Everything We Saw at Fantastic Fest 2025

Things can and will change plenty over the course of 20 years. It’s a truth that applies to people, places, and sometimes film festivals. Once the scrappy genre curio co-founded by Tim League in the mid-2000s as a movie nerd Mecca—one which lived up to the local motto of “keep Austin weird”—after two decades on the scene, Fantastic Fest has become itself an institution.

The site where the likes of John Wick, Heretic, Split, Saw X, and even There Will Be Blood had their world premieres, Fantastic Fest has become a major destination on the festival calendar, especially for those who enjoy horror, action, or outright odd genre-benders that challenge our expectations of what cinema can offer. This year marked the fest’s 20th birthday, and Den of Geek’s first dance at the party. We could never hope to see everything, but here in alphabetical order is what we did glean either in our interview studio on the ground, in the secret screening queue lines, or just in the rush and whirl of the weird from all around the world.

Photo by: Nick Morgulis

Appofeniacs

A devious throwback to the type of ‘90s thriller that used to populate arthouses and multiplexes alike in the wake of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Appofeniacs takes something old in its yarn about disparate cool kids living a heady and violent weekend in the greater Los Angeles area, and mixes it with a new source of genuine terror: AI deep fakes.

“I think what’s really scary is how it can really unravel our everyday lives on a personal basis,” writer-director Chris Mars Piliero says while stepping into the Den of Geek studio. He admits most AI chillers are usually concerned with Skynet or the end of the world, but the real-world applications of the tech already “is super-accessible and so realistic [that it triggers] our appophenia, which is our tendency to connect things that don’t have any connections. We gravitate toward our confirmation bias.”

Hence a movie in which a motormouth pop culture enthusiast can ruin the lives of complete strangers, one deep fake at a time. Sure enough, he will turn neighbors on their friends, lovers, and even complete strangers in the street. The movie is immensely stylish, befitting Piliero’s music video background, but also features modern 21st century concepts of retro cool since many of the protagonists represent a sleeker, kinkier side of comic-con cosplay culture than you are used to seeing. Says co-star Sean Gunn: “The modern con-goer who’s really immersed in their own fandom is something very different than the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons. And it’s one of the things I definitely like about the character I’m playing. He’s a true artisan.” That includes Gunn’s character making anime weapons in the film that have… real world applications. And there ain’t nothing fake about what they can get up to in this twisty genre crowdpleaser.

Photo by: Nick Morgulis

Bad Haircut

Bad Haircut seems the type of movie made for Fantastic Fest: a rough-around-the-edges but gregarious horror-comedy with a lot of nostalgia and one outrageous performance, courtesy of Frankie Ray as a hairdresser named Mick. This film is tailored to audiences who can bask in the vibes radiating off the hairdresser from hell.

A man of a certain age, with notably little hair of his own, Mick walks through his shop with rock star swagger, ingratiating himself to ‘80s slasher movie stereotypes like Billy (Spencer Harrison Levin), the hopelessly nerdy wallflower taken by his cool friends to their secret hair salon maven. Mick promises to turn Billy into a stud. Instead he drags the bookish Alice down a rabbit hole that includes murder, mayhem, kidnapping, and classic rock.

Writer-director Kyle Misak muses with a laugh that it is somewhat based on a true story: “In college I had this guy as a barber, and that’s kind of the catalyst of this movie. He was just really eccentric, really bizarre, and a lot of things that happened in act one in the movie [really occurred]. We just took his charisma, his energy, and his aura and put it into a character.” That choice gifted Ray with an outlet for a fantastically campy creation, where he feasts on the scenery one snip of hair at a time.

Photo by: Nick Morgulis

Black Phone 2

Horror sequels are tough. How do you follow up a chilling story when audiences already think they know what to expect from the scares (even as they expect the same thing again)? Yet by virtue of how the first Black Phone movie ended—with Ethan Hawke’s truly repellent source of evil, a child predator known as “the Grabber,” dying and being consigned to Hell—a sequel would by default need to be a different beast. And the smartest thing longtime collaborators Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill did was embrace those differences.

