PIG HILL (2025)

3 stars

Empty Jug Productions in association with Concourse Media. World Premiere at FrightFest 2025 on 23rd August

This has a strong opener to get you interested. Late at night. A couple pull up in a car. He is promising to ‘take her body on a pleasure cruise’. They are meeting someone there. Except she is concerned as the location is Pig Hill … Local legends talk of pig people and lots of girls that have gone missing.

He leaves the car and approaches another vehicle — only to be brutally attacked by a porky person! He is smashed across the windscreen, as she tries to start the car only to also be assaulted.

Carrie (Rainey Qualley — Margaret’s sister) is fascinated by the women who have gone missing and is writing a book about it. But she is not convinced it has anything to do with the porcine myth.

Meanwhile she works in a secondhand book shop. She meets Andy (Shane West) who brings in a bunch of books — including lots on Roswell — a local who has just returned to the area after living in NY. You know she will hook up with him at some point — especially as Carrie is estranged from her husband Ben. He left her and she doesn’t know why. Meanwhile Chris (her big brother, Shiloh Fernandez) looks out for her — though he is also biz partner with Ben and they are best friends.

She also keeps seeing a figure with a pig head. Nightmare visions. Then one of the desperate pregnant women at the shelter where she volunteers — who was found on the titular location — tries to perform a bloody and brutal coat hanger abortion on herself. The baby is born, but when Carrie looks at it it has a pig face.

She becomes obsessed with finding out the truth behind the myth…

Directed by Kevin Lewis (WILLY’S WONDERLAND), working from a script by Jarrod Burris, this was based on a 2019 novel by Nancy Williams. It has stylish cinematography by Tyler Eckels suffused with red filters presenting freaky and arresting images throughout. Grimy and violent it edges into tastelessness at times. The ending overplays the psychosis underpinnings and fractured visuals.

Steve Kirkham