photo by: Contributed

Crew members and cast from "They Call Her Death" are pictured, from left: Stephen Ferrell, crew; Austin Snell, writer and director; Jake Jackson, crew; Sheri Rippel, actor; Dusty Nichols, actor; and Alexander Laughlin, actor.

Lawrence filmmaker Austin Snell is particularly pleased that his new movie is attracting female fans.

“Women really seem to love this film,” which is honestly like the most satisfying thing for me,” Snell told the Journal-World ahead of Friday’s screening of “They Call Her Death” at Liberty Hall.

The film, which has garnered a distribution deal after its success at numerous festivals, is a Grindhouse-style Western featuring a bloody tale of revenge. That’s a standard plot in traditional Westerns, of course, but Snell’s movie comes with a few twists: a badass female lead, a horror-film element and, importantly, the absence of graphic sexual assault on screen — a voyeuristic staple meant for largely male audiences of yore.

The rape trope is an element of Grindhouse cinema dating back to the 1960s that Snell has long found problematic in a style of film that he otherwise loves — gritty, grainy, often garish tales shot on 16mm film.

Subverting that trope “leads to a whole bunch of people no longer feeling like they’re not welcome to the party,” Snell said, describing his 92-minute film as containing all the fun and gore of a traditional revenge quest but with a “much more progressive soul.”

photo by: Contributed

The movie poster for “They Call Her Death.”

photo by: Allani Gordon

Actors Sheri Rippel and Patrick Poe, from “They Call Her Death.”

Shot in Kansas and Missouri, the film is set in no particular locale but in what Snell describes as “a pretty fantastical version of the old West.”

“It’s not a historical document,” he said. “It’s a piece of entertainment” (and one that’s “absolutely not for kids,” he added).

At the heart of the entertainment is the character Molly Pray, played by Sheri Rippel, seeking her own style of frontier justice after criminals kill her husband.

Snell, 36, understands why revenge is so often prefaced with the word “sweet”; getting even satisfies a deep human appetite, but never so fully in real life as in the fantasy world of film, where getting even can easily — and often amusingly — get out of hand.

Snell sees the revenge film audience as “a roomful of people getting all their bloodlust pointed at one evil character and getting the fun ride of seeing him get his just deserts.”

He said he always pictured the film, which is campy and funny as well as bloody, being for “younger, extreme genre fans like myself, but we’ve seen some 70-year-olds in the audience … and they loved it,” he said.

photo by: Contributed

Lawrence filmmaker Austin Snell

The film’s cast consists primarily of actor friends of Snell’s, most of whom are associated with the Civic Theatre in Topeka, where he is originally from. The volunteer labor allowed him to spend most of his $40,000 budget — about two-thirds of it — on the 16mm film stock he insisted on.

“The image quality (of 16mm) gives you something that digital has yet to completely duplicate,” he said. “And since we were homage-ing films from the ’60s and ’70s, we wanted there to be kind of an organic quality to some of the imperfections. … We left a lot of the dirt on the screen, and there’s some scratches and there’s some obvious signs that it’s analog.”

The use of 16mm film, which he calls “very expensive,” also accounts for how long it took to make the movie — two and a half years. Snell, whose day job is a photographer and designer, had to save up money to purchase filmstock as they went along.

“We filmed slow because that’s the rate I could afford,” he said.

Besides writing the screenplay and music, he also directed and edited the film. And he even “hand-aged” some of the costumes he acquired to fit the era.

His goal was to have the finished product “fit in” among the Grindhouse movies that he collects and loves — movies like 1975’s spaghetti Western “Four of the Apocalypse,” 1970’s “El Condor” and 1968’s “The Great Silence.”

A major influence on him, the one that “lit a fire in me,” was the original “Evil Dead,” the 1981 supernatural horror movie about a group of college kids on an ill-fated vacation to the woods.

“It was the first movie that I thought, oh, me and my friends could just go to a cabin in the woods and, you know, make a film together, and maybe it would work,” he said.

That realization eventually led to Snell’s first feature-length film, 2018’s “Exposure,” about a couple’s wilderness encounter with an ancient evil.

“They Call Her Death,” screening at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Liberty Hall, is his second feature-length film. It has been racking up some awards around the country, including Best Feature at the Austin Horror Film Festival and Outstanding Art Direction at the Tallgrass Film Festival, among others, and Snell will be heading next month to Japan, where his movie will have a theatrical run before it’s eventually released on Blu-ray and streaming platforms.

Snell will be donating his proceeds from Friday’s ticket sales to the Trans Lawrence Coalition.

“There’s nothing really in the messaging of the film that’s related to trans issues,” he said. “We are not officially affiliated with them. … It’s just a group I believe in.”

photo by: Allison Lloyd

The crew works on a scene from “They Call Her Death.”

photo by: Allani Gordon

Actors film a scene in Austin Snell’s “They Call Her Death.”

photo by: Allison Lloyd

A scene from “They Call Her Death” being filmed in Wichita.