How Indie Horror Film BYSTANDERS Re-Invented the Rape / Revenge Sub-Genre: Interviews with the Film’s Cast & Creators

[Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault; Editor's Note: Spoilers Discussed Throughout]

Rape-revenge films have a long lineage in cinematic history. While the genre primarily sits in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond, you can trace early roots to 1931’s A Woman Branded, in which a woman is assaulted and contracts a venereal disease. But it was 1960’s The Virgin Spring that completely upended the film world and set in motion much of what we understand about and see in modern rape-revenge films. In the following decades, we’ve seen countless versions of a similar story, and you can owe another genre touchstone, 1978’s graphically assaultive I Spit on Your Grave, for furthering the reach of the rape-revenge archetype and laying the foundation for what was to come.

Filmmaker Mary Beth McAndrews plants her flag in the genre with her 2025 indie film, Bystanders, in which a young woman is raped and the night unravels into bloodthirsty revenge and burnt male flesh. McAndrews follows certain story beats from genre staples but offers a fresh, assault-less perspective to reinvigorate the rape-revenge style. A personal, deep connection to the genre gave her lessons about what to do and what not to do.

“My friend and I were having a sleepover in high school, and we thought that ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ was the movie to watch,” McAndrews tells Daily Dead. “I had watched it before I had been sexually assaulted myself. I thought it was just over the top, but interesting. I liked the violence at the end.”

Fast forward a few years, and McAndrews experienced her own rape in a violent relationship. Her perspective on and connection to rape-revenge films shifted tremendously. When she watched Coralie Fargeat’s blaze-setting Revenge (2017), she was in tears. “I started crying, but not because I was upset, but because I was so happy that I had found a movie that understood how I was feeling. That restarted a whole journey into the subgenre. I was then looking for movies that were directed by women.”

Such films as M.F.A., Isabella Eklöf’s Holiday, Violation, and Traps by Věra Chytilová became crucial to her healing journey as much as her love of the subgenre. When she read screenwriter Jamie Alvey’s script for Bystanders, inspired by the infamous Brock Turner case, she gravitated to every single aspect of the story. “That was when I was locked into female-directed rape-revenge stories. That was all I was consuming and what I wrote about for my master's thesis,” she says, adding that she even had a dream about directing Bystanders way before it became reality.

Pieces fell into place when McAndrews landed the editor-in-chief role with Dread Central and began working with the Dread film label, now under Epic Pictures. “I brought in the film and said, ‘We need to make this,’” she remembers. 

And the rest is history.

The film cast several bright young talents, including Brandi Botkin as the darling lead Abby, and Garrett Murphy, who plays Gray, opposite Jamie Alvery’s Clare; the script underwent several budgetary edits; and the shoot provided tremendous creative and cathartic release for McAndrews. All things considered, the filming for Bystanders resulted in a film that’s completely rearranged how you may think about the rape-revenge subgenre going forward. It’s a bold reinvention, and horror will never be the same again.

“The whole reason we made the movie was for it to resonate with at least one person and make them feel seen the way that ‘Revenge’ had made me feel seen,” offers McAndrews. “One time, a young woman said to me, after she watched the movie at a festival, that I inspired her to want to make a movie. That makes me want to cry in the best way.”

In various phone conversations, Daily Dead spoke with McAdrews, Alvey, and actors Garrett Murphy and Brandi Botkin about creative decisions, the rape-revenge genre, and overarching themes for this piece.

What’s your relationship with the rape-revenge genre?

Murphy: I really had no idea of the rape/revenge genre. I do like more traditional horror movies, but I've never really been a horror buff like Mary Beth is.

Alvey: I absolutely have always loved revenge, just revenge stories, overall. I said that I would like to write revenge stories for the rest of my life, because that's always appealed to me. When you get the rape/revenge genre, it is something that is specifically mining a lot of societal and feminine-oriented fear in a way that really spoke to me. I didn't make it out of middle school without being verbally and sexually harassed by boys. They thought they could talk to me any way that they could. The college experience didn't get any better there. I’ve just had a lot of frustration with society. 

