May

• Made on roughly a $1.7 million budget, the film recouped only about $634,000 worldwide and bombed in its limited theatrical run before its reputation turned it into a cult title.
• Lucky McKee wrote it pulling from three sources at once: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the simmering alienation of Scorsese's Taxi Driver, and Nirvana lyrics.
• Angela Bettis has a lazy eye of her own, which the role leaned on; for May's cross-eyed moments she wore two stacked layers of color contact lenses to push the effect further.
• Bettis took the higher-paying lead in the 2002 TV remake of Carrie partly so she could afford to play the low-paying May, a role she wanted purely for the character arc.
• May premiered at Sundance in January 2002, and Lionsgate snapped up worldwide rights the very next day for around $800,000, holding it for a limited release in 2003.
• At the 2002 Sitges Film Festival, Bettis won Best Actress and McKee took Best Screenplay.

May isn't a slasher villain so much as Frankenstein recast as the monster AND the doctor. The doll Suzie is her creator-mother's flawed prototype; when it shatters at the blind school, May simply inherits the family trade and starts assembling a 'pretty whole' from the pretty parts she's been cataloguing all film.

Every person May targets represents a part she was taught to be ashamed of. Adam's hands, Polly's neck, Blank's arms, Ambrosia's legs, all collected into one creation, and then she gives it the last piece herself: her own eye, the very thing the eye patch hid, so her friend can finally see her the way no one ever did.

The famous final beat, May gouging out her own lazy eye and pressing it into Amy, the doll she built, plays as the only honest love in the movie. The eye patch defined her entire isolation; surrendering the eye is her giving the one thing that was hers to a friend who will never look away.

May Dove Canady works at an animal hospital, talks to a doll she's had since childhood, and desperately wants someone to touch her face. She finds it in Adam, a grease monkey with a fondness for vintage horror. But her strangeness repels him. Then the doll shatters. Something in May fractures right alongside it. She starts collecting pieces of people — the ones with the parts she likes best. Hands, necks, arms. She's building a friend from scratch, and she's got the surgical skills to pull it off. The result is a patchwork girl named Amy, stitched together in May's apartment, dripping red onto the linoleum.