Thus in the sequel, a terrific Madeleine McGraw, who was the little sister of protagonist Finney (Mason Thames) in the first film, becomes the covert heart of Black Phone 2. It is Gwen that a now demonic Grabber (Hawke, even more visually repulsive behind a mask and gobs of prosthetic makeup) haunts the dreams of like a humorless Freddy Krueger. And it is those dreams that take the characters to a starker setting in the remote wilds of the Rockies. As the Grabber cryptically intones, “Hell isn’t flames, it’s ice.”

“The Dante reference is really the thing,” Derrickson tells us of the ice motif. “I love Dante’s book. I’ve read the whole Divine Comedy, but the Inferno is really the part people gawk over, and I think the idea that of the ninth circle of Hell being ice where the worst of the worst are—they are the betrayers, and there is something about the Grabber being a betrayer to the kids and to his brother, and being the worst kind of person that there is—and the inversion of the flame mythology with the ice mythology, that just made sense to me.” But it’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Black Phone 2. Stay tuned to Den of Geek in the coming days for our full conversation on the movie.

Bugonia

An excerpt from our review:

At a glance, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, which marks another pitch black satire from the Greek auteur with newfound shades of science fiction, appears to tackle this head-on via its morality play about a mentally unwell crank who kidnaps a pharmaceutical executive he is convinced is secretly an alien. How can Emma Stone’s high-powered CEO Michelle possibly relate to this dirt poor, deranged employee who has been fed a steady diet of YouTube and reddit conspiracy theory algorithms for years?

But then again, when looked at it from another angle, how can Teddy, Jesse Plemmons’ delusional working class schmuck, possibly convey his lifetime of sorrow to a woman whose joy and purpose in life is taking from sad sacks like him? … The slippery (and perhaps now familiar) trick about Yorgos Lanthimos is that he is not necessarily interested in the larger sociopolitical and philosophical subjects he loves mining for his sense of irony and cynicism. Sometimes it’s fun to just tear things, people, and finally parables down for the lulz, and as an arthouse setup and punchline delivery, Bugonia has a lot of bleak pleasure in its horror show premise.”

Photo by: Nick Morgulis

CAMP

After taking Slamdance by storm a few years ago via the pastoral Honeycomb, writer-director Avalon Fast returns to the woods as well as festival celebration in CAMP. This quixotic folk horror has already won the Next Wave Competition at the festival and seems to be on path to finding a larger niche audience who can appreciate bringing a Goth surreality to one of the most beloved staples of horror cinema: a summer camp.

Centered specifically at a Christian camp where a coterie of counselors form, ahem, a makeshift coven, CAMP lives up to its name by cultivating a dreamy artificiality where weird sisters ready break out of the confines of lakeside scripture readings.

“I had a pretty horrific experience at summer camp,” Fast admits in our studio.  “Homesickness, isolation, just like a general fear of the woods and a fear of being away from home. And yeah, I think that sets a tone. Camp is a place where teenagers get up to stuff. It’s a cool landscape for horror films, because of the outdoorsness of it all.” Even so, Fast teases what her characters are conjuring in that remote outpost is more than just a ghost story…

Coyotes

Director Colin Minihan and his collaborators are not shy about influences on their new B-creature feature throwback to the “animals attack” subgenre. Characters even namecheck Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Still, we suspect this thing has more in common with movies like 1978’s The Swarm, which featured Michael Caine dubiously fighting to save the U.S. from the then headline-grabbing threat of fearsome killer bees. Coyotes taps into a similar modern fear for pet-owners from around the greater Los Angeles area: coyotes hunting down their furry friends for food, albeit now with of a wink and a nod. That dread applies to many, including the film’s winsome stars and real-life genre power couple, Justin Long and Kate Bosworth.

