Movies
‘Lizzie Lazarus’ Plays With the Dead Tomorrow on SCREAMBOX! [Trailer]
If there’s one thing that horror teaches over and over again, it’s not to mess with the dead. The characters in indie gem Lizzie Lazarus, acquired by Bloody Disgusting, are poised to learn that the hard way.
Channeling Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, writer/director Aviv Rubinstien’s twisted psychological horror film builds to a shocker of a finale everyone will be talking about when it arrives tomorrow on both Digital HD and SCREAMBOX!
In the film, featuring stand-out performances from Omar Maskati and Lianne O’Shea…
“Summer Solstice, 1990, two strangers carry a corpse through the woods looking for a mythical zone they believe will bring the dead body back to life. But what secrets will come back with it?”
Filmmaker Aviv Rubinstien said in a statement, “This film was a labor of love born out of getting a little ‘cabin fever’ in covid and reevaluating all of my life decisions. What Lianne (O’Shea, who plays Bethany) and I developed was a story about grief, loss, and guilt, cults and witches, and the question of how far you’d go to bring someone you loved back from the dead.
“We set it in 1990, not just because that was the year of a real occult disappearance on the summer solstice, but we wanted to pay homage to 90s independent films that take place all in one night, like Before Sunrise, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and Gerry (which is 2002 but you get the picture!) with a Wicker Man twist.
“The film was self-funded, and I got the opportunity to collaborate with some of my best friends (and my now wife), who all busted their asses for this film. And we made a great new friend in Omar Maskati, who plays Eli. We shot it over the course of ten overnights, and everyone was super game, living together in Airbnbs in Reno, NV. The whole thing felt like summer camp, and it was an experience I’ll never forget.”
Lizzie Lazarus joins SCREAMBOX’s extensive library of unique horror content, including Terrifier 2, Street Trash, RoboDoc: The Creation of RoboCop, Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, Frogman, Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story, The Outwaters, Living with Chucky, Creepypasta, Tales from the Void, and Pennywise: The Story of IT.
Start screaming now with SCREAMBOX on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Prime Video, Roku, Fire TV, YouTube TV, Samsung, Comcast, Cox, and Screambox.com.
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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