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I may be biased, but foreign films have always been more visceral and entertaining. Horror films, on that same note, are always more potent when not held back by Hollywood studios (or influence), especially when they’re the perfect mix of gore, sudden scares, and psychological torture. Premiering as part of this year’s Toronto International Film Festival’s Midnight Madness program is the Belgian horror film, Cub. Directed by first-time director Jonas Govaerts, the film follows a Boy Scout troop into the woods where a psychopathic killer has set traps to kill each of the scouts one by one. The trailer, which you can watch above, is dark in both lighting and tone, with the aforementioned troop’s singing creating a disconnect from the violence that befalls them.
Cub premieres at TIFF on September 10th with no news of distribution. However, here’s hoping it’ll find a deal with one of the niche genre companies… Drafthouse Films, perhaps? You can read the film’s synopsis below.
CUB is a horror adventure in which a young imaginative twelve-year-old boy named Sam heads off to camp with his Cub Scouts pack, leaders Peter and Chris and quartermaster Yasmin. Once they enter the woods, Sam quickly feels something is not quite right. He soon stumbles upon a mysterious tree house and meets a shifty, masked feral-looking child. When Sam tries to warn his leaders, they ignore him: the boy often tells tall tales and Sam’s mysterious past which he refuses to talk about makes his leader Peter mistrust him. As Sam gets more and more isolated from the other scouts, he becomes convinced a terrible fate awaits them: the Feral Child, it turns out, is the helper of the Poacher, an evil psychopath, who has riddled the forest with ingenious traps and is intent on slaughtering the scouts… one by one…