Rodents of unusual size? They do exist in the upcoming indie creature feature Big Freaking Rat, and Bloody Disgusting has been provided with the exclusive trailer debut today.
Bite into the Big Freaking Rat official trailer below and read on for more!
Experience this hairy tale of horror with a comic twist on VOD outlets April 29, 2025.
In the film from director Thomas J. Churchill, “Ranger Brody believes looking after his teenage niece and nephew will be the biggest challenge of the summer until his brand-new campground is turned into a den of terror by a massive mutant rat.
“Years of dumping toxic waste into the land have created a monstrous rodent with a taste for blood, and now it’s up to a reluctant band of warriors to exterminate the beast.”
Horror veteran Felissa Rose stars alongside Caleb Thomas, Nino Aldi, and Caroline Abbott, with the cast also including Rachel Sterling and Julie Anne Prescott.
In addition to the trailer, you’ll find images and poster art below.
Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David co-created Seinfeld and wrote the character of George Costanza after himself, but famously decided against playing him.
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Liam Neeson’s IMDb contains multitudes: middling action flicks, classics, and everything in between. Here are the three of his films that made the IMDb Top 250.
Jack Quaid’s Nathan Caine becomes an unwitting superhero of sorts in action-comedy Novocaine, from directing duo Dan Berk and Robert Olsen (Significant Other, Villains). Or perhaps more accurately, Nate Caine sustains an insane amount of gruesome bodily damage, all in the pursuit of love.
In the film penned by Lars Jacobson, “When the girl of his dreams (Prey’sAmber Midthunder) is kidnapped, everyman Nate turns his inability to feel pain into an unexpected strength in his fight to get her back.”
That inability to feel pain yields no shortage of bone-crunching, ultra-violent carnage that induces laughs and sympathy pain in equal measure. It also leaves star Jack Quaid doused in blood and viscera yet again. The Boys, Scream, and Companion actor frequently finds himself coated in the red splatter thanks to his recent genre work, so much so that it does play a factor when reading scripts now. “It is a calculation now for sure,” Quaid says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s a lot of fake blood. And I know what that means. I know the cleanup process. I’m shooting the final season of The Boys right now, and in my shower caddy is shaving cream. Not for shaving, just for taking the blood off because that’s what does it the most. Shaving cream and Head & Shoulders shampoo, for some reason, is the best to get fake blood out of it.”
It’s safe to say that the actor spent a lot of time cleaning off fake blood after shooting Novocaine; Nate’s injuries increase with alarming and steady speed throughout the action-comedy. Quaid is quick to praise his directors for their careful tracking of the elaborate physical trauma his character experiences, including a deep-fried hand. “I have to give so much credit to Dan and Bobby for that. They were constantly having discussions of like, ‘Okay, what would hurt him but not necessarily kill him immediately? What is the line of believability? I think they wrote a really good way of saving a lot of those major injuries for towards the end of the movie, where there’s not a lot Nate can do to come back from that.”
It wasn’t the visceral violence that spoke to Quaid, though, but the unique action angle and inspiration from a Blockbuster action sequel. “I just love that I read the script, and I immediately gravitated towards it because I’m such a fan of action movies and I have been for such a long time. I had a religious awakening watching John Wick 4; I remember just thinking Keanu Reeves deserves an Oscar. I believe that. His physicality is unbelievable. He’s doing it in a way that’s specific to John Wick and not any other character he’s played in his action pantheon. And he’s pulling off all these insane moves while still staying in character, and it’s just so inspiring and cool to watch.”
Of course, John Wick feels pain. That Nate can’t might’ve let Quaid explore the comedic side of Novocaine’s premise, but not without working against everything he’s been trained to do when it comes to stunts and action choreography, which is selling the impact of every punch thrown.
Quaid explains, “Actually it was scary at first, to be honest. Because it’s something that they drill into you. As soon as I was doing Hunger Games, my first major movie, I remember doing stunts for that. They really try to say, ‘Hey, sell the pain.’ Because that’s what also makes the audience believe that a hit is real when it’s fake, the reaction afterward. I realized that okay, I have to be really good at selling like my head hit when like I get punched, it needs to feel real. First of all trying to fight like the guy was a challenge at first because if I get punched in the face, my head’s going to move but I just can’t react. But then I realized it’s, without getting too hoity-toity about it, it’s kind of like what silent film stars used to do. Like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, where their whole shtick kind of was crazy things happening around them and happening to them, but with no real reaction from them.”
Whereas Quaid’s job was to tell the lack of pain, prosthetics designer Clinton Aiden Smith, from COSMESIS advanced prosthetic studio, had the task of creating realistic injuries that continue to wreak havoc on Nate’s body. Olsen told Bloody Disgusting, “Clinton was unbelievable. He was just this, he was an absolute wrecking crew, the whole team over there at Cosmesis. From the very beginning of the prep process, he walked us through it. We would have wound meetings where we would go in, and he would pitch us things, and he would show us these graphic images of real wounds that he’d be like, ‘I found this image online. You can see the woman’s arm has snapped in half.‘“
“He seemed to enjoy it a lot more than he should,“ Berk jokes. “We can imagine what a giant gash on someone’s arm looks like. We don’t need to see 12 references from crime scene photos.”
