Movies
[Review] Halloween Horror ‘Hellions’ Is Unsettling, Not Terrifying
Reviewed out of Sundance by Fred Topel
Last year, Aaron Paul had a movie at Sundance called Hellion. I never saw it, but I assume Hellions is the sequel because that’s the rules. When you pluralize the title, it’s the sequel in which there are even more Hellions than the first film!
Dora (Chloe Rose) is home alone on Halloween. When three kids show up at her door in masks, she thinks they are regular trick or treaters. Despite Dora giving them candy, they come back to keep terrorizing her. At first it’s normal stuff like egging and pumpkin smashing, but it evolves into a much stranger assault from demons who clearly have supernatural powers.
First of all, the three masks look way better than anything from Halloween: Season of the Witch, so in your face, 1982’s Halloween III. They are clearly the work of prosthetic craftsman. If they were available for purchase in stores, they could cost more than kids or their parents could afford, so that might be the first indicator that these are not regular kids.
Hellions gradually transitions into nightmare logic, where the rules of time and space don’t apply. The color shifts to sepia, we see kaleidoscope imagery, and Dora ends up in a completely strange world for the climax. Editing even changes the logic of continuity. The lack of logic is always the scariest part of nightmares anyway, that you can’t even count on basic physics to apply, so it’s a good approach to the film’s horror.
That makes Hellions certainly unsettling, if not terrifying. If Halloween III were more like Hellions it could’ve worked. It delivers on the promise of kids terrorizing adults. Dora is an older teenager, but the Officer Corman (Robert Patrick) comes to her aid and he’s not much help against them either.
Director Bruce McDonald elevates his craft exponentially. Where Pontypool dealt with an auditory fear, Hellions allows him to manipulate all of our senses. It is a promising debut from first time feature writer Pascal Trottier, taking logic out of the equation. While maybe not as memorable as some of the other Sundance creature features, Hellions will still give you a good scare when you’re able to see it.
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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