Directing “Antivenom”

When I’ve experienced grief or depression in my life, the idea of hope sometimes feels like a pesky mosquito. I’d rather surrender to the weight of the ache, but (annoyingly) a stranger smiles, or the cherry blossoms on that tree outside are just so fucking beautiful… It’s just enough to get you through lunch. It doesn’t get rid of the boulder of grief on your back, but it plants the idea that there might be something on the other side of it.

The trans community knows this feeling better than most. Knowing that their experience was outside of my (cis) experience, I read the work of trans poets while I prepared to direct Antivenom. This struggle to merely exist in a way that no one should have to, saturated their words. On occasion, those words were seasoned with the erratic but persistent presence of beauty.

Darkswoon captures this feeling in Antivenom, as a lament for non-binary teen Nex Benedict, who died in 2024. The challenge to me was how to visually hold and honor the grief, while finding a way to transmute that pain into something beautiful, the way the song already does. “Where do your dreams go when you die? / It’s all happening on some other timeline”—this was the lyric that became my springboard. I imagined two Darkswoons in two different timelines; in one, they’re performing at prom, in another, they’ve enacted Carrie-style retributive justice at the prom. The vision evolved as I thought of the antivenom as a secret incantation, whispered through realities and across portals.

The song devolves into chaos before returning to the musical structure of the song’s opening. Time is cyclical; events are fated to repeat—but with interventions like acceptance, love, and community, maybe we’ll find ourselves in upward trending spirals—never forgetting the innocents who were sacrificed by humanity’s fear of accepting difference.