Avalon Fast

Avalon Fast has carved a distinctive niche in contemporary cinema as a director whose work centers on the visceral, unsettling, and often overlooked terrain of girlhood horror. Rather than conventional scares, Fast's films explore the psychological and physical terror embedded in the female adolescent experience.

Fast's most notable work, the short film *Shit & Champagne* (2020), premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and quickly established her as a fresh, unflinching voice in genre filmmaking. The film dissects the raw, chaotic dynamics of teenage friendship with a brutal honesty that blurs the line between the mundane and the monstrous. Her follow-up, *Thirst* (2022), further cemented her reputation, winning the award for Best International Short Film at the Sitges Film Festival. In this piece, Fast uses the metaphor of an unquenchable craving to explore themes of bodily autonomy, desire, and societal pressure.

Fast’s approach is often described as "girl horror"—a subgenre that uses the tropes of horror to excavate the specific anxieties, vulnerabilities, and power struggles of growing up female. Her work is distinguished by its intimate, almost claustrophobic focus on the body and its transformations, rejecting the male gaze in favor of a deeply subjective, often grotesque, perspective from within.

Through her growing body of work, Avalon Fast is redefining what horror can be, proving that the most terrifying monsters are often the ones we carry inside.