Fresh Meat (2025)

Fresh Meat world première at FrightFest, 29th and 31st August 2026

June Nolan (Joelle Farrow) and her friends Valerie (Hannah Galway) and Brett (Alex Sands) record their explorations of abandoned spaces, and then post the finished pieces on their vlog Abandoned with June. They are diligent, good-natured and safety-conscious – which is to say unsuccessful – but they hope to team up with the better equipped, much more successful influencers Marcus (Mika Amonsen), Anton (Tyson Wong), Makalya (Jorja Cadence) and Jamie (Karn Kalra), known collectively as the Thrillseekers, for their next destination Coldwater Prison, which has lain empty since 1985. Except that the past massacre there which saw the place closed down was not, as newspaper clippings state, the result of a deadly prison riot, but rather, as the 1985-set prologue to Fresh Meat shows, the work of one crazed inmate, Jeffrey Luther (Kyle Englehart), who single-handedly and indiscriminately tore prisoners and guards apart, literally limb from limb.

As our seven explorers ignore the firm warning from a local sheriff (Rudy Bellamy) and break into the premises, they walk in on a history that has never ended. For amid these blood-splattered walls, Jeffrey has somehow gone on living, and indeed will prove immortal – a mute masked unstoppable killing machine on the model of Jason Voorhees, and also a cannibal who likes to play with his food before eating it. When these meddling content creators inadvertently release Jeffrey from his cell, they will quickly learn that he cannot be killed, only contained – and that the inside man (Jesse Buck) responsible for his containment has mixed feelings towards these pesky young intruders who risk exposing a decades-long cover-up and unleashing the beast into the world outside, with unimaginable consequences.

These days, it is hard to know what to do with a slasher. For this generic form was done to death in the Eighties – indeed died in roughly the year that Coldwater Prison is said to have closed – and was then revived and postmodernised in the Nineties with Wes Craven’s Scream (1995) and its many imitators, and ever since has been taken beyond the valley of the ultra meta in endless Scream sequels, reboots and ‘requels’ as well as films like Scott Glosserman’s Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (2006), Drew Goddard’s The Cabin in the Woods (2011), Joseph Kahn’s Detention (2011), Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls (2015) and Ritesh Gupta’s The Red Mask (2025), or essentialised in films like David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2014) and Chris Nash’s In A Violent Nature (2024). Writer/director Daniel Turres is aware that the material in Fresh Meat is hardly original, and even the very title of his film seems to acknowledge repeat consumption as much as novelty. Yet Turres certainly delivers on the grotesquely gory kills, executed practically, that have become the genre’s lifeblood, while bringing the sort of knowing humour that he had already shown in Here for Blood (2023). Fresh Meat may feature young vapid influencers getting brutally slaughtered for likes and hits, but it also has the good sense to recognise how very funny that is. For when it comes to killers, there is no school like the old school, and the postmodern vanity of internet fame is no match for the brute, bludgeoning force of Jeffrey.