Here is a cruel little piece of horror architecture for you: build a slasher around a woman, put her name at the top of the cast list, teach the audience to follow her — and then kill her at the halfway mark and hand the film to somebody else. Jenna Kanell is an American actress, director, writer and stunt performer best known as Tara Heyes in Terrifier (2016). Tara is the apparent lead of Damien Leone’s microbudget phenomenon right up until Art the Clown shoots her dead about halfway through, in a piece of Janet Leigh misdirection that turned a no-budget Halloween nightmare into a franchise. Kanell’s performance is the reason the trick lands. A fake-out only hurts if you cared about the person being taken away, and for the whole first half of that film, she makes sure you do.
That is the credit her name hangs on, but it is not the whole of her. In the same era she stole scenes in The Bye Bye Man, and the credit listings on her biggest films keep quietly adding a second job next to her name: stunt performer. Behind the camera she has written, directed and produced her own shorts — one of them starring her younger brother — and in Faceless After Dark she co-wrote and headlined a film about a horror actress menaced by an obsessive fan, which is about as close to autobiography as this genre gets. This is her record, kept carefully, because the internet’s version of it needs the help.
Quick Specs
- Known for: Tara Heyes in Terrifier (2016); Kim Hines in The Bye Bye Man (2017)
- Occupation: Actress, director, writer, stunt performer
- Stunt work: Stunt performer on Terrifier, The Bye Bye Man and Renfield
- As filmmaker: Writer, director and producer of the shorts Bumblebees and Max & the Monster (2018); co-writer, producer and star of Faceless After Dark
- Signature role: Tara Heyes — top-billed in the film that launched Art the Clown
Terrifier: the lead who dies halfway
Terrifier began as Damien Leone’s microbudget slasher, premiered at the Telluride Horror Show in 2016, reached wider release in 2018, and then found its real audience on Netflix and streaming, where word of mouth turned it into a cult film and carried the series to the theatrical sequels. It was also the feature debut of David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown — Thornton took the role over from Mike Giannelli, who had played Art in Leone’s earlier shorts and in All Hallows’ Eve (2013). Kanell is top-billed as Tara Heyes, and the top billing is honest: for the film’s first half, it is her movie.
On Halloween night, Tara and her friend Dawn (Catherine Corcoran) cross paths with Art, and the evening curdles from creepy to lethal. Dawn is murdered in the film’s most notorious set piece. Tara — set up as the film’s lead, the one you are meant to follow home — escapes, fights Art, and briefly gets the upper hand on him, which in a slasher is usually the moment the tide turns. Here it is the moment before the end. Art shoots her dead about halfway through the film. Her sister Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) takes over as protagonist, survives disfigured, and is the survivor seen in the film’s framing scenes. It is the Psycho structure, executed without flinching: the face on the poster is gone at the midpoint, and the audience is left holding all the attachment they built for her with nowhere to put it. That discomfort is the film’s engine, and it runs on Kanell’s work — she has to be a complete slasher lead in miniature, funny, furious and frightened, inside half a running time.
Press noticed the performance at the time. Common Sense Media’s review compared Kanell’s work in Terrifier and The Bye Bye Man to Neve Campbell’s in The Craft and Scream — high praise for an actor working at the microbudget end of the genre, and a fair marker of what she brought to both pictures. And when Tara fights, that is Kanell fighting: the credit listings name her as a stunt performer on the film alongside her acting credit, and she performed her own stunt work. The falls, the scraps, the desperation choreography — that physical conviction is a large part of why Tara’s half of the film plays like a final stand rather than a prologue.
Kim Hines and The Bye Bye Man
Her other signature horror role arrived almost immediately. The Bye Bye Man (2017), directed by Stacy Title and released that January, follows three college friends who unleash a curse simply by learning its name. Kanell plays Kim Hines — the friends’ psychic acquaintance, the one they turn to for answers, who conducts a séance to get at the truth behind the curse. Kim is killed by the curse’s influence, which makes two films in a row where Kanell’s characters learn too much and pay for it — a niche, but she wears it well.
The performance was singled out by critics. Owen Gleiberman called her “the one who, all too briefly, steals the movie: Jenna Kanell.” All too briefly is the recurring condition of her early horror career — she keeps being the person you want more of in films that do not have more of her to give. As on Terrifier, the credit listings also name her as a stunt performer on The Bye Bye Man: the acting and the physical work arrived as a package from the start. That second trade is part of her standing in the genre — her stunt work in horror is among the work cited in Meg Hafdahl’s study The Science of Women in Horror (2020).
