Three Films Make A Post: Please state the theme of your movie clearly, sir!

Hive (2026): In the treatment of its truly weird monster, Felipe Vargas’s Hive is absolutely wonderful. It creates something strange, creepy and alienated/alienating out of a playground and the kind of home-made material a Tubi Original can afford, and then uses it in the creepiest way it can possibly imagine. That’s how low budget filmmaking is supposed to work for my taste.

Problems arise whenever it feels the need to make very, very sure its audience understands its thematic concerns about race and class in America, and puts its ideas into the stiffest, cheesiest monologues I’ve heard in quite awhile. It’s particularly irritating since the actors actually have the film’s back and have already expressed it all through gestures, glances and body language – particularly Xochitl Gomez is excellent – one would be wilfully ignorant not to understand. And yes, I know, the times and US educational standards seem to demand this sort of thing, but stating your theme like a little child never makes anything better, certainly not your movie.

Leaving D.C. (2012): A guy with obsessive compulsive disorder (writer/director/producer) Josh Criss moves from Washington, D.C. to the wilds of rural West Virginia. There, he encounters the kind of strangeness a man of his character and type of neurodivergence can’t simply keep away from, to unpleasant results.

This is a minor gem in the POV horror crown, mostly thanks to Criss’s impeccable sense of handling escalation in a slow movie, mixed with a willingness to portray a character who becomes increasingly difficult to like (in a believable manner), and a threat that’s just unexplained and undefined enough to be truly creepy.

For the POV connoisseur like me, there are some pleasantly imaginative uses of a supposedly securely installed camera, and surprisingly engaging playing around with audio software.

The Lost Footage of Leah Sullivan (2018): An attempt at making a documentary as a school project about a town legend in her former home town leads Leah Sullivan (Anna Stromberg, who also co-wrote and produced with her co-lead and director Burt Grinstead) to her doom.

Like a lot of the better POV horror films, this works particularly well because it is very good at emulating the form of what it is supposed to be – unedited raw material for an amateur documentary – and taking on the flaws this sort of thing would reasonably have. Stromberg is a great screen presence as well.

The plot is a little on the slow side, but the climactic creeping through an supposedly abandoned murder house is very cleverly staged, repeatedly making excellent use of a certain entity standing behind the characters only for the audience to see.