Tag Archives: independent horror

Shudder Premiere

Comfortably Numb

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by Hope Madden

Touch Me

About a decade ago, filmmaker Amat Escalante made a movie about sexual frustration, bad decisions and tentacle sex. The Untamed grounded the fantasy in a profoundly ordinary and relatable human drama, limiting the absurdity and amplifying the horror.

Addison Heimann leans far more absurd with his tentacle sex horror Touch Me, a potent drug metaphor that speaks to a modern malaise.

In a lengthy and surprisingly effective opening monologue, Joey (Olivia Taylor Dudley, exceptional) explains her situation to her psychiatrist. A weirdly good-looking alien in a tracksuit (Lou Taylor Pucci) came to save the planet from climate change and convinced Joey to have cross-species intercourse. His touch made her mind go quiet for the first time in her life, but she fled because she nearly died.

Still the lure of a quiet mind proves too much and soon Joey and her best friend Craig (Jordan Gavaris) cave into temptation and find themselves hooked.

Which doesn’t sound funny, but Heimann’s delightfully accepting glimpse at modern slackerism paired with Pucci’s wide-eyed narcissism and hip hop moves keep things light despite a lot of truly dark turns. At its core, Touch Me is about deeply damaged people struggling to face a reality that cannot make them happy and the incessant temptation of hard drugs to silence that anxiety.

For that reason, the silliness sometimes seems tone deaf. That, or the dramatic turns seem maudlin. But only briefly, mainly because of the commitment of Heimann’s small but talented cast.

Dudley and Gavaris affect a believable co-dependence, their banter a familiar and humorous cadence of self-loathing and support. Dudley is particularly impressive in a role that holds the metaphor, horror and silliness together. And Pucci hits a perfect tone for oblivious track-suited narcissist.

The writing does not always serve the actors as well as they serve it. There are holes in logic that Touch Me laughs off by pointing them out—a fun tactic, but not a solution. And the whole feels slight given the deeper ideas sewn throughout. But the film is an enjoyable, sloppy, relatable mess with insight and fun to spare.

New In Theaters

Subterranean Homesick Blues

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Backrooms

by Hope Madden

There is reason to compare Backrooms, feature debut from 19-year-old co-writer/director Kane Parsons, to Skinamarink, the 2022 feature debut from writer/director Kyle Edward Ball. If you are one of the many who found Ball’s nightmare an effective, even terrifying head trip, Backrooms might be for you.

If you didn’t, that’s OK too. Backrooms shares the true experiential nature—you may feel as though the director has somehow filmed your actual nightmares. But a lot more happens in this one.

Backrooms is liminal space horror, not entirely unlike Genki Kawamura’s effective video game adaptation, Exit 8. But for all these comparisons, Parsons crafts an unnervingly unique excursion into the uncanny.

Captain of that voyage is Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor). He manages a furniture store where he dresses like a pirate for low-fi ads. It’s 1990. Clark wanted to be an architect. He just keeps making the same mistakes, like a circuit he follows forever expecting a different destination. That’s why he sees Dr. Mary Krane (Renate Reinsve).

Let’s pause, because that’s reason enough to see the movie. Here are two actors who’ve built careers on understated, natural performances that ground every moment onscreen in something honest. Which makes them a magnificent choice for a film where nothing makes sense, and that’s the whole point.

Kane adapts a series of shorts that made him a YouTube force, all of it based on online Twenty-teens creepypasta dread of being trapped eternally in an endless, yellow, moistly carpeted maze of empty rooms with no hope of escape.

The fact that Parsons turned this concept into a compelling feature essentially about our own labyrinthine minds and psychiatry’s impotence is pretty impressive for a fucking teenager!

Both leads give the film earnest vulnerability and obvious intelligence, which sells the madness. Their few scenes together are wonderful, but that’s not simply because of their talent. The script is engrossing, forever mirroring what’s been seen and said in a way that could feel heavy handed were it not for Kane’s sure direction.

It’s easy to make a trippy movie that doesn’t make sense because you don’t really have to make sense. A lot of bad horror leaves you guessing because of sloppy scripting. Backrooms never feels sloppy. Every tee shirt, piece of furniture, neighborhood street feels intentional, tells its own story. Everything loops, remembers but doesn’t, until you can’t shake the dread that nothing is right.

Backrooms, because it’s so singular in its vision, won’t sit with everyone. But for those of us who have nightmares of being trapped in room after windowless room of fluorescent buzz and mildew smell, this is our Skinamarink. I mean that in the best way possible.