“We think about it, especially with our cats,” Bosworth says. “Because our dog is quite large, he’s an 85-pound big boy named Happy, he plays with coyotes. In fact, he frolics with them. There’s a band of coyotes that live on my parent’s street in Los Angeles, and he goes to their den and… they’re not going to take him down. But our cats would be little victims.” 

With that said, all parties involved approach their film entirely as creature feature fantasy. Minihan even reveals to us they unintentionally avoided eerie real-world perils in the scripting stage when they decided not to set the film around a wildfire that displaced the titular animals. So rest assured dog-lovers, the carnivorous beasties in this movie, created entirely from CG and puppeteering, have more in common with the hellhound from An American Werewolf in London than San Fernando Valley canids.

Photo by: Nick Morgulis

Deathstalker

In some circles, the high fantasy genre matured immeasurably in the 21st century. After decades of being treated as cheap, video store bottom-shelf schlock, or just a lark that allowed Lucy Lawless and Bruce Campbell to hop around New Zealand on horseback, sword and sorcery tales became prestigious. Serious. Important. They were treated with the severity of J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin staying up all night to author a D&D campaign.

Steve Kostanski’s Deathstalker is None. Of. That. By virtue of being a quasi-remake and continuation of the Roger Corman-produced, Argentinian C-movie franchise of the same name, which began in 1983 with Rick Hill as the Deathstalker, this 2025 vintage returns lovingly to the aesthetic of VHS glory days. Much as how Kostanski resuscitated the gentle giant monster archetype in Psycho Goreman, Deathstalker ’25 recreates the digital grain and matte-painting tactility that children of the ‘80s still crave. He even gets Bloodsport 2’s Daniel Bernhardt to carry around a hobbit-sized wizard on his back like Yoda (voiced by Patton Oswalt, no less).

“[I] was presented with a list of Corman properties that were up to be auctioned, and I took the list and I went right to D, right to Deathstalker… I have a fondness for the Deathstalker franchise. I like the idea of adding to that universe because it’s such a budget throwaway universe. It’s not Conan the Barbarian, it’s not Sword and the Sorcerer, it’s not Krull, it is just this cash-grab franchise. A lot of love of and reverence has grown for it over the years, but it is pretty obscure, and I thought this would be a fun sandbox to play in and come up with ways to reinvigorate it for modern audiences.”

It unapologetically drowns in nostalgia for Deathstalker, for Conan, for Sword and the Sorcerer, and maybe even a little Evil Dead too. It also asks you to drink deeply as well. Pass the chalice.

Photo by: Nick Morgulis

Dolly

A throwback to old-school 1970s slasher movies—but with the extremist gory heart of an early 2000s exploitation flick—Rod Blackhurst’s Dolly is the type of seedy grindhouse effort that the Fantastic Fest faithful covet. The film follows a happy couple (Fabianne Therese and Seann William Scott) whose bliss is quickly and permanently punctured by Dolly (NWA wrestler Max the Impaler), a woman with very specifics wants and needs… and who hides both behind a creepy doll’s mask.

One of several movies at the festival this year about the more sinister side of maternalism and the cultural infantilization of women, Dolly is also ultimately a brutal depiction of suffering and degradation through an oddly idyllic, fairytale lens. 

Photo by: Nick Morgulis

Find Your Friends

Izabel Pakzad makes her feature directorial debut in Find Your Friends, a movie in which Amber (Helena Howard) and a group of close girlfriends visit Joshua Tree in what is ostensibly supposed to be a weekend getaway. In reality, it becomes a soul-crushing game of doubt, recriminations, and second-guessing with a splattered body count. The film asks if you can find your friends on a spiritual level, even before the genre elements come into play. According to Pakzad, that is the point.

“It feels like these girls are really close together and there’s a rapport with each other, but then there’s this messy dynamic between all of them, and they can’t quite see each other,” Pakzad says of her cast of characters, which includes Bella Thorne in the role of a reveler. “I pulled from my own experience, because I went to a crazy party school, I had a really great group of girlfriends, but sometimes we were like ships in the night. We just could not see each other and not understand each other, so I think for me, it is a metaphor for that.”

