While not all of these films are straight up slashers, each one features a supernatural force killing people off. But only one really came together for me. Let’s take a look.
MS. KANYIN (2025)
I thought this Nigerian film was going to be more of a folk horror type of movie. The opening scene even features a spiritual tree in the woods that craves blood.
However, despite a 110-minute runtime that makes for a major slow burn, the movie ends up becoming a basic, super fun supernatural slasher in the final act.
There’s a whole lot of focus on the students and teachers at a boarding school, most notable a girl struggling in French class, the teacher trying to educate her, and the pressure both of them experience at the hands of men.
Eventually, the female student becomes desperate to pass the class, which leads her and her friends to doing something drastic…which leads to a tragic accident involving the teacher and the mystical tree in the woods. Uh-oh.
That’s when the intensive character studies, social commentary, and occult elements are tossed out the window with a sudden shift into a fast-paced, bloody revenge slasher. Awesome. I had fun with this one despite it being too long for what it actually delivered.
THE GOATMAN (2023)
There’s a great looking, horned creature in this movie…if you can manage to catch a glimpse of him when he appears on screen very briefly. This proves to be more of a supernatural flick, with the creature acting as some sort of Wendigo that appears to people in the form of someone they know.
The setup is simple. A bunch of siblings and their significant others camp out in a desert and soon begin to experience the unknown. Everyone starts acting weird, they split up, they explore the desert, and they’re terrorized by faceless people, which are the absolute highlight of the film.
Another highlight is a very creepy scene in which one girl checks her appearance in the mirror, and it’s quite noticeable that the reflection looking back at her is actually looking back at her. Freaky.
After a while, the group concludes that the main creature is making the faceless people appear as doppelgängers of the group. It’s all kinds of confusing in terms of plot, the horned creature is never referred to as the Goatman, and the tone moves into deeper, emotional territory in the final act. Personally, I just wanted more faceless terror.
#FLOAT (2022)
This 76-minute-long movie fails to create a cohesive plot or unfolding of events, rendering it kind of pointless to watch.
A wannabe influencer and her friends take the ashes of their friend, who died a year before, to the cabin and river where he died and where they do some sort of river float thing every year, which literally just consists of sitting on floats in the river.
The first night they are there, a redneck dude comes to the door and warns them to stay away from the river. They don’t listen.
The next day, they start disappearing, splitting up, and getting killed with absolutely no explanation how. And despite all the madness going on around them, those that aren’t hurt or missing just continue to go back to floating on the river. Like there’s literally a scene in which a girl gets sucked under water and a fountain of blood spurts up while everyone witnesses it, and then the next thing you know, they’re just floating on their floats again.
Meanwhile, the redneck dude keeps warning them to stay away from the river. He also claims it preys on your weaknesses, but we are never shown any actual weaknesses for it to prey on. He even abducts some of them, making us think maybe he is the one killing people rather than it being the river at all.
There’s eventually a gruesome confrontation with him, one of the remaining survivors is attacked in some sort of shadow puppet dance that implies there’s a monster, and then the influencer girl drives off and discovers she’s suddenly totally going viral. But why? It’s never implied that she’s been doing a live feed of their excursion all along, so what is attracting new followers? When there’s this many plot holes, there’s simply no solid ground for a plot to stand on.
