With the 25th annual Screamfest rampaging through Los Angeles this week, DoomRocket is here to showcase the horror festival's creepier, freakier selections. In review: Ehrland Hollingsworth’s Dooba Dooba, Dawid Torrone’s Dead By Dawn, Martijn Smits’ Meat Kills, and Kika Magalhães' short, Devil's Prism.
DOOBA DOOBA (USA; LA Premiere)
Easily one of the most inventive entries at this year’s Screamfest, Ehrland Hollingsworth’s sly nice-visit nightmare Dooba Dooba upends the conventions of the found-footage subgenre and toys around with the new and unnerving possibilities. Shot entirely with security cameras, the film works an ambitious domestic surveillance conceit into the post-creepypasta/analog-horror textures of YouTube ephemera, enough that comparisons to Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink will be inevitable and not entirely undeserved. But Hollingsworth isn’t just chasing trends here; if anything, he’s carved out a niche all his own. Should Ball’s cult movie nudge more people to see this, well, so much the better.
Hollingsworth’s tinkering does make it difficult to pinpoint exactly what format he truly wants to work with; even if it’s comforting to label Dooba Dooba “found-footage,” it doesn’t quite capture a film that interrupts its eerie goings-on with fourth-wall-breaking PowerPoint-style interludes featuring American presidents, or one that declares rather ominously that it is “A film by Monroe Jefferson.” Monroe (Betsy Sligh) certainly seems to command the narrative on either side of the camera; a compelling development for the viewer but bad news for her unwitting babysitter, Amna (Amna Vegha), who shows up for an overnight shift and quickly catches some iffy vibes radiating from the Jefferson household (particularly from Monroe’s parents, played by Winston Haynes and Erin O’Meara). The deeper she drifts into Munroe’s world, the screwier Dooba Dooba becomes.
The primary theme is anxiety, which Hollingsworth employs well. Monroe reacts to Amna’s presence with a frantic volatility that keeps the night’s events off kilter. We learn that she once witnessed the murder of her brother, but that doesn’t necessarily explain her inability to be alone or unwatched by the cameras around her house. As to that, the cameras that show us every angle of the house are there to make sure Monroe is safe — but when she secretly flips a hidden one pointed at Amna to focus on her, it’s Hollingsworth winking at us that Monroe’s safety isn’t what her babysitter should be worried about. There are other, stranger surprises in the film I won’t spoil here. It’s enough to say that the untied knots left after the credits roll lend Dooba Dooba a buzzing unease that has stuck in my mind. Uncanny, playful, and entirely its own, it’s a vision you can’t quite shake.
7.5 / 10
Dooba Dooba premieres at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatre on October 13. For more info, click this.
Written and directed by Ehrland Hollingsworth.
Starring Betsy Sligh, Amna Vegha, Erin O’Meara, Winston Haynes, and Billy Hulsey.
76 mins. / Unrated. Security footage captures a young person doing disturbing things.
DEAD BY DAWN (Poland; North American Premiere)
First-time director Dawid Torrone’s Dead By Dawn rises just above other boilerplate slashers through sheer confidence in the material. That confidence is overblown, but credit where it’s due. The setup: obnoxious, fame-adjacent actors are summoned to an isolated theater owned by a mysterious magnate to put on an exclusive play. Their director, the vape-pluming artiste Olgierd, drives them straight into rehearsals, while a black-gloved killer stalks them from the shadows. From the jump, Torrone leans hard on gel lighting and canted angles, evoking giallo — Argento, specifically — pulling one monstrous gimmick straight out of Opera and reminding us, perhaps accidentally, that this is a horror movie with its training wheels still attached.
If little else, I admired the economy. Torrone knows he needs only a creepy backdrop, a cast of pretty faces, a maniac with a gimmick, and a stomach for splatter. He boasts all these things. But his threadbare structure gives the film a generic quality that makes it forgettable. The story is thin gruel. The characters are all suitably annoying, given the premise — between rehearsals, they whine about Marvel- and Batman-dominated pop culture (carbon dating this a bit) — but interchangeable in function. (Save for Sylwia Boron, who may have landed her final girl status due to her resemblance to Suspiria’s Jessica Harper.) Its chapter structure gimmick has no business existing, other than as a sign to hit pause and refill my coffee. Faint gestures at sinister religious conspiracy eventually build to something, but in a way you’ve seen play out a hundred times before.