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

While not technically a horror movie, nothing in Austin this year induced as much anxiety or tension as Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The obliquely funny and ruthless character study follows a mother and therapist named Linda (Rose Byrne) as she suffers numerous personal crises at once—not least of which includes an unspecified illness for her daughter. Yet the power of If I Had Legs is how deeply it immerses you into the feature-length panic attack of a woman who feels like she is drowning. This is perhaps best crystallized by the movie’s shrewdest choice to never show the face of Linda’s daughter. We only process the child’s existence through off-screen pleas and cries for attention, which in turn reflect a mother so exhausted that she cannot see the forest for the trees, or her daughter for the feeding tube.

The film marks the boldest performance of Byrne’s career, with the actor bringing both dramatic pathos and starkly acerbic humor to a character who director Bronstein describes to us as “a woman who outside the story… is always a little bit of a chaos agent, always a little bit of a disaster. But she’s a woman you want at your party, she’s going to be the most fun, but when she’s upset, she’s going to be the most upset. She lives in extremes.”

The extremes take on a caustic edge in the film that plays with horror language and surrealism, as well as as unexpectedly straight-ahead dramatic storytelling, such as casting Conan O’Brien as Linda’s own put-upon shrink. “If there’s a self-deprecation in Conan’s humor, it’s not false,” says Bronstein. “It’s very intelligently and sensitive [from] someone who understands human emotions.” The emotions in her film are also deftly, and sometimes deadly, real.

Primate

An excerpt from our full review:

Premiering with a a buzz of shrieks and nervous titters at the opening night of Fantastic Fest last week, Primate displays a commitment that borders on tunnel vision in its delivery of sadistic set pieces and simian-on-simian savagery. Roberts, the promising genre director of 47 Metres Down—back before he got waylaid by studio box-checking in Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City—was on hand in Austin to state he considers Stephen King’s Cujo a major influence on Primate. There are definite similarities, particularly since both stories involve a parent and child who are bedeviled by a family pet with rabies.

However, Primate represents a different kind of cathartic release for Roberts, who eschews King’s penchant for humanity and sentimentality. In fact, despite being a studio release that is clearly intended for a wide teen audience, Primate amounts to the most ruthlessly mean-spirited and nasty little horror movie to come out of a Hollywood major in recent memory. And on those grounds alone, it makes for a delightful theatrical experience in a crowded theater as its young, chipper, and amiable cast of meat-sacks get absolutely obliterated by a monkey jonesing to go apeshit on its owners.

Reflections in a Dead Diamond

When one stops and considers it for a minute, it’s kind of surreal that the legacy of the original James Bond movies—the ones which featured Sean Connery in jetpacks and infiltrating hollowed out volcanoes—still looms large nearly 70 years after the fact. They even can inform genuinely surreal French cinema that might be at home as much at the Berlin International Film Festival as Fantastic Fest. And in the case of Reflection in a Dead Diamond, it’s premiered at both.

The new psychedelic time and genre-bender is from husband and wife filmmaking team Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani, and their movie convincingly evokes the glamour and intrigue of ‘60s era spymania while also synthesizing it through a wistful melancholia as the film’s main spy is seen both as a young man (Yannick Renier) and an old one (Fabio Testa), who’s gone to seed while waiting to die alone on a ritzy coastline where he stares at the young women on the beach.

“We wanted to question the image of this hero who saved the world, but maybe didn’t save the world. Maybe he made things worse,” Cattet says. “We wanted to speak about his nature of the world and with women.” They even might make you question the nature of reality itself.

Shelby Oaks

Longtime YouTube film critic and cinephile Chris Stuckmann has stepped across the barrier that divides reviewers from filmmakers with his first horror feature, Shelby Oaks. One of the most buzzed about films of the festival, Shelby is a definite first feature, with many of the foibles therein. Even so, Stuckmann wisely pinpointed a world he intimately understands and extracted from it a perfect ghost-story setup that transfers to fiction with alacrity and authenticity.