Fright Club

Fright Club Bonus: Kurtis David Harder

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Our Christmas gift to you, an extra Fright Club episode! We talk with filmmaker Kurtis David Harder, whose newest feature, Influencers, hits Shudder this weekend. He chats with us about the new film, his Nightmares Film Festival award winning Influencer, making movies, inspirations, and Christmas films. Check it out!

Nightmares Film Festival

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

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Tinsman Road

Screens Sunday, October 19 at 2pm

by Rachel Willis

Writer, director, and star Robbie Banfitch crafts a unique, documentary-style film with his feature, Tinsman Road.

Banfitch plays Robbie Lyle, a documentarian focused on capturing his mother Leslie’s (Leslie Ann Banfitch) belief that her missing daughter is now an angel.

Leslie’s grief is tangible, and as the “documentary” progresses, her hold on reality seems more and more tenuous. Her belief that her daughter is now a visiting angel is met with tender skepticism by her son. When she asks if he believes in psychics, she answers his no with the assurance that while “some are scams,” hers is real.

Leslie Banfitch’s naturalism helps sell the documentary approach. Her ability to fully encompass a woman who believes her missing daughter now haunts her life is not only heartfelt but convincing. Her performance sets the film apart from similar, weaker fare. Robbie’s own grief feels two-fold. Not only does he also mourn the loss of his sister but feels helpless in helping his mom with her grief. It’s a heart wrenching dilemma.

Eerie elements underscore the fact that, while this is a movie about a grieving family, it’s also a horror film. It’s these subtleties from the very beginning that slowly suck you in. The film also pulls artfully from the true crime genre.

The camera work and low-budget quality of the movie both heighten the tension and add to the sorrow surrounding the characters. Though the style has certainly been overused in the horror genre, Banfitch manages to make it feel like a necessary choice.

Certain moments feel unnecessary, but they’re few and far between. The removal of one or two scenes may have helped tighten pacing. But these are small imperfections, easy to overlook.

Tinsman Road‘s slowly building dread gives way to a shattering climax. The intensity of the third act is stomach churning, especially after the quiet meditation on grief that came before it. Banfitch rewards your patience with the finale.

Grief and horror have often gone hand in hand, and Banfitch offers up a worthy contribution.

New In Theaters

Candy Colored Clown

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Somnium

by Hope Madden

Hollywood is one big nightmare. That’s essentially the plot of writer/director Rachel Cain’s feature debut, a dreamscape where you’re never certain what Gemma (Chloë Levin) is experiencing and what she’s imagining.

Levine’s cinematic presence, no matter the film, is wholly natural, utterly authentic. There’s nothing uncanny about her. Her humanity and vulnerability inform every moment she’s onscreen. That may be why she’s such a perfect central figure in horror films like The Ranger, The Transfiguration, and The Sacrifice Game. However unnatural the plot or nemesis, Levine is a profoundly human anchor.

In this surreal Hollywood fable—part Neon Demon, part Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, part Inception, part The Substance—Gemma leaves a small town in Georgia to chase her Hollywood dreams. Lonesome, rejected, lost and always one step away from homelessness and failure, she takes a job at an experimental sleep clinic where people dream their way into believing they can achieve their ideal future.

Gamma works nights, studying scripts and babysitting sleeping clients. By day she auditions, faces rejection, daydreams about her old life, and flirts with the possibly creepy, possibly benevolent Hollywood insider, Brooks (Jonathan Schaech).

But the daydreams are leaking into her waking moments, huge chunks of time keep disappearing, and there’s this contorted figure with a twisted spine she keeps catching in her peripheral vision.

Cain’s script lacks a little something in originality—hers is hardly the first cautionary tale about striking it out on your own in Hollywood. Still, in subverting the idea of big dreams, playing with the notion that perception is reality, and mining the vulnerability and predatory nature of those with and without power in Tinsel Town, she hits a nerve.

She leaves too much unresolved, which is frustrating. But scene by scene, Cain casts a spell both horrifying and hopeful. Though the entire ensemble is strong, Levine is her secret weapon. The film falls apart if you don’t feel protective of Gemma, if you don’t long for her to succeed. Characteristically, Levine has you in her corner, even when lurking doom waits behind her in the shadows.