When I was a senior in college, it was about the time the Brock Turner stuff started. I graduated, and I was working on getting my Master’s, and I was looking into programs at that time, and I had a lot of free time. I was so pissed about everything. I was mad at the media that was being pushed at us. I was mad at society. I was just angry. I was super, super angry, and I just wanted to do something about it. ‘Bystanders’ pretty much came to me.

How did some of the lead characters (Gray, Clare, and Abby) come together?

Alvey: Clare and Gray were the first characters that I conceptualized, and the first real sort of scene that ever came to me was Clare in the car telling him she's pregnant. And it pretty much did not change that much, actually, from conception to screen. They also have another secret, and I was like, ‘I have to poke more at that.’ They are stopped by Abby, who was then Chloe, fun fact. But they're stopped. And I was like, ‘This girl has been assaulted. She is being hunted.’ And I always love the idea of when the hunters become the prey. She just runs into the most benevolent, vigilante serial killers. There's something there, because I've never seen anything like this. I was like, ‘I don't think this exists.’ 

I just started poking at it, playing with it, getting to know the characters, and I talked a lot to my dad about it. He helped walk me through a lot of the trauma stuff from his perspective. We both have trauma backgrounds, and he really helped inform what would basically be part of Gray's backstory. Part of the character comes from his experiences, and part of it comes from mine. But it was also Clare, because my dad was talking about being physically abused as a child and just waiting and waiting and knowing that it was going to happen but not knowing when. I really brought a lot of that to Clare in her backstory. She had a similar experience with her stepfather.

With Gray, he’s a really good critique of toxic masculinity and a man who has fought so hard not to be like the men around him and the men who have harmed him. His father was a big force in his life in a negative way. The boys around him… I was making a lot of connections between rape culture and toxic masculinity, and I feel like Clare and Gray are both sides of the same coin there. They're both victims of this white, hetero patriarchal complex that damages men just as much as it does women. It's something that we don't talk about as much as we should. Their trauma is very different, but it all comes from a similar place. They're killing a bunch of people, but there's nothing but love and respect for one another. I accidentally made a film that was in almost the perfect conversation with the state of popular literature right now. You see so much of the stuff that is pushed as dark romance. And I'm like, ‘This is an SVU episode.’

I wanted them to be very unassuming. With Clare, she's just florals, bright colors, and pastels. She's very traditionally feminine. Everything about her was curated to piss off a certain subset of men. She's got a soft voice, but it kind of leans nasally. I took a lot of inspiration from how people try to act like Melanie Lynskey is not terrifying in some of her roles. I brought a lot of that as an actress.

The same goes with Gray. You fall on one side or the other because he's awkward. He fumbles over his words. He makes the stupidest cringy jokes, which everybody's like, ‘Oh, this is so cringy.’ And I'm like, ‘I know, I'm in on the joke.’ He's supposed to be awkward. I'm so tired of the uber-suave, sexy serial killer thing. And I was like, ‘What if he's just an awkward fucking accountant?’ That never made the final cut, but Gray is an accountant, and Clare is an RN. They are just these completely, seemingly normal people, because that's kind of how trauma is. You'll walk into any room, and it's somebody with the most seemingly normal life on the surface, and then, you get to talking to people, and you get to know them, and you're like, ‘Oh my god, the worst thing has happened to you.’ I wanted Clare and Gray to be hopeful – that there is a possibility to lead a somewhat normal life after trauma. The serial killing and all that is basically a metaphor for the fact that it's never going to go away. You're going to have to work that out in some way, maybe not to that extent. 

It was very important to me to show that they have a very comfortable, warm life together, that they actually have sex, and enjoy it. That was important to me because of Clare’s character, of being so traumatized at the hands of men. I won't lie. That's a place that I've never really got to myself. I crave that one day it will happen. Casting Gray really made me face a lot of my own trauma with the men. It was a very delicate process. Thankfully, we wound up with somebody who was able to hold space for me on that set and really take some of my weirder quirks in stride. It turned out beautifully.