Olsen continues, “We were all just like, whoa. Looks good. You’ve got the thumbs up from us. Go ahead. So, they did this incredible thing where he built this wound story if you will, where we would walk into the room, and he would have 12 heads of perfectly 3D printed Jack Quaid heads laid along. And here’s the first stage after the first fight, here he is after the second fight, here he is after the third. We would go through with him and be like, ‘Okay, this stage is too similar to this stage, so what can we push off from that fight and put to the next one? Or what can we pull up into this fight from the next one? This one is lacking. So, you could really step back and look at the wound progression from this 10,000 feet up kind of view. That was really cool.“
“He was quite committed to the realism of the wounds, and sometimes we had to pull him back where it’s like, okay, he’d be hemorrhaging blood from that wound, but we can’t really have that happen now. We don’t want the costume to be affected, then we’d have to be tracking that continuity for the rest of it. It was this little push-and-pull, all amicable, of course, but it was always a little bit of just a calculation of the production needs versus the want for the wounds and lacerations to feel real or as close to it as we could get,“ Berk adds.
Because of this, Novocaine was filmed more in sequence than usual. Quaid explains, “That was also just for a practical reason, a lot of the injuries you see on me are done practically. We had an amazing team led by Clinton, our special effects supervisor. He’s the guy; he had to basically take a 3D scan of me, and they printed it out. It’s this green bald bust of me that’s hairless. It’s so odd. It’s basically the first thing I saw coming into South Africa; it was just this very uncanny image of me. But that’s so they could when I wasn’t there, apply all the different wounds to that bust and make sure they worked with the dimensions of my face. Then so many makeup tests for not only the wounds but the tattoos that I have. I just became a canvas, essentially. But I loved every second of it, and it looks really good in the movie. I love that most of it is practical; that’s the stuff that I love.”
Another SXSW Film Festival has drawn to a close, and with it comes our final dispatch from this year’s insanely packed fest for genre premieres and anticipated titles.
Among the fest’s highlights this year were Babak Anvari’s Hallow Road, an inventive genre-bender that begins as a road thriller before slyly morphing into something else entirely. The high concept haunted house movie Good Boy will make you fall hard for one of the best dog actors to come along in a while, while The Surrender presents grief through a visceral, violent lens.
As for headliners, directors Christopher Landon and Eli Craig delivered festival crowd pleasers with Dropand Clown in a Cornfieldrespectively, while Death of a Unicorn‘s sense of humor proved more divisive.
Our final dispatch from SXSW 2025 offers a review roundup that highlights some of the fest’s more unconventional horror comedies: Dead Lover, teen satire Slanted, and The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick.
Dead Lover
Filmmaker Grace Glowicki, who starred in last year’s Booger, not only writes, directs, and produces the horror comedyDead Lover but also stars as the stinky gravedigger desperate for love. When she finally meets her dream man (Ben Petrie), their whirlwind affair is cut short when he tragically drowns at sea. Grief-stricken, she goes to morbid lengths to resurrect him through madcap scientific experiments, resulting in grave consequences and unlikely love.
Dead Lover centers around a mad “scientist” of sorts with a plot that is very loosely based on Mary Shelley’s classic text, but Glowicki draws far more from comedy toupes, Mel Books, and cartoons than horror. In other words, it’s a feature that feels tailor-made for theater kids, filled with boundless creativity and an emphasis on the type of humor that lets you know whether Dead Lover is for you within the first ten minutes.
Or maybe even sooner than that; Glowicki purposefully gives her character a bad accent that could grate if you’re not on this quirky movie’s wavelength. While her Gravedigger is the center of this bizarre little universe, the filmmaker stacks her ensemble with scene-stealing cast members tackling a variety of esoteric characters, from lesbian nuns to eccentric lovelorn poets. Glowicki does embrace body horror, especially as her character’s pursuit of love wears on, but the humor never wavers in its steadfast, laser-focused pacing. That means that this horror-comedy does veer toward repetition.
What sets it apart isn’t just the humor, but the ingenuity on display in terms of visual storytelling. Dead Lover is pure DIY, playing like low-budget experimental theater with striking gel lighting and sharp contrasts, and minimal set design that lets its wacky characters shine. It’s a film that proudly marches to the beat of its own unconventional drum, all but ensuring it’s destined for cult film status. Dead Lover was acquired out of SXSW, so expect to hear news of a release date soon.
Slanted
Body horror continues its hot streak with writer/director Amy Wang’s teen comedy turned body horror satire Slanted. It follows Joan Huang (Shirley Chen), a Chinese-American teen who’s dreamt of becoming prom queen since early childhood. Determined despite her school’s penchant for favoring a specific demographic for the crown, Joan undergoes an experimental procedure that transforms her into prom queen hopeful Jo Hunt (Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire’sMckenna Grace). While that leaves her closer than ever to achieving her dreams, the transformation creates an emotional and physical nightmare.