New In Theaters

Some Dude with a Mop

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The Toxic Avenger

by Hope Madden

My friend has photographed Lloyd Kaufman’s testicles. That means that in a game of Six Degrees of Lloyd Kaufman’s Testicles, I would win.

In other news, a bunch of talented, funny humans have rebooted Kaufman’s iconic 1984 Troma classic, The Toxic Avenger. There are few films I have more impatiently anticipated than this, plagued as it was by a two-year delay in distribution. But now you can see writer/director Macon Blair’s reboot in all its goopy, corrosive, violent, hilarious glory.

Though the story’s changed, much remains the same (including Easter eggs a plenty!).

Winston (Peter Dinklage), single stepfather to Wade (Jacob Tremblay) and janitor at a factory that makes wellness and beauty supplements, finds that he’s dying and his platinum insurance doesn’t cover the treatment that could save his life. Attempting to steal the money to cover the treatment, he saves a whistleblower (Taylour Paige) from a group of horror core hip hop parkour assassins but winds up in a pool of toxic sludge.

Let’s pause for a second to marvel at this cast. Dinklage is one of the most talented actors working today, and as Winston he is effortlessly heartbreaking and tender. He’s also really funny, and this is not necessarily the kind of humor every serious actor can pull off.

Paige, who has impressed in Zola and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, among other film, also seems built for Blair’s particular brand of Troma comedy. And Tremblay, beloved since his excruciatingly perfect turn in Room as a small boy, gives the film its angsty heartbeat.

Plus, Kevin Bacon as the narcissistic weasel owner of the wellness and beauty empire killing the planet. He hates to be called Bozo (IYKYK).

Blair made his directorial debut with 2017’s underseen treasure, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore, though he’s better known as the lynchpin performer in many of Jeremy Saulnier’s films (Blue Ruin, Green Room, Murder Party). He and Kaufman both deliver laughs in small roles, but he impresses most as the mind behind the mayhem.

His vision for this film couldn’t be more spot-on. Joyous, silly, juvenile, insanely violent, hateful of the bully, in love with the underdog—Blair’s Toxic Avenger retains the best of Troma, rejects the worst, and crafts something delirious and wonderful.

New In Theaters

Coked Encounters

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Jimmy and Stiggs

by Hope Madden

Few filmmakers capture drug fueled horror mayhem quite like Joe Begos (Bliss, VFW). His latest is an exercise in minimalism. Not in terms of drugs or mayhem, just filmmaking.

An alien invasion horror flick, Jimmy and Stiggs sees Jimmy (Begos), an out of work filmmaker, hitting the stuff hard in his LA apartment when he blacks out and loses an entire night. Certain an alien abduction was involved, and that those slimy sardine MF’ers are coming back for him, he calls his best friend Stiggs (Matt Mercer) for advice.

The thing is, Stiggs is six months sober and hasn’t spoken to Jimmy in ages. In fact, in an opening sequence shot go-pro style from Jimmy’s inebriated point of view, we learn that Stiggs isn’t interested in producing Jimmy’s new film, news that sends Jimmy spiraling.

Still, worried for his old friend’s sanity and welfare, Stiggs shows up at Jimmy’s place just in time for the aliens to return.

What Begos creates, in a quick 80 minutes with mainly two actors and one increasingly and impressively demolished set, is DIY filmmaking at its most profanity strewn.

Given the sheer volume of cocaine and whiskey, the incoherence of the plot feels right at home. Begos amplifies the nuttiness with wild cuts, possible dream sequences, time shifts, and the periodic use of first person, go-pro POV sequences. The result is a dizzying, black-light colorful excuse to bash practical FX aliens to bits and let their day-glo goo decorate the apartment.

On the downside, Begos is no actor, and even 80 minutes of isolation with Jimmy and his coked-up ranting feels too long. Mercer fares better, leading some Apocalypse Now type insanity that plays really well in this context.

Jimmy and Stiggs was shot over 4 years, beginning during lockdown and extending until completion, mainly in Begos’s LA home. It’s a wild bit of alien fun that fades to black just before it outstays its welcome.

Shudder Premiere

Wait a Minute, Mr. Postman

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Dead Mail

by Hope Madden

Welcome to Peoria, IL sometime in the mid-1980s. A little mystery has taken hold of the post office. Letter sorters found a necklace in an envelope with the wrong address on it. It looks valuable, so that means Jasper (Tomas Boykin) will put his skills to the test to try to sleuth out who the jewelry belongs to and return it to its rightful owner.

