Pig Hill first published by SciFiNow for its world première at FrightFest, 1.30pm Saturday 23rd August
There is a contradiction at the beginning of Kevin Lewis’ Pig Hill, adapted by Jarrod Burris from Nancy Williams’ novel Pig (2019). “It’s just crazy that he wanted to meet you here,” Emily (Emma Kotos) tells her beau Mick (Ramsey Krull). “This is Pig Hill you know. The Pig Hill. Pig people. Missing women. You’re definitely not a local.” Mick has driven Emily out here to score some drugs from his dealer, and then to get it on with his not unwilling passenger. Yet where Mick sees only opportunity for more than one kind of illicit activity, Emily knows the local myths and recognises the danger signs. Pig Hill is a place associated not with sex but with horror – and sure enough, before they can even get past some basic flirtation, both of them will come under ferociously violent attack from a figure with a pig’s head.
Of course sex and horror often come together and make complementary bedfellows, but what is contradictory here is the slippage between tall tales and true. On the one hand, this prologue offers an utterly generic scene – of the kind typically found in urban legends or indeed at the start of horror movies, and it even includes Emily expressly alluding to a local myth (about ‘pig people’). On the other, Emily ties that myth to local news (the serial disappearances of women from the area), even as the setting for this straight-from-horror scenario is the very real Meadville, in Crawford County, Pennsylvania. Here fact and fiction are entangled, and protagonist Carrie (Rainey Qualley) – whose very name is a signifier of horror – takes it upon herself to disentangle these.
When she is not working in Meadville’s second-hand bookstore or helping out at the homeless shelter, Carrie is obsessed with writing a definitive account of those missing women – ten, including Emily, in the last decade. A radio report on the mystery suggests as a solution “everything from a serial killer to local legends of pig people”, but Carrie remains sceptical about the latter as any kind of explanation, even if, since she was a young child, she has been reciting the nursery rhymes about them with her older brother and best friend Chris (Shiloh Fernandez). “They’re not real,” Carrie tells her old hobo friend Reggie (Darrel Whitney), who himself believes that these legendary human-porcine hybrids go back many thousands of years, long before America’s colonisation, and have been haunting the Hill ever since. Giovanni Vendetti (Dino Tripodis), whose family has been rearing pigs on the Hill for generations, has a different, more scandalous piece of history to rationalise the local legend. Meanwhile the police think that fugitive meth dealer Red Davies (R.A. Mihailoff) is the ‘Pig Hill butcher’ behind all the abductions and likely murders.
Joining forces with the similarly divorced Andy (Shane West), who has recently returned to Meadville from New York and who fancies himself something of a Fox Mulder figure in the face of mysteries, Carrie tries to uncover the truth about the victims. Yet even Carrie starts seeing pig’s heads everywhere, keeping viewers guessing if she is being warned, gaslit or targeted, or if indeed her own anxious imagination, and her failure to take her meds, are all getting the better of her. Meanwhile, Carrie’s investigation will lead her to the most horrific of hellholes and the most unspeakable of acts, as a community’s history leaves its baleful legacy down the generations.
Lewis’ feature is about stories – the stories that we tell to articulate taboos, to cover up crimes, to confuse and distract and mesmerise and and entrance and entrap, or just to make sense of what cannot be rationalised. In other words, it is a horror film about horror films. It is also a tense thriller that goes to some very dark places, and even finds some sympathy for its devil.
strap: Kevin Lewis’ slippery metahorror entangles urban legends and unspeakable truths in a case of missing young women
Anton Bitel