Abby is our audience surrogate. She's our every girl. She is basically the picture of wholesome innocence that gets dashed and run through the wringer this entire night. It’s an arc. Mary Beth said this herself on set – we're speed-running a trauma narrative in the space of a night. It’s really raw and vulnerable. But I always liked the idea of her and Gray and Clare coming together on that level of… traumatized people helping traumatized people. I think some of the most profound relationships in my life have been other traumatized people helping me navigate my own trauma. You have to create that kind of community and that sort of found family. So it has a found family narrative in that way. But I was always in love with the idea of two people that are not related to this girl. They don't really know her, but they know her because they all come from that same place.

There are some hard-to-hear lines in this, especially coming from Cody and his bros. What kind of direction did you give the actor, Bob Wilcox?

McAndrews: That poor guy. He's so good, and he really poured his whole evil ass into this part, and I mean that with so much love and respect. I didn’t have to give him a lot of direction because he came in ready. He had really tapped into something, like the quiet evil that is really fucking scary. That's why we actually cast him. A lot of the people who came in for Cody were pretty bombastic, and that made sense. But then we saw him do it, super quiet, and Jamie and I, both simultaneously, were like he's the one. What was interesting was that we had all of the frat boys stay together in one room. We joked that it was our social experiment. We made them basically all live together like frat boys, and they honestly would come to the set with all of these ideas of how they were going to interact. I was so lucky to have actors who were so down. It’s a weird tonal thing to walk, but they were into it. They liked that. We were okay with trying things out because that gave them more opportunities to improv and also just try different tones out for themselves. Everyone was pretty green on the film, so I was so lucky to get such an incredible bunch of actors.

The rape/revenge subgenre frequently features violence against women, but yours doesn’t explicitly show any of that. 

McAndrews: That was on the page. And it was definitely a goal of ours. Jamie and I wanted no violence against women, only violence against men. There’s always violence against women, so let's make a movie where the men are the ones being tortured. Some people are like, “What happened to the other two girls?” And I was like, “Oh, they died, babe.” Then, they're like, “Well, why didn't you show it?” Because you don't need it.

Alvey: I knew that I didn't want to show the assault, that I wanted to focus on the revenge. And thank god, everybody was on board with that. I never had an assault scene in there. I just had the aftermath. People have said, ‘No, guys don't talk like that.’ And I'll tell you this, all the frat boys on set were like, ‘This dialogue is disgusting, but we have all met somebody that talks about women like that. People can act like that doesn't happen, but it does.’ I wanted to focus more on just the absolute degradation of women via language and how language plays into rape culture. I feel like that's something that we don't focus on. I think that there's something just so nauseating about Abby lying there and listening to them talk about it.

I'm a very emotional person, but writing some of those scenes, I was in tears just typing away. Sometimes, I would write a line of the boys’ dialogue, and I would stop. But I pushed on because I felt like I had a duty. Some of it is a bit bombastic because you're trying to get the point across, and sometimes you have to be as subtle as a rock to the face. And sometimes, you're still not getting it across to some people.

I was listening to how young men talk about women, listening to how people talk about women on the internet. It's almost like she's not a person, like she is just being actively dehumanized in that scene. And she has to bear witness to it through this drug-addled haze, too. What I was most worried about was putting an actress in that position, and I didn't want to play in. Some people watch movies for titillation instead of the thematic richness or catharsis.

How did you set about filming the assault? You use audio and a distorted visual to indicate what is happening.

McAndrews: It was written that we would focus on her face. The big thing was we didn't want to show the assault, and we were just trying to figure out the best way to do that. We were trying to think of how to make it as horrific as possible. Recording the audio for the boys was so weird, because we had them all stand in a circle, and we had our audio guy in the middle, and we just had them whispering weird, fucked-up shit into a microphone. It was just technically wild. And also, it was Brandy's first day on set. So, one of the first things we shot with her was that scene, which was definitely a big task. She was a huge champ. We also made sure it was a closed set; only me, Jamie, and Chance [Madison] our DP in there with her. We made sure it was as comfortable as possible.