Mia and Riley (Camille Sullivan and Sarah Durn) were sisters who shared an affectionate if troubled childhood. While there was much love in the household, Riley was bedeviled every night by bad dreams. Eventually, she learned to channel them into becoming a YouTube personality in the wild west days of the 2000s internet. As a paranormal investigator with a dedicated following, Riley was on the precipice of something big when she disappeared nearly 20 years ago.

All of this is relayed to viewers through the perspective of Mia trying to put the pieces together for a new YT documentary, which intersperses the film’s storytelling structure alongside traditional narrative filmmaking.

“I remember the quaint, charming days of early YouTube,” says Stuckmann, “where there was just a few people who were talking about stuff on that platform. It felt super small and felt like this little community, so that was important to me.” He later adds about breaking the rules of found footage movies that: “I remember the first time I was writing the treatment, it started as this sort of found footage/moc-doc approach, and I thought to myself ‘what are the rules of this?’ And as soon as I started thinking in that way I was upset with that, because I want to break some rules.” Mission accomplished. 

Silent Night, Deadly Night

Remakes are a tricky thing. If one just plays the hits, there will be little reason to justify the film’s existence beyond fiduciary responsibilities on the part of the studio. If you stray too far from formula, you might be accused of sacrilege by the fan community that made the IP lucrative in the first place. So I think it is a credit to writer-director Mike P. Nelson that Silent Night, Deadly Night takes such bold and sure-to-be transgressive swings with the cult Santa slayer touchstone, Silent Night, Deadly Night.

The 1984 original was a bit of another Halloween clone back in the day, with its story beginning in the killer’s childhood where he got an entire, preposterous psychological profile and origin story for his murderous Father Christmas fetish. Nelson inverts that 44 years later, adding a supernatural (or maybe just Spirit of Christmas) bent to the kills, which bend over backward to keep the new Billy Chapman (a solid Rohan Campbell) sympathetic. One particularly wild naughty night massacre begs audiences to join in the merriment.

However, such flashes and splashes of anti-Yuletide fun are couched in a movie that—whether by design or accident—better resembles a Hallmark holiday programmer, only now with a deep bodycount. Billy is the new guy in town; Pamela (Ruby Modine), the sweet girl who works at a novelty Christmas antique shop; and Billy’s numerous victims resemble little more than a cast of Bedford Falls eccentrics with simply dark secrets. It could work, conceptually speaking, but the film lacks the visual inventiveness to really cross over into the satirical or visceral. It’s antihero maniac might wield an axe, but the picture around him has the awkward stiltedness of a streaming service’s shovel.

Sisu: Road to Revenge

When the first Sisu arrived in cinemas in 2022, it slapped pretty hard as a nice bit of gritty escapism wherein a Finnish soldier in the waning days of World War II slaughters what seems to be an entire Nazi platoon by himself. It was fun, although not maybe the action masterpiece others made it out to be. If you agree with that assessment though, do I have good news: Sisu: Road to Revenge manages to outdo the action-packed violence in every conceivable way and delivers the spectacle of chaos the previous movie’s hype promised.

Embracing the first film’s wry sense of humor and heightening it to Looney Tunes levels, Sisu 2 features Jorma Tommila’s Aatami Korpi blasting through the entire Red Army with nothing more than a fluffy dog and some pluck for assistance. In one scene, he takes out a Russian fighter planes with a log he’s managed to steer like a projectile missile from the back of his truck; in another sequence he flips a tank mid-chase and keeps trucking upside down. Writer-director Jamari Helander tells us that it was more the silent film comic geniuses like Buster Keaton who inspired his wordless warrior in this movie. Whatever the influence, Sisu: Road to Revenge surpasses its predecessor and gives its scourge of despots and authoritarians a diametric opposite in his longtime nemesis, Soviet Gen. Igor Draganov (Stephen Lang). Everything about Lang’s loquacious performance is perfect, right down to his Stalin-esque mustache.

