Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl
Official Poster by Gabriela Johanna Mierkalne
Orlando, FL
Regal Pointe Orlando
Program #7: HORNY JAIL
Bizarroland Film Festival
San Francisco, CA
Balboa Theatre
Program #5: The Dark Rainbow
Another Hole in the Head
Chicago, IL
Music Box Theatre
Cinema Femme
Chicago, IL
Harper Theater
Chicago Underground Film Festival
Winston-Salem, NC
A/Perature Cinema
Out at the Movies
West Hollywood, CA
The Marilyn Monroe Theatre
Femme Filth
Short
Digital/16mm
Color
“In a candy-colored 1950s nightmare, a lonely waitress pursues the woman of her dreams as transphobic greasers, drive-in romance, and nuclear apocalypse converge in a feverish lesbian pulp fantasy. Blending melodrama, horror, and camp with handmade analog textures, this exuberant genre remix transforms queer desire into an act of survival.”
- Chicago Underground Film Festival
Written & Directed by
KYLIE MUNGENAST
Produced by
LIZ DAVIS & DESTINY GREER
Starring
ZOEY LUNA as Shirley May Holmes
ABBY LANGH as Dorothy Pearson ‘The Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl’
Reviews & Press
FilmSlop - Kylie Mungenast on Classical Hollywood Genre and the Making of ‘Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl’
Cinemasters - "Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl" Turns 1950s Nostalgia Into Queer Rebellion
Warped Perspective - Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl (2026)
Film Threat - Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl
MovieJawn - Interview with filmmaker Kylie Mungenast on PEPPERMINT PIXIE DREAM GIRL
Cast & Crew
Zoey Luna as ‘Shirley May Holmes’
Zoey Luna is the scream queen you’ve been dying to see! With a bloody passion for horror starting since her breakout role as Lourdes in Blumhouse’s The Craft Legacy, to her role in Parker Brennon’s horror anthology Hauntology, and her lead role in Kyra Gardner & Jimmi Simpson’s slasher / dramedy SLAY. Zoey is set to leave her mark on the screen for audiences all around.
Abby Langh does it all: an actress, writer, director, producer, a prolific model, and figure skater. Abby developed her own film production company, Lesbian Fantasy Films, to reclaim the cinematic medium’s frequent sexualization of queer women, and to produce narrative film pieces focusing on women and same-sex relationships across different genres.
Destiny Greer’s works typically focus on feminist aesthetics and human rights issues. Her most notable works are feature film Jellyfish Season (Produced By), short film #toxic_postitivity (Produced By), and PBS special Merrily Together (Co-Producer). Destiny is also an experimental 16mm filmmaker, who hand edits and processes her films like Him, Her Them and V for Vulva, which was nominated for Best Experimental at Atlanta Underground Film Festival.
At 16, Liz discovered filmmaking and found deeper fulfillment behind the camera, shaping stories and collaborating with others to bring creative visions to life. Liz attended the University of Tampa, where she studied Film & Media Arts. There, she met frequent collaborators Kylie Mungenast and Destiny Greer, forming a creative partnership that has continued across multiple projects. Her work centers on women, LGBTQ+ communities, and young people, creating emotionally resonant and socially conscious films.
Director Statement
I wrote Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl at the culmination of a bender which brought me to various lesbian bars and dates gone wrong. Shirley May Holmes was my self-insert into the script’s pastel 1950s palimpsest: we share the same food allergies, the same love for an Almond Joy, and the same hopeless attraction to straight passing femmes. That all said, I became interested in casting someone who felt like the opposite of me to play Shirley in hopes that it may aid in crafting internal tension within the character. Zoey Luna was my first choice for the role. She and I are both transgender women, but we embraced the aspects of our unique individualism as we birthed Shirley’s character. For example, Zoey is a trans woman of color, whereas I am not, and the two of us express gender and femininity in rather different ways. “Passing” became a critical part of our narrative conversation as we addressed the story’s framing of transvestigation.
As our administration threatens to classify transgender women as domestic terrorists, and all women's bodies undergo violent investigation to determine trans status, it feels as if we are back in the heat of McCarthyism. The violence in Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl addresses this, but the film features a sole beacon of hope: a peppermint-clad pinup girl named Dorothy Pearson. Abby Langh, who portrays this titular character, shares a mutual passion with me for traversing the female gaze. In a sensually-charged sapphic recontextualization of the “manic pixie dream girl,” Abby’s own background as a queer model and her intuition as an actress inform Dorothy’s vibrant agency in an experience of embodied identification. Despite Dorothy’s familiarity with the male gaze and her internalized homophobia upon first experiencing the female gaze, Dorothy grows to foil the self- repressed men in this world as she chooses to put her life on the line in an act of allyship instead of receding into self-preservation. That's what makes her THE Peppermint Pixie Dream Girl.
Stills