The Heretiks world première at Fantastic Fest, 19th Sept 2026
“We’re all a little pagan,” 13-year-old Mabel (Ava Mae Seidensticker) tells her college-age sister Ada (Josie Juliette Wert), a little way into Gregg Bishop’s The Heretiks. Mabel has come home early from her Middle School, suspended for two days for turning up in full skull face paint to celebrate the fact that it is Halloween. A natural born rebel who is smarter, sassier and more emotionally intelligent than most of the adults around her, Mabel is clearly one of the heretics of the title, all too happy to cosplay her witchy side in the conformist ’burbs. Meanwhile the film’s prologue had revealed a coven of real witches in the woods performing a sacrificial ritual which sets a sandglass in motion. The countdown for something apocalyptic has begun.
That apocalypse, in this tale of two sisters, might just come down to the fragile, combustible relationship between Mabel and Ada. Their mother died when they were both young, and their father is often, like now, absent, so that Ada has been as much parent and rôle model as sister to Mabel – but now that Ada has actually, or at least nominally, become a grown-up, she has also dropped out of college, lost her sense of direction in life, burnt several bridges and is no longer even sure of who she is. Certainly, distracted by her own feckless inertia and by ex-boyfriend Ryan (Spencer Brabham), Ada is failing as Mabel’s guardian, and even lets her little sister go trick or treating unspervised with just classmate Wesley (Luke Speakman) for company, while Ada hangs at a party with Ryan.
When Mabel, mysteriously marked on her forearm, comes under attack from unnervingly giggling, girlish Neve (Tess Williams) and her coven of magic-wielding witches who hope to usher in the end of the world by sacrificing the young teen at midnight, a different mother figure steps in to protect Mabel. For Cai (Kimberly Eptsein) was once the coven’s head, but has since fallen out with her sisters and their desire to expedite a cosmic disaster – and her only way to stop them is to prevent Mabel’s imminent immolation. To Cai, the others have strayed from the proper path of witchcraft, while to them, she is the heretic – and Cai, determinedly sticking up for Mabel while sociopathic in her attitudes towards others, is still not sure where she sits on the scale between superpowered witch and frail human.
Under siege from home invaders with murderous intentions and extraordinary paranormal abilities, both Ada and Mabel must negotiate their own sisterhood, even as they learn the odd spell from Cai while in turn teaching her a few lessons about humanity, solidarity and the value of life. This is to be a long dark night not just of the soul, but also of awakening and transformation. For Wesley becomes the knight he is dressed as, Ada becomes the heroine that Mable has always seen in her, and both sisters learn lessons about love and death, and their place in a larger universe, with Cai standing in for their own long-departed mother. And both sides in this suburban yet world-changing conflict have their own kinds of sacrifice to match their rites of passage.
Working again, as he did on SiREN (2016), with screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piorowski (David Bruckner’s The Night House, 2020), Bishop has crafted a loving tribute to the kind of Eighties suburban kids-in-peril adventure seen in Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985), Fred Dekker’s The Monster Squad (1987) and Tibor Takács’ The Gate (1987) – a form which has more recently been resurrected by television’s Stranger Things (2016-2025). On a night of dress-ups and spooky fantasy, Mabel and Ada, at their different ends of adolescence, play out in the guise of genre their farewell to childhood, their bumpy coming of age, and their embrace of mortality, while assuming a female empowerment that has always been latent within them. Collins and Piorowski’s screenplay is often very funny, but the jeopardy feels real, with kids not just under threat, but suffering horrifically painful, even lethal injuries, as though to underscore the high stakes in the apocalypse that growing up represents.
strap: Gregg Bishop’s semi-comic witchy Eighties-style adventure mixes adolescence and apocalypse in a Halloween home invasion.
© Anton Bitel