Botkin: That scene was heavy not only due to the subject matter, but also because it was the very first scene I shot for the film. I felt safe and taken care of the entire time, though. Mary Beth was incredibly communicative and supportive, and checked in with me between each take. Chance, our amazing DP, is someone who I’ve worked with previously, and I always feel very comfortable when he’s behind the camera. He makes sure that I’m aware of what’s happening on his end and creates a calming atmosphere, which I value so much.

Did you have any reservations about starring in a rape/revenge story?

Botkin: I didn’t have reservations once I spoke to Mary Beth about her intentions with the film. It was made clear to me in our first conversation that there was no interest in adhering to tired tropes that can sometimes be present in rape/revenge. No graphic assault scenes, no objectification or playing to the male gaze. Once I learned how this story would be told, I felt completely assured and excited to be involved.

Murphy: I did a short film in March of that year, and before that, I'd done a handful of commercials. This was the first movie I'd ever done. When someone offered me two weeks' worth of pay for a movie – and decent pay – I was like ‘okay, count me in.’ In terms of trying to live up to the intensity of the movie… maybe a little bit. My motivation was economic survival, so I was gonna say yes to it no matter what. But there was a little bit where it took me some time to really get comfortable in the whole setting of the rape/revenge. It is a very sensitive and important topic that I was not used to.

They [creative team] were seeing his character go more of a synonymous path with Jamie's character and a hardened revenge-type path, instead of this diverse way of taking Gray's character, of making him a little bit more flamboyant. I'd never read a script like this before where it was rape/revenge. It was something that I found challenging, which made it fun, because I'm more of a rom-com guy.

My way of developing the character was just being myself but sort of if I were a serial killer. It was me just trying to take things from my life and add that to what Gray's character is. How would Garrett be a serial killer? It would probably be goofy and a little bit loose and off the cuff.

When I was reading the script, I thought that adding that comedic layer would enrich it, instead of making it stagnant with two characters feeling the same way and treating it the same. If you had an opposing lighthearted serial killer next to a more intense serial killer, it might make for a better dynamic.

What was your acting process like to bring Abby to life?

Botkin: My priority when approaching this character was to embody Abby with an honesty that would do the role justice. Being vulnerable, allowing my environment to shape my reactions authentically, tapping into a hurt but also a power. This was all very important to me. In between takes of filming one of the earlier scenes in the film, a friend and crew member asked me why I was behaving like no one could see me. The question took me off guard, and I realized that I hadn’t stepped out of the character, even though I thought otherwise. This moment was very useful for me as an actor, and I’ve since learned how to develop a more functional system to step out of a character once I’m not in front of the camera anymore.

We care about Abby because she feels like a friend next door. Along with Brie and Jade, you three connect magnetically onscreen. Was it easy to build those relationships together?

Botkin: Working with Callie and Carrie were some of my favorite scenes to shoot. They are both so giving, and our scenes felt completely natural for me to film. I had known Carrie prior to shooting, but I had met Callie on set. Building those relationships on screen felt very easy because I was incredibly comfortable with each of them off screen, too. Due to time constraints, we ultimately weren’t able to include a moment that the audience gets to share with Abby in the aftermath of the hunt, where she reconciles what has happened to her friends. Let it be known, though, that Abby does care deeply for her friends and does take that time to process the events off-screen.

One of the standout moments in the film involves Jamie Alvey, as Clare, picking up a rock and bludgeoning a frat bro’s head in.

McAndrews: I just remember wanting to really get the impact of her hitting him without having to show all the gore because of budget reasons. When we were editing, my editor [Barry Rowen] almost didn't include that moment, and I made them put it back in. It shows you that Clare’s a little bit crazy but in a way that you kind of love. I also like “Who's the bitch now” echoing at the end. It was really important to have that parallel.

