For producer Rebecca Lafon, her professional filmmaking career didn’t begin with a conventional drama or a straightforward genre piece. Instead, it began with Lady Parts, a daring queer body horror short that transformed the awkwardness, terror, and exhilaration of teenage sexual awakening into something startlingly physical and unforgettable.
Written and directed by Ariel McCleese, the story follows Iris, a high school student who develops a disturbing condition: whenever she thinks about her classmate Ellie, she becomes uncontrollably and dangerously wet. What begins as an embarrassing bodily reaction evolves into a full-fledged horror scenario, threatening anyone who gets too close to her. Yet beneath the film’s prosthetics, practical effects, and gallons of lubricant lies a deeply emotional story about self-acceptance, intimacy, and the risks that come with love.
A Script Unlike Anything She Had Read Before
Lafon immediately sensed that this script was operating in territory rarely explored by either horror or queer cinema. “I remember reading it and feeling immediately that it was doing something I hadn’t quite seen before,” she recalls. “Not just in the horror space, but in queer cinema more broadly.” What struck her most was the film’s refusal to treat queer longing as something subtle or restrained. Traditional coming-of-age stories often rely on lingering glances, hidden feelings, and quiet emotional revelations. Lady Parts takes the opposite approach by externalizing every confusing and overwhelming feeling associated with adolescence and sexual discovery. “The film looks at sexual awakening as a kind of bodily crisis,” Lafon explains. “It found something true about what it actually feels like to be a teenager—that your body is betraying you, announcing you, before you’ve had any say in the matter.” The material also appealed to Rebecca as a producer who thrives on testing herself. Lafon has made a conscious effort to embrace increasingly difficult production challenges with every project and Lady Parts offered her exactly that opportunity.
Turning Emotion into Physical Horror
One of the film’s most memorable achievements is the way it transforms an internal emotional experience into something tangible and cinematic. This process required extensive collaboration between Lafon, Higgins, McCleese, and production designer Masha. “There’s an enormous amount of lube in this film,” Lafon says with a laugh. Because Iris’s central “monster” trait involves becoming excessively wet, the filmmakers had to carefully develop a visual language that would communicate such a condition effectively on screen. Water alone, Lafon explains, doesn’t necessarily register on camera in a compelling way. Creating the right effect required a combination of lubricant, glycerin, lighting, and production design working in perfect harmony.
One sequence in particular, the bathtub scene, became a showcase for the collaborative nature of filmmaking. While Higgins worked closely with McCleese and the lead actress to ensure the emotional authenticity of the performance, Lafon and the production design team focused on the technical logistics of creating the film’s signature visual effects. The experience reinforced an important lesson for Rebecca: emotional storytelling doesn’t come exclusively from actors and directors. “We often think of all the emotions on screen stemming from the director and actors’ work,” she says. “But every element, including production design, guides the audience to an emotional state.” The result is a scene that feels simultaneously intimate, unsettling, and deeply empathetic—a hallmark of the film’s unique approach to body horror.
The Ending That Almost Didn’t Exist
If the bathtub sequence represented a technical challenge, the film’s final scene became a test of creative resilience. The production had invested enormous resources into preparing an elaborate underwater climax. Lafon, who is scuba-certified, spent hours in a cold swimming pool helping prepare the location for the submerged set. Specialized crew members, including an underwater cinematographer, were already in place. The art department had designed an entire room intended to disappear beneath the water. Then reality intervened when the pool heater failed. What might have seemed like a logistical inconvenience quickly evolved into a serious safety concern. Rebecca found herself repeatedly pouring warm water into her wetsuit simply to maintain body temperature. As producer, she reached a difficult conclusion. “If I couldn’t be comfortable in the water while wearing a wetsuit,” she explains, “I couldn’t ask my actors to get in.” Particularly because the scene involved vulnerable performance work, safety had to come before the shot. The team made the painful decision to abandon the sequence altogether.