“There might be something similar with Stalin,” Helander concedes with a chuckle in our studio. “Stephen Lang really wanted to have that mustache, and I think he looks really cool with that mustache.” He later adds, “Originally I was thinking a much younger bad guy, like a more physical danger, but I really loved the idea [of Lang]. It came from Sony, they said ‘what about Stephen Lang?’ And I found it really interesting them both being old dudes.”

The Strangers: Chapter 2

According to iconic journeyman director Renny Harlin—the guy who once upon a time helmed The Long Kiss Goodnight in between, uh, classics like Die Hard 2 and Deep Blue Sea—last year’s The Strangers: Chapter 1 was not the movie he set out to make. That turgid retread of the original 2008 cult classic of the same name (albeit now ostensibly as a prequel) was simply the gateway for the story he wanted to tell in the next two-thirds of his epic home-invasion trilogy.

I can only assume that he’s still waiting to get to the alleged good stuff in Chapter 3, because The Strangers: Chapter 2 is a listless and hackneyed slasher movie gussied up with delusions of credibility. After surviving the same tired old tale about preternaturally unstoppable killers targeting her and a fiancé for no reason, final girl Maya (poor Madeleine Petsch, wasted) must endure the same nonsense again when the Strangers return to finish the job in the hospital. They chase wee Maya into the woods, into the rain, and straight into the arms of an unconvincing CGI boar at one point (no, really!).

Admittedly I never was a great admirer of Bryan Bertino’s original Strangers  In that film, ostensible flesh and blood humans had supernatural powers to manifest on either side of deadbolt doors like ghosts. The lack of logic always rigged the game in my mind, robbing it of any real tension. However, even that film had a sophistication and artfulness totally foreign to Harlin’s abilities. The movie also knew that if you have a dreadful mystery—literal strangers who target you for no reason—the last thing one does is shoehorn in tacky flashback sequences which rob them of their mystique in favor of maudlin Bad Seed homages. 

But Strangers 2 does that and then some, offering what appears to be a ludicrous origin story for at least one member of the trio of killers, and set pieces devoid of anything other than close-ups of suffering and death. Try as the movie might to assert that Petsch can best a boar, nobody is escaping this bore.

Photo by: Nick Morgulis

Theater Is Dead

Any theater kid worth their jazz hands will tell you theater is their religion, and their church a stage. Katherine Dudas’ frothy Theater Is Dead takes this logic to its cultish conclusion. In the wilds of pastoral New England sits a summer stock-esque program helmed by respected director Matthew (Shane West). Many of the actors who work with him go on to have spectacular careers, but the tradeoff might prove more than Willow (Decker Sadowski) is prepared to bargain for. A young novice with little stage experience—not even “commercials” as one co-star fumes—Willow just wants to be up on the boards this season. But the theater director has longer term commitments in mind.

A snappy and happily campy sophomore effort from Dudas, Theater is a highly collaborative effort, with the director writing it with many of her fellow acting-school alums and stars, including Sadowski, Olivia Blue, and Madison Lawlor. The approach is shaggy, but in the same merry way as a thespian warm-up game. It also belies a devious irony within its title since the medium that’s long been accused of “killing” live theater—cinema—is now itself in apparent mortal danger due to technological upheaval.

“What I love at the heart of this film is an artist falling in love,” Dudas considers, “and my hope is the audience watches it and understands why someone would sell their soul and doesn’t judge them, because you see the pureness of it. And all the conversations about AI in film and such are terrifying, but I have this maybe misplaced optimism [that the industry will continue], because we fell in love… when your heart and soul is involved, there is something very human up there.”

V/H/SHalloween

It’s a little surprising that it’s taken this long for the prolific found-footage anthology series of V/H/S to get around to doing a Halloween-centric film. While the October holiday has featured in previous segments and short films within the series, this year’s offering from Shudder revolves exclusively around spooky season. Whether it’s the dangers of trick ‘r treating (especially when folks say you’re too old), ignoring the “please take one” sign, or what can happen when you forget the reason for the season while frolicking ironically at a Halloween party, a group of young filmmakers tackle Oct. 31 from a half-dozen vantages in this chapter.

