SXSW 2022 Horror Preview

The SXSW Film Festival returns from March 11-19 with a hybrid event with online screenings as well as Austin, TX for the first in-person event in two years. As always, there are a lot of exciting new genre movies and series making their debut. Here’s a few that we’re looking forward to.

Bitch Ass
Director: Bill Posley
World Premiere

The year is 1980. Young Cecil is bullied by kids in the 6th Street gang for being fat, shy, and always playing board games. They all pick on him and call him Bitch Ass. On a gang initiation night they jump him and leave him for dead. Fast forward to 1999. No one has seen or heard from Bitch Ass since, and he has become an urban legend. Now, a new crop of 6th Street recruits are gearing up for another initiation night. They get tasked with robbing a house, but little do they know they're walking into Bitch Ass' house, and he has been plotting his revenge by building deadly versions of the childhood games they bullied him for playing. Let the games begin.

Hypochondriac
Director: Addison Heimann
World Premiere

Will, a young Hispanic gay potter, is one gregarious guy. His boss is terrible, but he's got a great boyfriend and a great job. Unfortunately, behind that veneer is a dark past of violence and mental illness that he is desperate to keep hidden. When his bipolar mother comes out of the woodwork after ten years of silence, he begins exhibiting unexplainable symptoms. After an injury at work, he starts losing functioning of his arms, and something sinister lurks in the corner of his vision: a silent and ominous man in a wolf costume. Will spirals into an obsession, determined to solve this mystery of his own. What is going on with his arms? Can he trust his boyfriend? Is he becoming his mother?
 

The Cellar
Director: Brendan Muldowney
World Premiere

About a week after the Woods family move in to Xaos House, their daughter Ellie goes missing during a power cut. Ellie's mother Keira investigates and finds that the walls have strange symbols engraved into them. After a number of terrifying supernatural experiences she comes to the conclusion that the house took Ellie. She discovers that a physicist and occultist called John Fetherston, who was obsessed with finding the 11th dimension, built the house and engraved sinister equations on the 10 steps leading into the cellar. Finally, Keira must battle with the universe’s most ancient evil, or lose her family’s souls forever.
 

Soft & Quiet
Director: Beth de Araújo
World Premiere

Playing out in real time, SOFT & QUIET is a runaway train that follows a single afternoon in the life of Emily, a female white supremacist and elementary school teacher. Emily organizes the inaugural club meeting of 'Daughters for Aryan Unity', and she indoctrinates a group of alt-right women. When they all decide to move the meeting to Emily's house, they stop at the local store to pick up refreshments, where an altercation breaks out between two mixed-race Asian sisters and the club that spirals into a volatile chain of events.

Sissy
Directors: Hannah Barlow, Kane Senes
World Premiere

Cecilia and Emma were tween-age BFFs who were going to grow old together and never let anything come between them, until Alex arrived on the scene. Twelve years later, Cecilia is a successful social media influencer living the dream of an independent, modern millennial woman... until she runs into Emma for the first time in over a decade. Emma invites Cecilia away on her bachelorette weekend at a remote cabin in the mountains, where Alex proceeds to make Cecilia’s weekend a living hell. #triggered

Deadstream
Directors: Vanessa Winter, Joseph Winter
World Premiere

After a public controversy left him disgraced and demonetized, a washed up internet personality tries to win back his followers by livestreaming himself spending one night alone in an abandoned haunted house. When he accidentally pisses off a vengeful spirit, his big comeback event becomes a real-time fight for his life (and social relevance) as he faces off with the sinister spirit of the house and her own powerful following.

Master
Director: Mariama Diallo

At an elite New England university built on the site of a Salem-era gallows hill, three women strive to find their place. Gail Bishop (Regina Hall) steps into the position of “Master,” a dean of students, and discovers what lies behind the school’s immaculate facade; a first year student, Jasmine Moore (Zoe Renee), confronts a new home that is cold and unwelcoming; and literature professor Liv Beckman (Amber Gray) faces off against colleagues who question her right to belong. Navigating politics and privilege, our characters encounter increasingly terrifying manifestations of the school’s haunted past… and present.

Check out Bloody Good Horror's coverage of these and other movies during SXSW 2022.