BIFF OFFSCREEN: Cicada: I was a Teenage Horror Movie!

Cicada: I was a Teenage Horror Movie!, VHS to digital video, 1997/2022, 63 minute loop w/ stereo sound

In 1997, tweens with a VHS camera filmed a horror epic. 25 years later, they edited it—as a comedy. Soak in the gloriously glitchy VHS splendor of this remixed horror-comedy that is at once a bloody twist on vampire lore and an endearing portrait of filmmakers coming of "rage," struggling to make an ambitious home movie—each playing multiple roles, spilling dimestore blood in a slew of murder scenes, and testing testicular limits with a homemade zip-line set piece.

About the Artist:

A filmmaker since childhood, Keil Orion Troisi got a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC. He has been a story editor and screenplay ghostwriter, and was a NYFA Fellow in Screenwriting-Playwriting, 2019. Since 2012 has been a core member of art-activism group The Yes Men. He made the short horror-comedy Poacher Poacher (2023), multi-best-short-award winning doc Total Disaster (2022), corporate-horror feature Human Resources (2015), Lena Dunham’s unauthorized first film Mono Generation (2017), and produced and co-wrote Peace Pipeline (2021), which won Best Documentary awards at Dallas VideoFest, Hell’s Half Mile, North Dakota Human Rights, Wolf Tree, Skoden, Jim Thorpe, and Fort Smith. His filmmaking and performance interventions combine humor and horror to foster hope, or at least attempt to comprehend WTF got us here.