by Troy Anderson in New Movie News
Read the cast list for Blood Shine and, if you follow this corner of movies at all, you do not see a random assortment of names. You see a family reunion. Two families, actually, and they do not usually share a table.
The Cast List Is the Story
Blood Shine hits theaters and digital platforms on August 21 from Dark Sky Films, and before we get to the light-worshipping cult at its center, look at who showed up to make it. The headline is Larry Fessenden, and if that name does not immediately mean something to you, allow me to fix that. Fessenden has spent more than three decades as the closest thing American independent horror has to a patron saint, writing, directing, acting, and, through his shingle Glass Eye Pix, quietly incubating an entire generation of genre filmmakers. When Brooklyn Horror handed him its lifetime honor a couple of years back, we were in the room for it, and the tribute was overdue by about twenty years. He is the connective tissue of this whole scene.
Now look a little further down. Toby Poser is here too, and Poser is one quarter of the Adams family, the self-funded filmmaking clan behind Hellbender and Where the Devil Roams who write, direct, act, shoot, and sound-design their movies themselves from a home base in the Catskills. They are the standout of nearly every festival they touch, a genuine cottage industry of witchy DIY horror. And David Call, who plays the lead, is a Fessenden veteran, having carried the director’s Frankenstein riff Depraved a few years back.
Here is the part that seals the thesis. The families did not just lend their faces. The makeup effects come from Brian Spears, a Fessenden regular, and the visual effects come from Trey Lindsey, who does the same job on the Adams family pictures. Two of the most self-sufficient DIY horror operations in the country pooled their people, on screen and behind it, into a single movie. Wrap in a producing assist from Paper Street Pictures, the outfit behind Shelby Oaks and Scare Package, and distribution from Dark Sky, the reliable MPI genre label, and Blood Shine starts to look less like a standalone release and more like a group portrait of exactly who keeps American independent horror breathing right now.
A Horror Director Walks Into a Cult
The premise has a sly self-awareness that fits a film this inside-baseball. Set in a desolate stretch of upstate New York, Blood Shine follows Clara, a religious zealot who worships light through solitary, sacred rituals. Into her orbit stumbles Brighton West, a troubled horror filmmaker who has retreated upstate to finish the screenplay for his next picture and instead becomes the raw material for Clara’s increasingly extreme spiritual practices. She is convinced her sadistic ceremonies will transform him into a god, and she draws him down into a hallucinatory descent through faith, flesh, and the sublime. A horror movie, made by horror lifers, about a horror director who goes looking for a story and gets devoured by a real one. The joke is intentional, and it is a good one.
The folk-horror framework here comes with a twist worth flagging, because Clara does not worship the dark. She worships the light. That inversion puts Blood Shine in conversation with the brighter, sun-drenched strain of the genre, the daylight-cult tradition where terrible things happen in radiant meadows rather than shadowed woods, and it gives the film a distinct visual identity to match its arthouse ambitions. The pitch is a blend of gallery-ready compositions and genuinely visceral gore, which is a difficult needle to thread and precisely the kind of swing this particular gene pool tends to attempt.
The Couple Behind the Camera
Blood Shine is written and directed by Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks, a married team whose partnership is one of the more interesting recent additions to the genre. Their debut feature, the pandemic-set Alone With You, won a Fangoria Chainsaw Award and carried a notable producing pedigree, backed by actor Theo James and by Andrew Corkin, whose credits reach back to Martha Marcy May Marlene. That is a serious calling card for a first film, and the follow-up expands the canvas considerably.
Bennett is the more publicly visible half, and not only because she also stars here as Clara. She is a working actor with a real horror resume, including a role in the buzzy Shelby Oaks, the debut feature from film-critic-turned-director Chris Stuckmann that arrived through NEON with Mike Flanagan among its champions. Brooks, for his part, comes up through nonfiction, a cinematographer and documentarian who has shot series for a stack of cable networks and streamers, which is not the usual on-ramp to folk horror and may be exactly why the film reportedly looks the way it does. A documentary eye trained on a light-cult fever dream is a promising mismatch.
The performances have been the loudest talking point off the festival circuit, with Fessenden and Bennett singled out most often, which tracks. Put a thirty-year genre veteran and a director playing her own zealot in the same frame and you tend to get sparks.
Where and When to Catch It
Blood Shine did not come out of nowhere. It worked the serious genre-festival circuit first, premiering at FrightFest in London before stops that included Sitges, Brooklyn Horror, and the Telluride Horror Show, the exact rooms where this kind of film earns its reputation before it ever reaches a wider audience. Dark Sky then picked up North American rights and set it loose.
The film runs a tight 91 minutes and arrives in select theaters and across VOD and digital platforms on August 21. If you have any affection for the scrappy, interconnected world of American independent horror, the one that runs on shared crews, self-funded ambition, and a few dozen people who keep showing up for each other’s movies, Blood Shine is close to required viewing on pedigree alone. That it also appears to be a genuinely strange and striking piece of folk horror is the bonus. Worship the light. Watch your back.
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