Now that I live in Massachusetts, the Salem Horror Fest has become my new go-to horror film festival. Work meant that I had to miss the opening night festivities on Thursday, but I was damn sure able to make it to Friday night and check out a pair of indie horror flicks. While the first one was a disappointment, the second one blew my damn socks off.
To start...
The Rebrand (2025)
Not rated
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Score: 2 out of 5
The Rebrand is a found-footage horror-comedy satire of influencer culture that would have worked better as a straight comedy than a horror film, as it's clear that that's where the talents of Kaye Adelaide, the film's director and (with its star Nancy Webb) co-writer, lay. A film about an eight-months-pregnant videographer named Nicole who travels to the lesbian influencer couple Thistle and Blair to film their "comeback" documentary after they got canceled following Thistle spewing a transphobic rant on a livestream, only to find herself in a house of horrors, I was most engaged when the film was focused on sending up the vanity and artificiality of influencer culture, only for it to lose me when it tried to get serious and turn into both a horror movie and an exploration of what is clearly an abusive relationship. The two sides together made it feel like a film that had no idea what it wanted to be, and while it was well-made on a technical level and had moments that either worked well on their own or could've been the seeds for something good, as a whole movie it just fell apart.
Above all else, there is one big central problem that holds this movie back: Nicole is a fucking dumbass. When she arrives at Thistle and Blair's house, the very first thing she sees is Thistle smacking a sack with a hammer and then dumping it off her porch, and it's not long after when we find that Blair's cat was beaten to death. What's more, the entire house is rigged with cameras, including in Nicole's guest bedroom and even in the bathroom, and she frequently catches Thistle and Blair getting into heated arguments that blow up the image as a perfect couple that they want to sell to their fans. It is telegraphed extremely early on that Thistle is bad news, such that anybody with a working brain should figure out immediately that something bad is going to happen to them if they accept Thistle's offer to stay the night. And yet, not once does Nicole voice any thoughts about what's plainly obvious to anybody watching this. Even as the weird shit starts escalating, such as sugar being poured into the gas tank of Nicole's car (which Thistle awkwardly tries to claim was their homophobic neighbors being jerks -- so, uh, why is Thistle and Blair's car alright?), the road being allegedly closed off by flooding with the only evidence being a "trust me, sis" from Thistle, and Thistle's own increasingly unhinged behavior, it takes far, far too long for Nicole to realize the shit she's in.
Instead, Nicole is a completely passive figure, little more than a camera operator even though she's the ostensible protagonist. Even during the big blowup where Blair figures out what Thistle did to her cat, Nicole never has anything to say about it, not even a "hey, Thistle, I thought I saw you smacking a sack with a hammer when I got here." Blair, too, has very little character beyond just being Thistle's partner, the film unable to decide until the third act just how involved she is in Thistle's scheme. On one hand, it's clear that their relationship is a domineering and abusive one in which Thistle controls Blair and pushes her around, but on the other hand, there are hints throughout that Blair may be more than just an unwilling and reluctant partner to Thistle, the film trying to build a sense of ambiguity around her that it never follows through on. A more engaging film would've been one in which Nicole realized immediately that she can't trust Thistle, and tries to escape sooner only to find that Thistle has sabotaged such, all while trying to find a place where she can voice her thoughts without Thistle finding out about it. At the very least, it would have had me questioning her intelligence a bit less by showing her trying and failing to escape.
What saved this movie was its comedic side. The film opens with a framing device revealing that the footage Nicole filmed is being screened by an LGBTQ-themed true crime web series hosted by a flamboyant trans woman named Tranna Wintour (a real-life figure playing herself), and the meat of the film consists of plentiful jabs about how influencers market a fake version of themselves for the cameras all while professing "realness." Nancy Webb absolutely dominates the film as Thistle, the twisted caricature of an influencer whose cancellation and attempted "rebrand" into a mommy vlogger now that she's just gotten pregnant (or so she says) is presented as something grotesque, the kind of person who, sadly, is all too common in the world of online fame. When on camera, her interactions with everybody around her, including the people she presumes are watching, are obviously scripted to the point that the film shows us the literal scripts that she and Blair are reading from. Other films, including other horror-comedies, have tread similar ground, but Webb's performance, over-the-top as it is, always kept me from getting bored. Again, to go back to what I was saying before, I'd have dropped the pretense much earlier in the film and been upfront about Thistle's villainy, because Webb was clearly having so much fun playing a psycho influencer. What's more, while Nicole and Blair were both sorely underwritten characters, I did like the actors playing them, Naomi Silver-Vézina and Andi E. McQueen, who did what they could with their characters. Silver-Vézina got to show off her skills with a harp in one great scene, and while the writing did Blair no favors, McQueen always seemed to have a very clear idea of who she was, somebody who's clearly suffering under Thistle's thumb but is too afraid to challenge her. Again: having Nicole figure out early what's going on would've also allowed for a great arc for Blair, as Nicole helps her find the courage to stand up to her lover's abuse.
The Bottom Line
There were some good ideas here that could've been brought out by a better script, but unfortunately, its flat and frankly stupid protagonist let it down in fatal fashion. I'd skip it.
