Snapshot world première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026 Joseph Archer’s Snapshot both does and does not present itself as a classic found footage film. Text at the beginning reveals that its reels were donated to the British Film Archives by the will of ‘Mary Tamworth’ in 2026, and appear to have been ‘cut, reordered and…
Compliance UK première at FrightFest, 31st August 2026 Compliance begins as in fact it ends, with high-angle CCTV footage of various room interiors, each logged by a digital label (“Cornell S living room” etc.) to mark the location. The last shot in this series is a bedroom, with Sam Cornell (Megan Wilcox) asleep in bed,…
Frogman retrospective screening at FrightFest, 30th August 2026 In August 1999, on a car trip with his bickering parents (Justen Jones, Emily Joe Hayes) and older sister Lizzie (Shea Mikel) to Loveland, Ohio, ten-year-old Dallas (Indiana Arnold) captures something walking bipedally in the woods on his Hi-8 camera – a creature with human height and…
Invoking Scream world première at FrightFest, 28th August 2026 After a warning (in text and voiceover) about “violent imagery and a scene depicting suicide”, Invoking Scream plays like a VHS, complete with anti-piracy advertisement, tracking artefacts and visible on-screen ‘rewind’ functionality. Indeed rewind to 1997, at Los Lleuques in the Ñuble region of southern Chile,…
Birdcall Canadian première at Fantasia, 31 July 2026 Justin Calandriello’s Birdcall opens with an information video from the future. A cute ornithoid puppet (voiced by Casey Marie Eckler) introduces herself as Avery, a member of the (fictive) species Avis Anthropophaga (or ‘human-eating bird’), and describes the effects of the disease Parasitica Rapax, that a bird’s…
Loner first published by DMovies.org, timed with its world première at Raindance Film Festival 2025 “This by the way, for anyone under the age of 18, is called a map,” says Angus Mattock (Charlie Robb) near the beginning of Loner, which Robb wrote and co-directed with Douglas Tawn. “It’s made of paper.” It is an…
Frogman Returns at Chattanooga Film Festival, 19 June 2026 In a way, there are always returns with Frogman. In Anthony Cousins’ found-footage feature debut Frogman (2023), Dallas (Nathan Tymoshuk) returned to Loveland, Ohio with his friends Amy (Chelsey Grant) and Scotty (Benny Barrett) to try to capture on camera the legendary local cryptid that Dallas…
At different points, both Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Dr Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve) will not so much describe their experience of the Backrooms, as state why it is so hard to describe, saying that the layout of these spaces is like a picture of a dog drawn by someone hearing a dog described without ever…
Creature of the Pines had its world première at Panic Fest, 10 April 2026 Over the years, indeed over millennia, in the remote woodlands of Pine Hollow, New Jersey, people who have hiked along the unmarked paths near Ridgewater Creek have been disappearing without trace – apart from any drawn, written or filmed record that…
Out in their patrol car one night at the beginning of Brandon Christensen’s Bodycam, Officers Jackson (Jaime M. Callica) and Bryce (Sean Rogerson) are called to a house where there is a ‘suspected 10-16’ in progress. That is police code for a domestic disturbance – a phrase that will come to resonate in a film…
Infirmary had its world première at Dances With Films NYC, 16 Jan January 2026 Infirmary knows exactly what it is, and right from the outset wants the viewer to know too. For in opening with text about an “unknown disturbance” at LA’s Wilshire Infirmary which left two dead and one missing, and in promising to…