of kind of a family drama."

Bloody Axe Wound arrives in theaters Friday from RLJE Films and Shudder.

Main image: Sari Arambulo in Bloody Axe Wound. RLJE FIlms/Shudder.