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Second film of the night, fortunately, was a hell of a lot more entertaining.
Pater Noster and the Mission of Light (2024)
Not rated
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Score: 4 out of 5
Now this is what I'm talking about. Pater Noster and the Mission of Light is an homage to, and satire of, the golden age of psychedelic rock, hippie culture, and record store culture that was apparently filmed on a budget that cost as much as a used car (as the closing credits state), yet you'd never be able to tell watching it. It was a very fun and propulsive folk horror bloodbath made with a clear affection for its subject matter, specifically writer/director Christopher Beckel's love of music and horror movies, and while the satire of consumerism that Beckel was discussing in the Q&A session after the movie wasn't something that really came through for me, I certainly did get the jabs at the values of the Baby Boomers peppered throughout the film. More importantly, it's clear that he knew what he was doing behind the camera as well and managed to translate that love into a good movie, a film that's often amusing in its more comedic touches but which knows how to bring the pain when it counts, all of it anchored by a great cast and a visual style that combines homages to the aesthetics of '70s horror movies with more modern touches that make this more than just a simple throwback. Right now, I'm ready to call this my favorite film of this year's Salem Horror Fest, and I suspect it still will be by the end of it.
Our heroine Max is a young clerk at a record store and an enthusiastic collector of old vinyl records who, one day, encounters an extremely rare and valuable record recorded by a hippie band in the early '70s called Pater Noster and the Mission of Light. When the guy who sells it to her lets her know where she can find more, she enthusiastically runs out and grabs them, and winds up getting a call later that night from somebody associated with the hippie commune that produced the records. Together with her co-workers Sam, Abby, and Gretchen and a local metal drummer named Jay Sin who also owns one of the band's records, Max is picked up by the cult and brought to their commune, where they have lived largely cut off from the outside world after an... unfortunate incident about fifty years ago.
There are no points for guessing that the Mission of Light is evil and is going to do horrible things to our protagonists. We're told early on, via a cameo appearance from Tim Cappello as a radio host laying out their backstory, that this group, which was involved in various "fringe science" experiments on top of recording music, retreated into isolation in the mid-'70s after a murder case and that some of their music and writings are cursed and can drive people to madness. It doesn't take long for things to take a turn for the sacrificial once Max and her friends reach the commune, as the cult is harvesting orgone energy (a real-life pseudoscientific concept that's floated around in occult and countercultural circles for nearly a hundred years) from one of the most potent sources there is: human fear, meaning that their suffering is drawn out as the cult drugs and tortures them. We get brutal stabbings, a castration, a bear trap, somebody getting torn apart Day of the Dead-style, and more, all brought to life with shockingly high-quality gore effects for such a low-budget film. While many sequences are shot like a normal, modern-day horror movie, once the action starts getting spooky we start getting the color, psychedelia, and other audio and visual cues straight out of the trippier films of the '70s, like the influence of the decade from which the Mission of Light came is starting to creep in and warp the minds of our protagonists. Beckel was clearly influenced by stylish retro filmmakers like Dario Argento and Brian De Palma here, but at the same time, he's interested in more than just making a simple homage, and the fusion of old-school and new-school styles makes this a film that, while reverential towards classic '70s horror, is very much interested in being its own thing.
That battle between old-school and new-school likewise informs the cast, as young heroes square off against older villains who we find are using some of their weird science to keep themselves young(ish) even as they're pushing 80. The protagonists are a realistically flawed but likable bunch, having all embarked on this mission for purely mercenary reasons (they want to score some valuable records to either sell or hoard) but still having generally good hearts underneath, while the cultists are committed to maintaining their "pure, natural" lifestyle at all costs, to the point of being willing to sacrifice people from the decadent outside world to do so, and the cast all did solid work in making these feel like real people who I grew to either care about or dread. I bought the protagonists not realizing until it was too late that they were in trouble, and even then, they figure things out pretty quickly and are a generally smart bunch all things considered. Max especially made for a good final girl, the one who the cult turns out to have bigger plans for than simply sacrificing her, managing to be strong and resourceful but at the same time not above acting out of pure selfishness while her actress Adara Starr turns in a fine performance. By the end, she felt about as realistically traumatized as I imagine anyone would be if they'd gone through the things she did. The music recorded for this film, meanwhile, also did a lot to pull me into it and sell me on the hippie villains, feeling like real-deal '70s psychedelia and lending authenticity to its hippie cult. Plot-wise, things started to go sideways in the third act once the film brought in the demon baby, but even there, the film's sense of style was enough to make me embrace the growing madhouse atmosphere I was immersed in. Even some minor continuity errors I picked up on were forgivable on account of having happened during some of the film's trippier moments, flowing into the dreamlike atmosphere and giving me a sense of "wait, did I see that? What's going on here?"
The Bottom Line
Clearly informed by a love of '70s horror and music yet still standing as its own beast, Pater Noster and the Mission of Light is admittedly kinda rough in spots but otherwise looks and feels like a far more expensive film than it actually is. I really hope it gets some attention going forward, because this was a damn good one.
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