Or should you be afraid? It’s a trio of psycho killer flicks—at a motel, at a cabin in the woods, and on the road, and two of them take place on holidays. But are they scary? Let’s find out.
THE INN (2025)
This 65-minute, indie slasher goes harder than most modern slashers in terms of brutal kills, and they were so satisfying that the hollow plot didn’t even matter to me. It also effectively captures the grindhouse filter look. However, these days that look doesn’t come across as 70s/80s horror as much as it does like the days when 00s horror was trying to look like 70s/80s horror.
This is how you start a movie. Without wasting any time, things kick off with two girls having a creepy close encounter with a dude on a dark road at night. They arrive at a motel for a party, and a fricking masked killer shows up and just starts mutilating the fuck out of everyone. The practical effects in this flick kick ass.
After the initial massacre, the film takes its time setting up a typical slasher. Turns out the killer is known for hitting up motels. Therefore, we meet a bunch of characters at another motel for the next round of kills.
I wasn’t really vested in the characters introduce or the police investigating the previous case, because none of it is developed enough in the short runtime to add much weight to the masked killer aspect. I just sat back and enjoyed the pacing taking its time this go around to deliver more evenly spaced kills as the killer tears a new bunch of characters apart.
The silly tag scene after the credits doesn’t quite fit the tone of the rest of the movie, but it does promise a sequel.
AFRAID? (Aka: What Are You Afraid Of?) (2025)
This is an odd little indie horror flick. There’s a lot going on yet not much going on. It takes place at Halloween time, yet when the main cast goes away for the weekend, the holiday is totally forgotten, so it doesn’t satisfy the criteria for a Halloween-themed horror movie. And the ending left me scratching my head.
First, we meet a white trash young woman and her white trash family. There is some violence and abuse, then she simply goes to school the next, where she has strictly all Black friends. They decide to go away for the weekend to a cabin in the woods…meaning she leaves her little sister alone with her abusive father. Weird.
There’s plenty of stuff going on to fill a literal hour before the first kill. The guys pick up liquor for the weekend. Once on the road, the group gets stopped by a white cop, and one of the Black guys has a daydream sequence imagining how this encounter could go. They then have an actual encounter with racists at a convenience store. Following that, they get a flat. A weird dude who looks like he’s wearing clown makeup appears out of nowhere and helps them change it.
They get to the cabin, and after a while, the lights go out and the group starts getting scared. The creepy clownish dude from the road shows up momentarily but there’s no clear point to his appearances. The group goes swimming in a lake the next day. They have individual conversations about their futures and their relationships.
Someone finally gets killed at the 1-hour mark. There are suddenly dogs outside. The friends are trapped inside. It’s all kind of chaotic, it doesn’t quite find a typical slasher groove, plus you can’t really see the kills because everything is filmed very dark.
Eventually the action moves to the lair of a dude wearing a welding mask. There’s not much in the way of a final battle with him, but the white girl does something so incredibly unexpected that it adds a whole new dimension to the movie…just as it’s about to end.
Nothing is explained. The killer isn’t revealed. There’s a final scene that reminds us that it’s Halloween time and also seems to imply that the film is trying to reveal something to the audience, but I had no way of substantiating my guesses, so in the end, I don’t know what any of it meant.
HE KILLS AT NIGHT (2025)
For a movie that is mostly about two people stuck in a car together, this film manages to feel totally disjointed. It also manages to deliver a lot of Christmas spirit, believe it or not, so it earns a spot on the holiday horror page.
There are reports of a killer on the loose. It’s Christmas Eve. A woman dressed in festive clothes stops on a dark, snowy road to take a piss…and gets murdered.
Then that same killer hops into the car of another woman and demands that she help him get away.
There’s a lot of talking, they listen to Christmas music on the radio, they try to steal another car, she tries to get away a few times, and seemingly random, unrelated scenes are injected into the movie, including one that takes place on Halloween.
In the end, the movie tries to tie all those intrusive scenes together with a twist, but I honestly didn’t get it.
