For the past week, Austin has been soaked with blood, guts, and gore—figuratively speaking, at least. SXSW has long been a favorite among studios for horror premieres; past debuts have included A Quiet Place, Us, The Cabin in the Woods, The Invitation, and Drag Me to Hell. This year’s crop of films has been no exception.
Ti West’s X and Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies (starring a convincingly dopey Pete Davidson) have ranked among the most anticipated releases. In both cases, the end results live up to the hype—and better yet, there’s plenty more where those came from. Feast your eyes (if you dare!) on all of SXSW’s best horror offerings.
X
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Let’s start with the most obvious. The House of the Devil director Ti West’s slasher borrows a lot from films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Psycho, not to mention some of M. Night Shyamalan’s freaky grandparents movie The Visit. But at no point does it feel derivative. Stellar performances from star Mia Goth (seen here playing two roles), Brittany Snow, Jenna Ortega, and Kid Cudi ground this chilling tale about a group of young and beautiful people who show up at a remote farmhouse to film a porno. When their elderly hosts find out what they’re up to, the bloodbath begins. Set in 1979, the film is a deliciously bloody throwback and an absolute must-watch—even if its thematic work is sometimes more effective than its kill sequences.
X is now playing in theaters.
BODIES BODIES BODIES
Speaking of excellent casts—have you seen the incredible assortment of performers Reijn rounded up for the deadly hurricane party at the center of horror-comedy Bodies Bodies Bodies? (Or, as my brain insists on calling it thanks to Megan Thee Stallion, Body-ody-odies?)
Start with Pete Davidson, in peak form here as an obnoxious tool, and then add in Lee Pace in peak comedic (and, let’s be honest, physical) form, Amandla Stenberg, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm breakout Maria Bakalova, and Shiva Baby star Rachel Sennott—who runs away with the entire film.
Here, a group of rich and obnoxious twentysomethings (and, in Lee Pace’s case, one of their way-too-old boyfriends) get together to ride out a dangerous storm. But things get a little too intense when they decide to play a party game that exposes all of the emotional fractures underlying their seemingly sunny friendships. Raucously funny and unpredictable until the end (at least in terms of how all the bodies eventually hit the floor), this one’s definitely better when watched in a crowd.
A24 has not yet announced a release date for Bodies Bodies Bodies.
WATCHER
By far the most Alfred Hitchcock-ian of this year’s debuts, Watcher marks a feature premiere for its director, Chloe Okuno. But its lead, It Follows and The Guest star Maika Monroe, is right at home in this latest thriller—which finds her playing a New Yorker named Julia who moves overseas to Bucharest after her husband’s promotion.
Voyeurism, paranoia, and the feeling of being out of one’s element underpin this tense character study, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year; Julia, who doesn’t speak Romanian, feels isolated and relies on her husband to translate for her. It’s an unnerving position to be in, especially when a man starts constantly watching her from a window across the street. Is he really stalking her, or is she just imagining things like all the men around her seem to believe?
Monroe plays Julia with just the right blend of jittery emotion and self- doubt; her character’s certainty about her situation waxes and wanes as she confronts various people who refuse to believe her. Okuno imbues each shot with dread, and the film’s washed-out color palette makes a perfect canvas for the film’s saturated, gruesomely bloody finale. Horror fans who have yet to hear Okuno’s name almost certainly will soon; this one’s a must-see, and she’s already got a Netflix thriller starring Anna Kendrick on the way.
Watcher is set for theatrical release on June 3.
HYPOCHONDRIAC
Among the most visually creative of this year’s SXSW horror picks, Hypochondriac examines the ways in which unprocessed childhood trauma can come back to haunt us—through the story of a potter who begins hallucinating a person in a wolf suit.
Writer and director Addison Heimann revisited a real-life personal trauma in this story, which follows a man named Will (Zach Villa) as he tries to navigate an increasingly serious relationship. His partner, Luke (Devon Graye), is as kind and supportive as they come. But Will struggles to trust him and open up thanks, in large part, to his traumatic experiences with his mother, who tried to kill him during his adolescence. That becomes a big problem when Will begins hallucinating and suspects he might have more in common with his mother than he’d like to think.
Villa, seen previously in Destroyer and American Horror Story: 1984, radiates with terror in this role. Cinematographer Dustin Supencheck’s camera movement is disorienting, and at Will’s worst moments we see everything in a dizzying whirlwind of kaleidoscopic doubles. A chief fear for survivors of parental abuse can be the possibility of one day turning out just like their abuser—a concern Hypochondriac explores both sensitively and thoroughly. Thankfully, however, the film provides a little bit of hope before all is said and done.
Hypochondriac is set for release on April 8.
JETHICA
By far the sparsest of SXSW’s horror offerings, Jethica is an idiosyncratic, surprisingly funny little gem. Pete Ohs directs Callie Hernandez (Blair Witch) as Elena, a mysterious young woman who reunites with an old friend from high school named Jessica (Ashley Denise Robinson). As it turns out, Jessica has a stalker who’s followed her across state lines. This is no ordinary creep, either; it’s going to take more than a restraining order or jail time to get rid of him.
Hernandez and Robinson make a wonderful pair, with chemistry that feels easy and familiar right off the bat. The two also vibe well with Ohs’ minimalist style, which leans hard on dry humor and dispenses with any kind of sentimentality—at least until the film’s end, which, all things considered, turns out to be surprisingly sweet.
A release date for Jethica has not yet been announced.
BITCH ASS
Original Candyman Tony Todd is always a welcome presence on our screens. Here, the actor plays the narrator of a gruesome tale in which a simple robbery becomes a bloody, Squid Game-like massacre.
Actor and writer Bill Posley makes his feature directorial debut with this film. “Bitch Ass” is the name given to our main character and antagonist, played by Tunde Laleye, by his high school bullies. (His real name is Cecil.) An homage to Black horror films like Tales from the Hood and The People Under the Stairs, Bitch Ass finds Cecil setting up a series of Saw-like traps, all based on his favorite childhood games, for the robbers he knows are coming to loot his grandmother’s house. One by one, they try to best him—and one by one, they fall. Whether anyone can actually outsmart him is what we’re left to find out.
Rife with clever editing and acted with both terrifying conviction and bleak humor until the end, Bitch Ass is as well-paced as it is diabolical. Its plot never lags, and not one sequence lingers past its welcome. If anything, I just wish they’d found a way to keep Tony Todd on my screen for a little longer.
A release date for Bitch Ass has not yet been announced.
SISSY
Aisha Dee is a long way away from The Bold Type in this lavishly styled Australian horror-comedy from directors Hannah Barlow and Kane Senes.
There’s a candy-colored wicked streak to this film, which finds Dee playing Cecilia, a mega-popular mental health influencer and one-half of a best friend duo that came to an abrupt, mysterious end. Reunited 12 years after the fact with her old BFF, Emma, Cecilia—who emphatically no longer goes by her childhood nickname, Sissy—agrees to come along for her bachelorette weekend in a remote cabin in the mountains. She doesn’t realize, however, that she’ll soon be reunited with another classmate from the old days—one who’s far less excited to see her.
Along with Hypochondriac and Bitch Ass, Sissy is among the most visually memorable of this year’s releases. It’s meticulously and humorously stylized to unfold like the cinematic version of a glitter filter on Instagram, a deliberate contrast to the occasionally nausea-inducing gore of the proceedings themselves. Dee is a terrifying revelation as Cecilia, a character whose true nature (like everyone else’s in the film) eludes us until the very end.
Shudder has acquired Sissy but has not yet announced a streaming release date.
DEADSTREAM
Never has “like and subscribe” culture been quite this bone-chilling. Husband and wife writer-director duo Joseph and Vanessa Winter’s horror-comedy finds Joseph playing a disgraced stunt streamer who decides the best way to win back his following (and hopefully more sponsors) is to stay overnight in a haunted house. That goes about as well as one might expect.
Shawn built his career by “facing his fears” online, but this stunt takes things to a new level. He might’ve come prepared with garlic, Holy water, and other demon-fighting accoutrements, but Winter’s loud-mouthed character has no idea what he’s up against. Winters plays his character with just the right blend of sincere fright and theatrical high-pitched screams; at first, it’s hard to tell how much of the character’s anxiety is performative—a mainstay of most paranormal shows. By the end, however, there’s no mistaking the genuine fear.
Staged like a found footage film, Deadstream veers into Evil Dead territory in its stunning final act—a wonderfully ghoulish display of practical creature effects sure to warm any Sam Raimi fan’s heart. Beyond that, all I can say is that it’s best to go in totally cold.
Shudder has acquired Deadstream but has not yet announced a streaming release date.
