Blood Shine is a cult movie, and I mean that in the best way. Not “cult” as in destined-for-a-midnight-slot-someday, but cult as in the actual subject matter: a zealot, a set of rituals, a believer who wants company. I’m a sucker for this stuff. Give me a woman in the woods who thinks she’s found God and I will follow her anywhere, and Clara (played by co-director Emily Bennett, who also co-wrote and co-directed the thing) is exactly that kind of guide.
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Here’s the conceit. Brighton West (David Call) is a horror filmmaker retreating upstate to finish a screenplay, which already tells you Bennett and her husband/co-director Justin Brooks are willing to point the camera at their own profession. That’s usually where a movie like this goes wrong. Filmmakers making movies about filmmakers tend to disappear up their own aspect ratio. Blood Shine doesn’t. The meta commentary is there, it’s just light on its feet, more of a wink than a thesis statement. There’s a version of this film that stops every twenty minutes to tell you something Important About Art. This isn’t that version, and I was grateful for it. Even the monster Brighton is writing into his own screenplay, glimpsed only in pieces, looks genuinely great. Somebody in the practical effects department was not phoning it in for a movie within a movie.
Clara pulls Brighton into her rituals, and the film is smart enough to keep the specifics of her belief system just out of reach. You get pieces. You get symbols. You don’t get a tidy mythology dump, and the ambiguity is doing real work here rather than just stalling for time. I stayed hooked because I never fully had my footing, which is the correct way to make a movie about faith curdling into something else.
And once it curdles, it curdles hard. There’s a lot of blood in this thing, a lot of it, and the film earns most of it. The torture stretch in the back half is rough. I don’t say that as a knock. It’s supposed to be rough, and it works precisely because it doesn’t let you off easy, but be warned going in that this isn’t a movie you casually put on with dinner.
Also, is that my guy Larry Fessenden? It is. Of course it is. The man has never met a strange little horror movie he didn’t want to be part of, and Blood Shine is stranger and littler than most, which means he fits right in. Not to belabor the point but Fessenden is a real modern gem. His relentless support of small budget has given so many first time directors their shot at success. Not the least of which is one of my favorite slashers of all time in Jenn Wexler’s The Ranger. If you think Roger Corman is an intergral part of modern low budget horror (you would be absolutely correct) you MUST check out other Fessenden projects.
Then there’s the ending, which is where the movie really shows its hand. The whole runtime is spent tightening a screw, and the last stretch is where it finally snaps, into something bizarre and genuinely creepy in a way I’m still turning over. If the ending of Kill List and the ending of Neon Demon had a baby, it might look something like this. That’s not a comparison I make lightly, and it’s not one Blood Shine entirely earns beat for beat, but the swing is real and the nerve behind it is rare.
This is a small, confident, occasionally punishing movie about what happens when people start following people or belief systems without asking questions. A movie for the present day for sure and it is worth seeking out.
Blood Shine Directed by Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks. Written by Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks. Starring Emily Bennett, David Call, Brendan Sexton III, Larry Fessenden, and Toby Poser. Distributed by Dark Sky Films is in select theaters and on VOD/Digital August 21st.
Tyler has been the editor in chief of Signal Horizon since its conception. He is also the Director of Monsters 101 at Truman State University a class that pairs horror movie criticism with survival skills to help middle and high school students learn critical thinking. When he is not watching, teaching or thinking about horror he is the Director of Debate and Forensics at a high school in Kansas City, Missouri.