Reviews
‘On Gallows Hill’ Review – Indie Horror Film Tweaks The Vampire Rules [TADFF]
It’s hard to come up with a new take on the vampire film. So much of the lore has been established, it’s easy to fall back on the common conventions of the subgenre.
Writer/director Edward Shimborske doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but he does have enough tweaks to make On Gallows Hill (2025) feel fresh. The film opens with a scroll about a particularly dangerous part of NY with a high body count before focusing on Matthew Bishop (Rohan Maletira), a College student with an active social life and a love of baseball.
One night at the bar, Matthew has an unusual encounter with the bouncer, Stuart (Tim Pollack). After getting kicked out of the bar for instigating a drunken fight, Matthew is attacked on his way home. By morning, he’s a full-blown vampire, complete with light sensitivity and an inability to eat human foods.
Cue the credits.
One of Shimborske’s twists is that vampires can’t simply consume human blood: they have to drink the blood type from when they were human. For Matthew, this proves to be a big challenge because he’s O-, but also…how the hell is he meant to find this information out? (An amusing montage shows him asking girls their blood type at a bar, and it goes about exactly as well as you’d expect.)
Enter Aussie vamp Joseph Singer (Sam Smiley), who mocks Matt but also shows him the ropes. Turns out there’s a club called The Inner Circle that caters to vamps. It’s lorded over by The Prince/Ben (Noah Jacobs) and offers clients both ambiance as well as blood on tap.
Ben takes pity on Matthew for uncertain reasons (thanks in part to his Victorian styling). Jacobs plays the head vampire as something of a dandy (unsurprisingly for a vampire film, it’s not hard to get a queer read from both Ben and Joseph).
The Prince offers Matthew a deal: regular access to blood in exchange for work. Matthew is put to work overnight, bleeding bodies alongside Mikhaila (Isabella Vasari), a disaffected-verging-on-cruel vampire with no sympathy for the humans who are imprisoned solely to be drained and dumped.
Naturally, Matt doesn’t exactly gel with this philosophy, but Shimborske IV also ups the ante beyond the usual reticence to drink blood. In a novel twist, vampires must consume blood every ten days or they start to become desiccated husks who sink into living comas. The film helpfully reminds us of this fact with on-screen titles in bloody red, though the ticking clock is narratively less important than one would expect when all is said and done.
The tortured vampire is one of the most common tropes in vampire media (think Louis in Interview with the Vampire), and Matthew is – sadly – no different. Despite Maletira’s solid lead performance, Matthew’s struggle to accept his new vampire status, as well as his romantic longing for nursing assistant Annie Apples (Jill Pierangeli), proves to be extremely conventional. Even the revelation that Annie has the same blood type as Matthew (which, hmmm) doesn’t dial up the tension or intrigue, despite the two actors’ chemistry and their characters’ penchant for late-night wordplay.
Adding to the film’s unevenness is the presence of Western-coded vampire hunter Mr James Skinner (Billy Whitehorse), a character who spends the film tracking Matthew’s whereabouts. There’s more to the character than initially meets the eye (he shares a secret connection to other characters that comes out in the last act), but the reveal is executed in a muddled and abrupt fashion that lessens its impact. Skinner, in particular, feels like one element too many, and the film grinds to a halt whenever he appears.
The result is a climax that feels both overstuffed and overcomplicated; these scenes feel less like an ending than a set-up for a sequel or spin-off.
Despite the fumbles, there are several fun quirks, including the film’s memorable black, white, and red animated opening credit sequence (made by Jasper Morris, Anna Anderson, Jake Johr, and Shimborske himself) depicting Matthew’s nightmarish turn to vampire. There are also several stop-motion bat scenes, such as Matthew-as-bat stealing an IV bag of blood and bats duking it out for the betting pleasure of club patrons. This memorable addition is extremely amusing and charmingly executed courtesy of stop motion animator Richard Svensson.
Ultimately, On Gallows Hill has enough unique tweaks on the familiar vampire formula to merit checking out. While the sad vampire and doomed love affair tropes feel played out and the climax doesn’t stick the landing, Maletira is solid, Smiley and Jacobs sink their teeth into their supporting roles, and the animated & stop-motion elements are unique and extremely welcome.
On Gallows Hill had its Canadian premiere at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. Release info TBD.
Movies
‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026]
A haunted house story is tense, terrifying storytelling when it’s properly executed. There’s been a growing tendency in horror to blend together harrowing haunted house stories with traumatic homecomings. A family member’s illness or death triggers a return to something dark that was intentionally left behind. Recluse hits all the tropes that one expects to find in this type of horror film, yet it manages to push this story in a daring, disturbing new direction that uses sound as a superpower.
It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.
Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things.
These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.
A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.
A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.
”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.
Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.
Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.
The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable.
Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.
It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.
Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.
Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.
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