Rather than allowing disappointment to derail the production, Lafon and Higgins pulled McCleese aside and shifted their focus toward finding a new ending. Their goal became simple: finish the film and protect its emotional core. “We’re not going home without a full film in the can,” they decided. What began as a compromise ultimately became one of the production’s greatest successes. The replacement ending proved so emotionally effective that the filmmakers never needed to return for the planned reshoot. For Rebecca, it became a defining example of a lesson every producer eventually learns: sometimes the version of the film you planned isn’t as strong as the version you discover under pressure.
Collaboration Above Everything Else
When Lafon reflects on Lady Parts today, the first thing she remembers isn’t a specific shot or festival screening; it’s the people. She credits much of the film’s success to the creative partnership she formed with McCleese and Higgins. Recommended to connect with Higgins by industry mentor Chris Schwartz, Lafon quickly discovered a collaborator whose strengths complemented her own. Higgins brought the perspective of an accomplished director, while Lafon focused on balancing creative goals with practical execution. That partnership became especially important when severe weather threatened the production. During filming, reports of an approaching storm forced the crew to abandon outdoor preparations and gather indoors. Phones came out. Weather trackers were monitored. Everyone watched the distance between the production and incoming thunder. The storm eventually passed without causing serious damage, but the interruption revealed something important. Rather than allowing stress to fracture the team, the filmmakers remained focused on what they could control: safety, morale, and making the best possible film. For Rebecca, it validated one of the most important decisions a producer can make. “The people you choose at the beginning of a project are the same people who determine how that project survives its worst moments,” she declares.
Finding an Audience
If making Lady Parts was rewarding, watching audiences embrace it proved even more meaningful. The film quickly established itself as a standout on the festival circuit, earning recognition from genre and LGBTQ+ audiences alike. It collected wins at Queer Fear Film Festival (Best Short Film), Access:Horror (Best Director), and Brooklyn Horror Film Festival (Best Production Design), following its West Coast premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival. Screenings at Brooklyn Horror, Salem Horror Fest, Portland Horror Film Festival, and numerous other events further confirmed the film’s growing reputation. Then came perhaps the biggest milestone of all: distribution through Shudder and ALTER. Lafon points to this as the moment which transformed the project from a successful festival short into something larger. “The idea that Lady Parts might be someone’s first queer horror film,” she says, “That it might be the first time a queer teenager sees their experience reflected back through genre—that’s exactly why I wanted to be a producer.”
Building on the Legacy of Queer Horror
While some have described queer horror as an emerging genre, Lafon views it differently. She sees Lady Parts as part of a long tradition that includes landmark works such as A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, The Hunger, Interview with the Vampire, and Hellraiser. What’s changed, she argues, is visibility. For decades, queer themes often existed beneath the surface of horror films, encoded through metaphor or subtext. Today’s filmmakers have the freedom to be more direct. Lady Parts exemplifies that evolution. Rather than presenting queerness as the source of horror, the film locates horror in shame, repression, and societal judgment. The monstrous elements emerge not from the protagonist’s identity, but from the pressure placed upon it. “It’s using horror to manifest the inner feelings of its characters in an outward display,” Rebecca notes. That perspective helped make Lady Parts one of the most distinctive queer horror shorts of recent years while reinforcing Lafon’s reputation as a producer with a focus on bold storytelling, creative trust, and the belief that sometimes the most powerful filmmaking moments emerge when everything goes unexpectedly wrong.
Lady Parts is only one example of a broader career that has established Rebecca Lafon as an emerging force within independent genre filmmaking. Over the years, Lafon has built a reputation for successfully guiding ambitious productions from development through distribution, often managing projects that combine significant creative complexity with demanding logistical challenges. Her work has earned recognition from film festivals, distributors, and industry professionals, contributing to a growing profile within both the horror and independent film communities. The success of Lady Parts also reflects a pattern that has become increasingly associated with Lafon’s career. Rather than focusing on conventional projects, she has consistently gravitated toward bold, distinctive stories that challenge audiences while remaining commercially viable. This approach has helped her build a portfolio of successful productions and establish credibility among filmmakers, festival programmers, and industry decision-makers. As a result, Lafon has become recognized not only for her individual projects but also for her broader contributions to the advancement of innovative independent cinema.
