The debut feature film of the filmmaker Stewart Thorndike, Lyle (2014), was quoted as “Rosemary’s Baby (1968) for the 21st Century”. Now, she is back with another horror tale centering on a group of friends who go to a hotel for a weekend getaway and soon discover that women do bad things here.
In Bad Things (2023), a group of friends vacationing in an abandoned hotel, a pervading eerie energy begins to illuminate the cracks in their little family unit. Ruthie Nodd inherits the hotel from her grandmother and with bad childhood memories threatening to burst to the surface, Ruthie wants to sell the hotel and never return. But her partner Caldrags her there in the hopes of returning it to its former glory. They are joined by their amiable friend Maddie and mysterious grifter Fran, whose unhinged seduction threatens to drive a wedge between the couple. As the friends dance, cook, flirt, and fight up and down the halls of the hotel, they begin to find themselves indelibly entwined in the hotel’s seductive embrace and start doing bad things to each other.
Stewart Thorndike is the writer and director for Bad Things (2023), for which she was nominated for the Founders Award at the Tribeca Film Festival for Best U.S. Narrative Feature.
Gayle Rankin, Hari Nef, Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Rad Pereira, Jared Abrahamson, Molly Ringwald, Ariella Josephine, Austin Jones, Patrick Klein, Dana Slosar, and Holland Smith for the main cast.
After its premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 9, 2023, it collected mostly positive reviews, with Film Carnage calling it “wonderful and unexpected” and Indiewire stating that the film is “A refreshing twist on slashers. [Stewart] Thorndike’s queer take on The Shining (1980) is a great amount of fun… with a killer cast“.
Bad Things (2023) is opening on Shudder on August 18, 2023. Watch its official trailer here.