It’s all pretty clumsy. The SFX are inconsistent: gross, evocative squish sounds one minute (good), then sudden silence for convenience’s sake (bad). Two examples: a chainsaw kill happens out of nowhere, and a victim-to-be wriggles out of the killer’s view from a dead end without making a peep. Other things kept taking me out. Lav microphones stick out on the actors at certain points. I think I caught a whiff of AI during a TV broadcast. The maniac features a multi-eyed mask with a black wig that’s too goofy to scare, even if their cleaver swings with conviction. The biggest problem is that Torrone attempts too much at once. Dead By Dawn has slasher gusto and an impressive body count. But the execution is lacking. At least we can’t say the same for its killer.
4.5 / 10
Dead By Dawn premieres at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatre on October 8. For more info, click this.
Written and directed by Dawid Torrone.
Starring Sylwia Boron, Monika Frajczyk, Adam Machalica, Lukasz Szczepanowski, Piotr Nerlewski, Bartlomiej Topa, and Paulina Zwierz.
87 mins. / Unrated. Expect dismemberments and plenty of arterial spray.
MEAT KILLS [VLEESDAG] (The Netherlands; West Coast Premiere)
And now, from The Netherlands, comes Martijn Smits’ Meat Kills, a splashy throwback that nods devotedly to New French Extremity, particularly Alexandre Aja’s nervy, blood-soaked High Tension. It follows Mirthe (Caro Derkx), the new member of an animal rights extremist group that targets a pig farm owned by Jonas (Bart Oomen), a widower who, with his two sons, runs the family business as he cares for his ailing young daughter (Juliëtte van de Weerdt). As us-versus-them narratives go, Meat Kills isn’t bashful about casting both sides in sin or drenching them in viscera — though one side definitely takes the full brunt of both by the end. Here’s a hint: it ain't the folks with the sob story.
Mirthe’s inaugural mission begins innocuously enough. The "hardcore" leader, Nasha (Emma Josten), fits the crew with oinker masks, slips onto the property, and tags the walls with their “meat is murder” sloganeering. Things take an abrupt turn once Jonas’s eldest son (Derron Lurvink) catches them in the act: Nasha pulls out a wicked machete, and soon Mirthe finds herself caught in the midst of a rapidly unraveling home invasion that involves her secret past with Jonas’s younger son (Sweder de Sitter). Quite inevitably, blood is spilled. The little girl is made to fear for her stuffed piggies. Then, Jonas comes home.
It’s fun how Smits makes a puzzle of this familiar splatter setup. The important pieces scatter, then later assemble into place — and not too neatly, thank goodness. The real tension comes from how slippery allegiances in the story prove to be; for some viewers, choosing a side between the hip, diverse activists and the blue-collar workers they’ve targeted, unless you go into this film already feeling a certain kind of way about animal rights. Smits constructs a lively, blood-soaked abattoir around this debate, and Johan Paul de Vrijer’s screenplay handles the film's both-sides-isms smugly, a provocative rage-bait tactic that stirs tension effectively. Meat Kills finds common ground between the wrong and the worse, a place where meat is meat — it cuts, rips, tenderizes, boils, and bleeds.
7 / 10
Meat Kills premieres at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatre on October 14. It screens with William Lott's short, Nails. For more info, click this.
Directed by Martijn Smits.
Written by Johan Paul de Vrijer.
Starring Caro Derkx, Emma Josten, Sem Ben Yakar, Sweder de Sitter, Tommy Zonneveld, Chardonnay Rillen, Derron Lurvink, Juliëtte van de Weerdt and Bart Oomen.
85 mins. / Unrated. A human torso gets the slaughterhouse treatment, among other atrocities.
DEVIL'S PRISM (USA; Los Angeles County Premiere)
A break-in/revenge situation featuring the three worst burglars I've seen in a hot minute that gets straight to the point and initially uses its POV camera work to emphasize the sinking feeling that something in the dark is suddenly breathing down your neck. Starts rough and doesn't leverage its premise or gimmick to create anything shocking or memorable, but the deep-whisper voice effects that invade the mind of one doomed burglar (short director and co-writer Kika Magalhães) are, at least at first, quite effective. However, once that prism is in play, the eponymous devil gets chatty; like Freddy Krueger might tell you, monster banter isn't very scary. Has the good fortune of featuring Emma Raimi, who looks like she had fun during filming. A first-person doom-piece that could have used more time in the oven.
3.5 / 10
Devil's Prism premieres at the TCL Chinese 6 Theatre on October 11 as part of the Screamfest Shorts Block. For more info, click this.
Directed by Kika Magalhães.
Written by Kika Magalhães and Chris Marrone.
Starring Jasmine Akakpo, Emma Raimi, and Kika Magalhães.
11 mins / Unrated. The POV creature takes some video game hit damage.
All films were screened remotely as part of our coverage of Screamfest 2025.
Thanks so much for this, for those of us in LA who are unable to attend. FOMO no mo.