There’s a unique frustration in watching your friends thrill over a movie you can’t see yet. Hellcat hit me with such vexation again and again, as rave reviews rolled in from Fantasia International Film Festival, FrightFest, and Beyond Fest.
Over and over, critics danced around the secret at the heart of the film, but none would reveal it. Which was infuriating, as I yearned to know. Spoilers be damned!
Now, having seen Hellcat, I understand not only the secret it keeps but also why my friends and colleagues kept mum. In this case, it’s fun not knowing. So, please forgive me as I, too, avoid the major spoiler. But yeah, there’ll be some hints along the way that true horror hounds can discern.
Hellcat begins as an abduction thriller.
Credit: Shudder
Written and directed by Brock Bodell, Hellcat opens with a scene that feels like something out of the true crime series Your Worst Nightmare. A young woman wakes up in the back of a camper trailer. She doesn’t know where she is or how she got there, but she can tell this camper is moving. Where? Why? And who put her here?
Dakota Gorman stars as this woman, Lena, whose survival instincts kick in quickly and ferociously. Wordlessly, she makes her way up and down the camper, trying to assess how to get out and, failing that, what the hell is going on. Before long, she hears a voice. Eerily, it comes over the intercom embedded the taxidermied head of a coyote.
This is Clive (Todd Terry). His voice is Southern, firm, and infuriatingly patronizing as he tells Lena he captured her to protect her, because she is infected. By what? He won’t say. But he coaches her to stay calm, lest she make matters worse.
In a clever move, Bodell won’t cut to Clive right away. For much of the film, he is just a disembodied voice, tormenting Lena with a willful lack of information. Because cinematographer Andrew Duensing won’t move the camera beyond what Lena can see, we, the audience, are trapped with her inside both the camper and her anxiety. Even when a flashback occurs — be it an ill-fated camping trip or a girls’ night out gone bad — it unfolds within the camper. Branches sprout from the walls as a hunter pierces through their leaves with his rifle. Multicolored lights flash across the sequined dress of a scornful friend doling out unsolicited advice, as she stands outside the camper’s toilet stall.
These details, along with Gorman’s intense and gnarly performance, keep us feeling caged like a wild animal alongside Lena. And solving the mystery seems our only way out!
Hellcat takes a ghost-story twist, but it’s not a ghost story.
Credit: Shudder
No, really. Unlike Mother Mary, which insists it isn’t a ghost story (because it totally is), Hellcat truly isn’t one. In writing his script, Bodell builds his story around a perspective shaped by fear, but one that is totally understandable. Waking up in a cozy cage, Lena rightfully assumes the worst about her captor. But as the film has teased, he knows more than she does, and truly means her no harm. That doesn’t mean he’s not doing any.
In ghost stories, this is a recurring tale. The ghost’s creepy appearance strikes fear in the human heart. But as The Sixth Sense, Crimson Peak, Presence, and a slew of other sensational ghost stories show, the spirit might be the monster, but it’s not the villain. Hellcat offers a similar twist, with a dizzying mash-up of genre elements.
Props to Gorman and Terry, who smoothly navigate this intriguing dynamic between captor and captive as it mutates into something far more complex. As their long drive through a seemingly endless, moonlit night goes on, they begin to form a reluctant bond. And with that, Clive will finally show his face, adding a new and strange wrinkle to this scenario.
Credit: Shudder
Horror fans will likely pick up what Clive’s sniffing around by the time Lena finds a fridge stocked with sedatives and bloody meat. But even this won’t give away the surprises that dogpile in the final act.
Like a lot of Shudder titles, Hellcat is a low-budget movie. But this financial constraint pushed Bodell and his collaborators to imagine what could be done cheaply and cinematically. The result is a movie that is claustrophobic, thought-provoking, surprising, and wicked fun. By the time Lena escapes the camper, Bodell has used the paths of several different horror subgenres to create a final chapter uniquely his own. After much blood, sweat, and tears — both on and offscreen — Hellcat offers a climax that is enthralling, raw, and richly humane.
