BRANDON, MB – Scary movie enthusiasts are stunned after discovering that a recent popular horror film is in no way an allegory for grief, PTSD, or intergenerational trauma.
The 2025 film, Nightmare Hollow, depicts a young family who purchase a new house only to learn it is haunted by the ghosts of a cabal of cannibalistic serial killers. Local horror movie enthusiast Jamie Campbell, 25, was the first to make the shocking discovery about the film’s utter lack of subtextual links to emotional suffering.
“Every October I watch 31 horror movies, and I’d heard great things about Nightmare Hollow,” explains Campbell. “But halfway through the movie I started to realize that the ghosts in this movie were not any kind of heavy-handed metaphor for domestic abuse or even alcoholism – they were just literal evil spirits.”
“Is that kind of horror movie even legal in 2025,” questions Campbell, before re-watching a scene where a cannibal phantom stabs a victim with a long knife which is somehow not meant to represent patriarchal oppression.
Unlike recent horror classics like Get Out, Hereditary, Weapons, 28 Years Later, The Invisible Man, The Babadook, The Substance, and countless others, the murderous spectres of Nightmare Hollow somehow do not double as stand-ins for childbirth, bullying, racism, state-sponsored terrorism, or repressed memories of clergy violence.
“It was even made by A24. I didn’t think they would ever greenlight a trauma-less feature,” notes a baffled Campbell.
Turning online, other fans in the horror community are similarly perplexed at Nightmare Hollow’s complete lack of bluntly on-the-nose symbolism for emotional distress.
“There was that scene with a witch, but she wasn’t emblematic of parental neglect at all. What a ripoff,” says the moderator of Reddit’s /r/horror page.
“I thought maybe this was a forgotten horror movie from the 1980s but there weren’t quite enough naked boobs for that, plus then the family used DoorDash,” notes Letterboxed user WesCraving.
Reached for comment, Jared Berlantos, the writer and director of Nightmare Hollow, is open about his film’s utter lack of deeper themes intended to court descriptions as being “elevated horror”.
“It was hard enough getting a movie funded, produced, and edited,” explains an exhausted Berlantos. “I guess I just ended up writing something where the ghosts are actual ghosts, and characters get scared for 90 minutes. Maybe that’s not enough these days, but I don’t know what else to tell you.”
Berlantos adds, “I’ve always just wanted my work to speak for itself, especially since my father ended up killing and eating my younger brother when I was a small child.”
“Maybe one day I’ll make a film to process all that, but for now Nightmare Hollow will have to do.”
