Movies
Offspring (V)
“So, if you’re looking for a feel good night at the movies, or you think all cannibal flicks are Hills Have Eyes tales, then you should run away from Offspring as fast as your feet can take you. However, if you want to look past all the technical flaws for a balls-to-the-wall bloodbath then you’ll never be sicker than to spend a night with the fucked up family at the center of this film”
When splatter punk author Jack Ketchum’s name is attached to something, goremeisters generally know what they are getting themselves into. So it should come of no shock to those of you in the know when I tell you that Director Andrew van den Houten’s vision of Ketchum’s novel Offspring is pretty much a psychotic mess.
Offspring is the sequel to Ketchum’s groundbreaking 1980 cult debut novel Off Season. That book told the story of a cannibal family that feasted on the residents of the small Maine community of Dead River and the sheriff who hoped to have killed them off. Offspring is about the return of the cannibal family and the reenlistment of now retired Sheriff George Peters (Art Hindle) to find them again.
The residents of Dead River are turning up…well…dead. Eviscerated and decomposing all over their nice clean country houses. When a local family is attacked by the cannibal clan (dressed like rejects from a prehistoric cartoon comedy) survivors Amy (Amy Hargreaves) and Clair (Ahna Tessler) are kidnapped and taken to the cannibal’s beachside cavern lair. Amy (who has a baby at home) is needed to nurse another child the cannibals have stolen. Clair has her own son Luke (Tommy Nelson) and a brutal ex-husband to contend with. Eventually all the families and the cops end up in one final blood-soaked showdown on the beach.
It’s damn near impossible to succinctly describe the narrative of this film without using the term “controlled chaos”. In a very brief 79 minutes this film manages to utterly annihilate a veritable cornucopia of characters. Less than 20 minutes in the film is full-steam ahead on the bloodshed and it never lets up. It’s moving at a break-neck pace toward the horrific climax. What’s amazing is that like the book, the film is going places that you would never want it too. And it’s going there with gallons of grue and glee!
Offspring is more than just another killer kid movie. Children of the Corn or The Orphan have nothing on a film like this. These kids are five, seven, eight years old, eating people alive, stealing babies, hacking off limbs and cooking them over open flames. They get shot in the head by police officers with no regard to their ages. To top off all the violence the children receive, the film also offers assorted severe misogynistic scenes of rape and abuse carried out but the adult protagonists and antagonists as well.
Offspring is a brutal production and one that wallows in the bloody mire of its excesses. It’s not strictly reality; it’s every one of the worst aspects of the human race all on display at once. No one sees redemption. Even the most innocent character in the film is forced to destroy that innocence to save another. This is a bleak movie, based on bleak source material from a man who has cornered the market on the destruction of hope. Anyone who has read or seen the film adaptation of Ketchum’s masterwork The Girl Next Door can attest to that.
So much of the film is a mess that it’s hard to point out the darkness from the light. This is a low budget production, and as such, it suffers from some seriously bad lighting, camera work that periodically goes out of focus, and a final set piece (the cave) that really pushes your suspension of disbelief. And it’s all flying at your face with such fervor that you couldn’t clock character development with a radar detector. It’s like Jeffrey Dahmer’s Cliff’s notes version of Ketchum’s book. It might be a train-wreck of a film but its one bloody, bodies-strewn-across-the-tracks-train-wreck that you’ll have a hard time turning away from.
So, if you’re looking for a feel good night at the movies, or you think all cannibal flicks are Hills Have Eyes tales, then you should run away from Offspring as fast as your feet can take you. However, if you want to look past all the technical flaws for a balls-to-the-wall bloodbath then you’ll never be sicker than to spend a night with the fucked up family at the center of this film. Most of you probably fall in the middle between both worlds. To you, I can only say be warned. Once you step into the dark mind of Jack Ketchum you might never be the same.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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