There’s also this torn, bloody piece of paper about a kidnapping.

Filmmakers Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy’s thriller Dead Mail builds on a wildly unrealistic concept: smalltown post offices with super-secure back rooms where pains are taken and spies may be accessed to solve mysteries behind lost mail. And yet, their analog approach to this period piece gives it a true crime feel you never fully shake.

The authenticity is not just in the lo-fi look—although the set design, costumes and hair are spot on. The wholly convincing performances, especially from two of the cast mates, pull you in.

Boykin’s low key, unflappable turn as the dead letter investigator quietly anchors the film—so quietly that the machinations around him are more likely to draw a “huh, I had no idea the Peoria post office went to such pains to track down lost mail” than they really should.

But the bulk of the film is carried on John Fleck’s shoulders. As Trent, the seemingly harmless organ enthusiast who has a man trapped in his basement, Fleck’s delivers magnificent work. There’s a beautiful loneliness in his performance that makes Trent irredeemably sympathetic.

DeBoer and McConaghy (Sheep’s Clothing), who co-write and co-direct, invest in character development enough to complicate your emotions. You’re genuinely sorry to see what happens to some of these characters, and yet, you just can’t hate Trent.

A couple of characters are there more for comic relief than anything, but even they are somewhat delicately drawn. And though the premise on its face is outlandish, every detail in the film convinces you you’re watching nonfiction.

Filmmaker and cast investment pays off. Dead Mail is clever, intriguing and wholly satisfying little thriller.

New In Theaters

A Walk in the Woods

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Lovely, Dark, and Deep

by Hope Madden

What is the draw of the deep woods? Ticks? High likelihood of injury with haphazard chances of rescue? Cocaine bears?

Even the obvious reasons to steer clear of the woods can’t deter a lot of people. Writer/director Teresa Sutherland’s Lovely, Dark, and Deep links two risks that have haunted writers and creators throughout existence. Some people go crazy in the woods, and many get lost in there and never come out.

“And into the forest I must go, to lose my mind and find my soul.” John Muir said that. The “father of the National Parks” may not have predicted Sutherland’s translation.

Sutherland drops new ranger Lennon (Georgina Campbell, Barbarian) in the National Park back country, where she will spend the season mainly alone in her ranger hut. Does she know that Ranger Varney (Soren Hellerup) disappeared last season?

Likely it wouldn’t dissuade Lennon, who has a past to reconcile and some podcasts on missing people to listen to.

Campbell’s performance shifts as Lennon’s determination makes way for absolute confusion and terror. What begins as single-minded pursuit shows itself to be desperation in disguise. Willfulness gives way to horror as Lennon’s investigation turns up wooded weirdness and wickedness she did not predict.

Wide shots and drone work keep Lennon dwarfed by an increasingly claustrophobic forest, though Campbell never lets the character feel overmatched by nature. Not nature. But a disorienting woods as deep as these (it’s actually Portugal) can easily conceal a lot that is far from natural.

Sutherland’s film is a bit of a slow burn, but once it hits its stride, she throws an unsettling assortment of hellish visions at you. You don’t have to have a natural (and really healthy, I think) fear of the woods to know it’s time to get the F out of Jellystone.

Nightmares Film Festival

Driven

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Trunk

by George Wolf

You get the sense early on that the German thriller Trunk may have some pleasant surprises in store.

Malina (Sina Martens, terrific in a physically demanding role) wakes up to find herself badly injured and confined to the trunk of a car. The trunk is ajar, and before the driver returns to shut her inside, Malina is able to retrieve her cell phone.

And lemme guess, the phone’s almost dead, right?

FULL POWER.

Okay, then, here we go! Dialing a series of well-chosen contacts, Malina has to 1) stay alive, and 2) piece together what’s happening while she looks for an escape route.

Writer/director Marc Schießer proves a solid triple threat here, also handling the editing duties with a deft hand and solid instincts for pacing and tension.

The cinematography is on point, as well. And while this particular trunk seems unusually roomy, Scheiber consistently lands precisely the type of claustrophobic camera angles and POV shots that Liam Nesson’s recent car-centric thriller Retribution tried in vain to achieve.

You may end up sniffing out some the mystery at play, but even so, Schießer’s finale will be no less satisfying. Trunk is a tense, crowd-pleasing thriller, one that adds enough detours to a well-traveled road until it’s fun again.

So climb in, and enjoy the ride.