I Was a Teenage Serial Killer

The Riot Grrrl feminist punk empowerment movement of the 1990s moved from music to film with a self-described "pushy" and "assertive" woman director from Minneapolis. Sarah Jacobson discovered filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, under the creative instructor George Kuchar. The accomplished New York underground filmmaker encouraged budding artists with individualistic ideas to create without regard to outside influences. In parallel with the Riot Grrrl punk music movement, Jacobson poured her anger and effort into two well-regarded underground pictures: the feature length Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore (1997) and the short I Was a Teenage Serial Killer. The latter is an expression of feminist rage filmed in B&W 16mm. Jacobson found film to be an outlet to respond to the sexism and oppression she had experienced in high school, along with the dismissive and possessive attitudes of male musicians in 'progressive' rock bands. Her 27-minute movie is a feminist bloodbath in which her unflappable heroine Mary (Kristin Calabrese) stops taking such daily abuse and begins to slaughter a succession of male chauvinist pig characters -- mostly creeps encountered on the street. The liberating message is that Mary fully enjoys her new mission in life. Heavy-duty music accompaniment for Mary's liberating crime spree is provided by the Riot Grrrl group Heavens to Betsy. The Art Institute rejected Serial Killer for its institutional screenings but Jacobson found appreciative audiences elsewhere. She aggressively promoted the film to festivals while simultaneously selling it by mail, as punk music was often distributed. In interviews Jacobson reported that her interest in film had begun back home in Minnesota, with the alternative programming seen on the 1980s Night Flight TV program. She especially liked Smithereens (1982), directed by Susan Seidelman. "I decided then that I wanted to make films in which women didn't get killed, raped or married--cool films about cool women." I Was a Teenage Serial Killer and Sarah Jacobson's subsequent full-length feature Mary Jane's Not a Virgin Anymore (1998) continued her crusade for angry, punk feminism. It opened the 1996 Chicago Underground Film Festival and was screened at Sundance. By that time, Sarah had earned the unofficial title 'The Queen of Underground Film.' Her career was not to progress much further, unfortunately, as her life was cut short by uterine cancer, to which she succumbed in 2004 at the young age of 32. By Glenn Erickson