As with most V/H/S films, Halloween is a grab bag of shorts of varying quality, several of which are little scarier than an actual haunted house setup by the neighbor down the street. Yet there are also a handful of standouts, including a Spanish-language chiller from the director of REC and Veronica, Paco Plaza. His film features a bunch of Hallow’s Eve revelers who are only too glibly ready to chant foreboding Hermetic text on the wall. They get an eyeful for their trouble; Alex Ross Perry, meanwhile, makes a seriously disquieting short about the ‘90s phenomenon of kidprint videos intended to keep the youth of America safe in the early days of VCR recordings.

“It’s very real, I recommend looking on YouTube kidprint videos,” Jones remembers. “If kids have them, they upload [them], and they’re very creepy, very strange. A lot of tracking lines, a lot of weird open sound, a lot of erratic camera-work on behalf of the videographer… the film’s producer Josh Goldblum shot them, so he was very intrigued by this…. Growing up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, for me it was just a slightly dangerous time, in a way, and I wanted to point that back.”

Vicious

An excerpt from our full review:

On paper, the premise intrigues. But in execution, it more often infuriates and later exhausts. Bertino, Fanning, and a slew of gifted collaborators fervently scurry between set pieces with the affectation of storytellers determined to proclaim something profound or (that most dreaded of words among genre aficionados) elevated in the horror space. But for all the profundity of its pretty wrappings, this holiday gift is barren beneath; a deeper truth that one suspects Paramount Pictures is acutely aware of since a chiller clearly earmarked for the holiday season corridor appears now to be getting low-key dumped in October’s oversaturated horror market.

Vicious ultimately (and maybe even intentionally) lives up to its title: it is needlessly cruel since it offers nothing of merit beyond the sight of a movie star like Dakota Fanning subjecting her body to self-harm games that wouldn’t look out of place among the most nihilistic sequences of Saw. Except, ironically, the better Saw movies actually found meaning, hamhanded though it might often be, behind all the gore and ghoulishness. Vicious is just a ghoul with better acting.

Photo by: Nick Morgulis

Whistle

Full disclosure: we did not actually see Whistle, the closing night film at Fantastic Fest this year, because we were already gone by the time it premiered. However, we were able to speak at length about the film with director Corin Hardy and screenwriter and Fantastic Fest regular, Owen Egerton. They offered both some curious teases about the upcoming Shudder release wherein Deadpool & Wolverine’s Dafne Keen discovers an ancient Aztec Death Whistle with some eerie powers.

“I think good horror starts not with a question of what’s going to scare you, but what’s going to scare me,” Egerton explains. “And I was journaling and thinking ‘Oh, what scares me is the idea that somewhere out there my death is waiting, and I started thinking through that and came up with this curse which is the center of our story. In the process, I began researching what is that going to look like and I came upon the Aztec Death Whistles. They’re across Mesoamerica and other cultures as well, and they’re so fascinating because we don’t know what they’re for, we don’t know what they meant in their particular culture. They seemed like a really interesting vessel to build a story around.”

The concept captured director Hardy’s imagination as he wound up designing them, collaboratively, in his own sketch book—dreaming up a whistle so tempting that you might blow on it, regardless of the consequences.

“I went through 50 or 60 designs,” Hardy reveals. “If you look at the actual Death Whistle, they’re pretty strange, creepy little things already. Some are very simplistic bone carvings, others are elaborate, others abstract. So I had a Spanish designer Daniel Caruso, almost like auditioning a cast member, to try and create something that has the right balance. Visually I didn’t want to have an object that just looked evil, that was doing a nasty face. I wanted something that could take on different personalities in different lights. And in Whistle you see this throughout the movie in different environments, there’s flames or pool reflections, so it gets lit from below or the side… It could look vacant, almost enticing like the ring in Lord of the Rings. You just want to put it on or blow it.”

Audiences will find out what happens next when the movie releases on Shudder in February.

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