'Hellcat' Infects with Claustrophobic Terror (Fantasia 2025)

When we lose a parent, I think it’s like waking up on a strange, dark road. No idea where we are. No clue where we’re going. Lost, and alone, and afraid. That is how such a feeling is presented in writer/director Brock Bodell’s feature debut, Hellcat (which played at this year’s Fantasia Film Festival), a tense road trip horror film that doesn’t quite bite as deeply into the themes it presents as intended but still manages to find heart and healing on a lonely highway to hell.

Lena (Dakota Gorman) awakens inside a camper pulled by a truck, without any memory of how she got there. Her only connection to the outside world is the voice of Clive (Todd Terry), the man who has kidnapped her. He informs her that she has been infected with a terrible disease, and that he must get her to a specialist before she harms herself, or others. Lena isn’t sure what to believe, but with the wound on her arm growing worse and the clock ticking, she knows her only way out is to fight.

​Hellcat is the rare road trip horror film that also somehow keeps the story (mostly) contained, in this case to the trailer Lena has woken in. All she can remember is that she was camping on her own, looking to reclaim herself after the recent death of her mother. Like the best chamber horror films (Saw, Cube, you name it), there’s an immediate sense of claustrophobic terror that fills the tiny camper. Akin to the suffocating sensation that some of us experience when someone we love suddenly dies. You can’t breathe. You’re scared. Angry. You want to scream. Lash out. Tear apart the environment around you as if hoping to uncover answers that never come. All things that Lena does. All as pointless in the face of death as they always are. Clive has no answers for her. She’s as in the dark as we are, and Bodell keeps it that way for as long as possible, drawing out a mystery that infects the audience with a creeping suspense as we piece together the truth.

On its tightly wound surface, Hellcat is part thriller, part body horror, and a few other elements I won’t dare spoil here. Though the body horror comes off as rather tame—there’s very little nastiness to be found in the film outside of clear signs that Lena’s infection is crawling up her arm—Bodell succeeds at getting his claws in and gripping the viewer. Working underneath all of that though is a strong story of a woman who has plunged into an existence that no longer makes sense to her with the passing of her mother. The filmmaker accentuates this confusion by incorporating hallucinogenic imagery like blood rushing through veins, quick flashes of how Lena got her wound, memories of mom, all swirling together like an internal storm sending shocks through this woman who has lost her grasp on life. My favorite shot of the bounty of gorgeous imagery captured by cinematographer Andrew Duensing comes as Lena peers into a locked room of the trailer, the camera pulling further and further back until the viewing port is merely a speck in blackness, emphasizing her utter despair and loneliness.

Turns out, Lena isn’t the only lonely character. Shot to appear as if he is speaking to her through the mounted head of a wolf in the camper, Clive paints himself early on as a good man, an honest man, a hunter…one who has lost his family, as well. Through a heartfelt performance from Terry, we, like Lena, aren’t sure what to think of this person who has kidnapped her. Bodell explores a sort of father-daughter relationship between the two, as we learn Lena’s own father may be struggling with how to approach her after mom’s death. Details are vague and there isn’t quite enough meat on the bone to make the intended impact, but Bodell still succeeds—thanks in part to exceptional performances from Gorman and Terry—in crafting a mutual understanding between these two individuals set on a path they don’t know how to get off. In that same realm, the filmmaker also touches on concepts of misinformation and how the loneliest of us are more susceptible to it, if only to share an ideological connection with someone out there that no one else understands.

​A ticking clock mystery contained within the walls of a cheap camper, Hellcat marks an intriguing debut from Bodell that may fall short in some areas but succeeds in telling a tense tale about a woman’s reclamation of her autonomy that reaches beyond the horror and into the souls of its characters. It’s a surprisingly beautiful reminder that nothing in this world is black and white. That people are more complex than they first appear. That life and death are mysteries that don’t often come with easy answers, but that doesn’t mean we have to fear them. Whether or not you manage to figure out where the road is leading in Hellcat, this is a journey worth taking for anyone who may be looking up at the moon on a starry night, wondering where to go next.

By Matt Konopka