Movies
[Sundance ’15 Review] ‘The Hallow’ Is a Relentless Creature Feature!
Reviewed by Fred Topel
At the intro to his midnight premiere of The Hallow, director Corin Hardy called it a grounded, dark fairy tale. It is that but it’s so much more too. It’s also a creature feature, a siege movie, possession and body horror. It serves all five and now makes me really happy Hardy is doing The Crow.
Adam is working for a logging company in a small town where the locals believe the forest belongs to some creatures. Now, even if they were just hostile locals, that’s scary enough. I would quit. The logging business can’t be lucrative enough to endure scary locals threatening my family. But of course, having watched movies before we know the townie freaks are actually right.
The Hallow is relentless when the creatures come after Adam, his wife and his baby. They just keep coming and break through every barricade, poke through every keyhole. Big loud jump scares are backed up by first rate creature design and staging of the attacks. When Adam is working on the power generator while the his wife is guarding the baby, she’s f***ed. Those things are coming at her.
That’s the siege and the creatures, but they can also possess Adam so that’s another threat on top of the above. It mutates his body so there’s your Cronenberg. There’s some good old black goo oozing around too. The fairy tale is in the mythology, which is explored in the third act.
All of the above is just a list of things The Hallow did right. Combining all those elements and keeping it intense, all with characters who have been established as passionate and loving, makes us invested in the ride Hardy is taking us on. After he’s done with The Crow I would be happy to revisit The Hallow again, but of course I would. I’m Franchise Fred and I think there should always be sequels to everything, indefinitely, no exceptions. Bring on Return to The Hallow, Bride of The Hallow and, of course, The Hallow in Space.
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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