In the finale, Cody is set on fire for his crimes. How did that come together?

McAndrews: I'm very proud of this. In the initial script, they were supposed to set the whole cabin on fire, but with the $50,000 budget, you cannot set a cabin on fire. Jamie rewrote the ending with that in mind, and when we got to shoot it, they were like, ‘well, we can't set him on fire,’ so we have to use digital fire. I said, ‘Absolutely, the fuck not.’ Digital fire looks like shit, even on a good budget, and we don't have money for good fires. For this one, I was not compromising. What we ended up doing was basically putting an aluminum pan full of rubbing alcohol and lighting it on fire. Our DP shot through the fire to make it look like he was on fire without anyone being set on fire, or anyone being close to being on fire. Safety was a huge concern here because, again, we have a small budget, and we didn't have a budget for a stunt person. I think it looks so good.

Botkins: That fire scene really brings the events of the night home for Abby. She endures so much over the course of one night, with adrenaline and fight-or-flight response kicking in to keep her alive. She barely has any time or opportunity to process what she has endured, or how these events will impact her for the rest of her life. Burning Cody in the fire won’t undo what has been done, but it’s a moment of catharsis that she needs. She’s facing this horrible thing in the eye and taking her power back. Among many lessons learned, Abby learned that she is not defined by the actions of other people or by what has been done to her. She also learned that she doesn’t have to lose any valuable parts of herself in her quest to find peace. 

With that moment, the camera pans to each of the characters, Abby, Clare, and Gray. What does that mean for each of them?

McAndrews: For Abby, the assault is burned away, symbolically. For Gray and Claire, it's just another bunch of douchebags. It’s an interesting contrast because for Abby, it's this huge moment of transformation and change. But for Clare, it's not as transformative. It’s just another day's work. That's an interesting vibe between this girl's life being changed forever, and them just being like, ‘Oh, it’s just another day.’

Cody dying by fire is the false ending. Two more characters show up, and Clare, Gray, and Abby have them to deal with now.

McAndrews: We don't expect them. Jamie actually posted on Bluesky that it speaks to eating the rich. It was added really late in the script-writing process. For the longest time, it ended with the fire. But we made a lot of changes to the script to make it fit the scale. There were more frat bros in the initial script, but we pared it down for casting. A producer early on who ended up not being on the whole project worked with Jamie and added in the parents to show an intergenerational aspect of the whole thing. It’s a really great touch. This isn't just ‘boys will be boys’ behavior. Implicating the mom brings a sense that women can be just as bad as men and enable this behavior in their boys. That moment just speaks to this not being isolated but a disease that creeps through generations of families who think they can get away with anything and don't have any fear of consequences. But now they're finally meeting consequences.

In killing the father, Abby reiterates the line: “Who’s the bitch now?” That’s a full circle moment, as it calls back to the head-bashing scene when Clare says it. 

McAndrews: She doesn't kill Cody, but she gets to kill the root of the evil, which is always better. I wish we had spent longer on the ending, but in these movie schedules, you do what you have to do. But I’m really glad that she gets her moment in the spotlight at the end. She's taking control. It's not because someone told her to do it, or someone is letting her do it; she's doing it because she's following her gut. She's finally doing what she feels is right, rather than waiting for someone to tell her. That's a really important moment.

The end credits scroll upward at the end as Abby, Clare, and Gray are walking away down the road at sunrise. That’s a nice way to bookend the story.

McAndrews: This is exactly what I wanted at the very end. We filmed them twice. We filmed them once during sunset because we didn't know if we'd have time to do it during sunrise. But then the last day, it was the last thing we were doing for the entire movie. I just directed my first movie, and I’m fucking sobbing behind the cameras.

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Editors Note: Bystanders is now available from DREAD. To find out where to watch the film, visit: https://epic-pictures.com/film/bystanders

Behind-the-Scenes Photos Below Are Courtesy of Jamie Alvey: