NoSeeUms had its world première at FrightFest 2025, Saturday 23 August
“The land, the land knows you, even when you are lost” says a female voiceover at the beginning of Raven Deshay Carter’s NoSeeUms, as we see the image of a woman plummeting backwards in slow motion, surrounded by a swarm of insects. That image, and indeed that voice, belong to social anthropology student Ember (Aleigha Burt), who is herself lost. For, uprooted as a child from her ancestral home in the Florida ‘backwoods’ for reasons that she no longer remembers (apart from occasional nightmares of white violence against a black couple), and knowing no one from her family except her mother Sonja (Dee Selmore), Ember has long since code-switched away from her natural accent and, to the frustration of her only African-American friend Jasmine (Chase Johnson) and Sonja, has gravitated towards a white – now ex – boyfriend Paul and “crazy white bitches” Abigail (Tabby Getsy) and Lexi (Jessie Rody).
So when Ember ends her conversation with Jasmine by telling her to “Stay black”, it is clearly Ember herself who is at risk of ignoring that injunction and losing all connection with her roots. Yet this is, as that opening voiceover had suggested, a film about land and property. Invited with her Asian roommate Tessa (Jasmine Gia Nguyen) to join Abigail and Lexi for a weekend of “white girl shit” near the Aucilla River in Florida at an isolated lakehouse that has been in Abigail’s family for generations, Ember immediately starts seeing ghostly apparitions and having vivid nightmares, even as the midges – known locally as NoSeeUms – swarm in unnatural ways. This is a place with a disturbing history. “Why should I have to suffer for the sins of the past?” asks Abigail – yet while she may deny that she enjoys white privilege, may regard the days of slavery and violent land grabs as a distant period with no connection to her present, and may feel fully entitled to the power and influence that her father’s many Floridian properties afford her, she is nonetheless casually racist, and treats Ember more like the help than like an actual friend.
It is only when Ember meets local handyman Earl (Tyler Bibb) and story-telling community elder Papa Boyd (Kyle Johnson) that she comes to realise she has a personal connection to this property and its buried history of appropriation and injustice, and decides that instead of running as her mother once did, she needs to face, even expose, the past, and to reclaim her stake in the future. All this leads to the unrestful, undead Tilly (Trisha Arozqueta), as angry as Ember herself and determined to right wrongs and settle scores without compromise or mercy.
Co-written with Jason-Michael Anthony and Hendreck Joseph, Carter’s debut feature is horror noire, using the genre tropes of ghosts, possession and Phenomena-style entomological mayhem to lend dramatic form to the otherwise abstruse historical issues of heirs’ property and Black land loss. Near the beginning of NoSeeUms, Ember attends a class given by Professor Dr. Johnston (Elizabeth Wonder Lee) in ancestral healing, epigenetic trauma and the difficulties in changing systems and structures that have long been in place. The rest of the film converts this theory to wish-fulfilment practice, and shows one woman rediscovering her heritage – with a vengeance.
strap: In Raven Deshay Carter’s Floridian horror noire, property may be theft, but ghostly possession is nine-tenths of the law
© Anton Bitel