Slanted is a teen comedy, first and foremost, only flirting with body horror in the third act. It wears its satire on its sleeves, with the opening introducing a surrealist vision of American patriotism. Wang’s debut is at its strongest when exploring the relationship between Joan and her proud Chinese parents and the generational divide that’s widened by Joan’s American upbringing. The cultural divide is also reflected in Joan’s relationship with best friend Brindha (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), though to a lesser degree; Ramakrishnan is woefully underutilized here.
Wang helms with confidence, introducing numerous memorable set pieces and a poignant exploration of cultural identity. Grace and Chen infuse their character with aching adolescent awkwardness and vulnerability that earns easy rooting interest, even when making devastatingly yet authentically flawed choices. Yet, as personal as Slanted feels, the superficial nature of its satire winds up softening a lot of its sharper edges. That likely suits its teen demographic well but won’t be as winsome for seasoned horror fans.
The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick
This film, with one mouthful of a title, has been described as a “millennial terror of modern adulthood,” and hails from director Pete Ohs, who helmed supernatural stalker comedy Jethica. Like Jethica, Tick operates on the same idiosyncratic, deadpan tone and defies easy categorization. Zoë Chao stars as Yvonne, a woman coping with grief who attempts to work through it by vacationing at her friend’s idyllic countryside home. The details of the inciting tragedy inspiring Yvonne’s retreat come piecemeal, letting the deadpan, off-kilter character dynamics between Yvonne and her temporary roommates take center stage. Things go from awkward to weird when Yvonne is bitten by a tick and exhibits bizarre symptoms.
Worse, Yvonne can’t tell if the vibes are off with friend Camille (Callie Hernandez, Alien: Covenant), house chef AJ (James Cusati-Moyer), and his real estate agent boyfriend, Isaac (Jeremy O. Harris), or if it’s grief-stricken paranoia. While their eerie interactions present cult-like vibes, it’s here where Ohs’ metaphors for social peer pressures and the way that holistic wellness is really just snake oil. Tick is more horror adjacent than outright horror, but Ohs mines much of the uneasy atmosphere from the insane sound foley that accompanies the peculiar and often unappetizing dining scenes. Ohs, who co-wrote the film with his four leads, also dabbles in body horror moments surrounding Yvonne’s bite, though with much restraint.
The True Beauty of Being Bitten by a Tick deftly blends a pastoral fairy tale with muted millennial horror to opaque results. It’s the type of film that favors mood over narrative and quirks over coherency. Tick puts its metaphors first as it explores Yvonne’s anxiety and unease, but the millennial apathy of its characters dulls its sharper edges. Like Glowicki’s Dead Lover, it’s the type of genre-bender that signals almost straightaway whether it’ll be for you or not.
Kai Caster (“Yellowstone”) has been cast in the upcoming horror-comedy Halloween Store, Deadline reports.
He joins the previously announced Simon Rex (Scary Movie 3) and Natalie Alyn Lind (“The Goldbergs”).
In the film, a group of people find themselves trapped inside a costume store on Halloween night with a mysterious killer on the loose.
Caster will play Brock, the boyfriend of Amy (Lind) and a star quarterback with alternative motives. At first glance, Brock is the epitome of an all-American good boy, but he may just have a dark, sinister side.
Shane Dax Taylor (Murder Company) directs from a script by Chad Law (6 Bullets) and Josh Ridgway (The Flood).
“Saturday Night Live” stalwart Kenan Thompson and Steven Schneider (Insidious, Paranormal Activity) are among the executive producers on the project.
Artists for Artists, Big Bad Pig Productions, and Racer Entertainment are producing, with Range Media is handling sales.
While you wait for NEON’s slasher movie Hell of a Summerto release in theaters on April 4, why not instead just watch the movie on the big screen over a week earlier?!
For horror fans in Chicago and Dallas, Bloody Disgusting is joining forces with NEON to present two sneak preview screenings of Hell of a Summer on March 24, 2025.
These early screenings will be taking place at the following locations and times…
Chicago – AMC River East 21 – 3/24 – 7pm – Auditorium #9
“Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard is the co-writer, co-director and star of the upcoming slasher-comedy from NEON, which will be released in theaters everywhere on April 4.
Watch the official Red Band trailer below.
Hell of a Summer follows 24-year-old camp counselor Jason Hochberg (Fred Hechinger), who arrives at Camp Pineway thinking his biggest problem is that he feels out of touch with his teenage co-workers. What he doesn’t know is that a masked killer is lurking on the campgrounds, brutally picking counselors off one by one.
Finn Wolfhard wrote and directed the upcoming movie alongside Billy Bryk (Ghostbusters: Afterlife), with both actors also starring in the film. The cast also includes Fred Hechinger (Fear Street 1994), as well as D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (“Reservation Dogs”), Abby Quinn (“Mad About You”), and Pardis Saremi (“Career Opportunities in Murder and Mayhem”).