The sequels she is not in
In Terrifier 2 (2022), Kanell is credited as Tara for a photographic cameo only — a still image of Tara appears. There is no new footage, no performance and no voice; she did not return to the role, and any biography claiming she reprised it, produced or co-wrote the sequel is printing fiction. In Terrifier 3 (2024) she does not appear at all, in any capacity: Victoria returns there as Art’s possessed accomplice, and that is Samantha Scaffidi, not Kanell. The franchise’s centre of gravity moved to Victoria and to Sienna Shaw, played by Lauren LaVera — which makes Kanell’s position in the series a strange and specific one. She is the founding sacrifice: the lead of the film that started it, absent from everything it became.
Behind the camera: Bumblebees and Max & the Monster
Kanell’s own filmmaking runs on entirely different fuel. She wrote, directed and produced the short film Bumblebees, starring her younger brother, Vance Kanell. Accounts describe Vance as her disabled brother — one disability-inclusion resource puts it as “born with eight sensory disorders,” and Kanell’s professional bio calls him her “neurodivergent brother” — and the film grew out of that relationship. It screened at more than forty festivals and events, the siblings spoke together at Harvard Medical School, and the project connects to the Easterseals Disability Film Challenge. Kanell also carried the experience to the TEDx stage at TEDxTryon with a talk titled “A Bee Showed Me That Limits are Lies” — the title alone tells you where the film’s heart is. This is advocacy built out of a family, not a brand, and it is the work she talks about like it matters most.
Max & the Monster (2018) is a separate project — a different short, not a sequel or a companion piece, and the two should never be merged into one credit. Also written, directed and produced by Kanell, it is a dark comedy that premiered on opening night of the 2018 Austin Film Festival. Set the two shorts side by side and you get the range of her as a filmmaker: one a tender, purposeful family project that took her to Harvard Medical School, the other a dark comedy opening a major festival. Neither resembles a slasher. Both are hers in a way Tara never could be — she built them.
Faceless After Dark: the meta one
Eventually, the Terrifier experience itself became her material. In Faceless After Dark, Kanell stars as Bowie (Bowie Davidson), an actress famous for a killer-clown film who is held hostage by an unhinged fan dressed in clown costume, determined to restage her nightmare for real. She is the film’s co-writer, with Todd Jacobs, and one of its producers; Raymond Wood directed. Kanell has described the film as semi-autobiographical, and it is not hard to see why — years of convention circuits, obsessive fandom and being defined forever by one Halloween night sit right on its surface. The film premiered at FrightFest in London on August 25, 2023, with Dark Sky Films distributing, and went on to screen at the New York City Horror Film Festival and the Atlanta Film Festival, with her writer and producer credits front and centre. It may be the most personal credit she has: the scream queen writing back at the machine that made her one.
The wider career
Between and beyond the horror landmarks, the credits accumulate in a pattern: small roles, precisely placed, across much bigger productions. Standard filmographies list her earliest feature credit as Anna in Sassy Pants (2012). In The Front Runner (2018), the Gary Hart campaign drama, she plays Ginny Terzano, a deputy press secretary. In Renfield (2023) she plays Carol — and, true to form, the credits name her among the stunt performers as well. Bad Boys: Ride or Die (2024) casts her as Nicole, Red One (2024) as a Krampus Guest, and The Buildout (2024) as Cameron. Television has used her in the same register: a Med Tech in episode five of WandaVision (2021), and Jessie in “I’ll Remember,” the season six opener of The Vampire Diaries (2014). It is the working actor’s filmography underneath the cult one — the day job of the woman Art the Clown shot halfway through her own movie.
Where she stands
Jenna Kanell’s place in horror is unusual and secure. Plenty of actors have launched franchises; very few did it by dying in the middle of the first film and making the death the thing the whole series is built on. Terrifier needed a lead the audience would mourn at speed, and she delivered one — then spent the following years doing her own stunts in other people’s hits, taking small roles in studio pictures, and building her own films behind the camera, from a short about her brother that reached Harvard Medical School to a meta-thriller about exactly the kind of fame Terrifier handed her. Tara Heyes was never the survivor — Victoria holds that title, and Sienna inherited the fight. Jenna Kanell made sure nobody who watches that first half forgets her anyway.