In short: Tonight She Comes (2016)

Various people – postman James (Nathan Eswine), college drunks Ashley (Larissa White) and Lyndsey (Cameisha Cotton) mainly -converge on your proverbial cabin in the woods. They’ve got friends missing, but since this is a horror movie, they find the time for a bit of alcohol and sex. That is until Kristy (Dal Nicole), one of the missing, returns. She’s clearly not well, what with her new tendency to stare disquietingly and murder people. One potentially possessed woman isn’t quite enough for a whole film, so the kids will also have to deal with a family of classic horror movie hillbillies who seem to have conjured up the problem. Hilarity and gore ensues.

Matt Stuertz’s Tonight She Comes is one of those films I can’t really blame people for disliking. Not because it is a bad movie but because it reassembles elements any viewer may know and love from other cheap horror flicks in generally slightly skewed, sometimes too silly, and always peculiar ways. That’s not the sort of thing that’ll go down well with anyone actually looking forward to a standard slasher, but even if any given viewer is okay with general peculiarity, she still needs to connect with Stuertz’s sense of humour as well as cope with a films that often has the somewhat lumbering quality of something stitched together out of different body parts by a hunchback named Igor. In other words, the film has its charms, but these charms are rather specific.


After a rather rough start – I find scenes of the worst postman in the world farting around with a friend and two girls getting drunk and bitching not exactly riveting – I turned out to be rather taken with the film. While there’s hardly a horror cliché left out, Stuertz tends to do fun things with them, and while only about half of the jokes in the film work for me (there’s a bit too much demonstrative transgressiveness going on), that’s still a lot of jokes, sight gags and dubious uses of tampons to enjoy. Add generally decent, sometimes even moody, photography and lighting, serviceable acting, and a general air of enthusiasm, and you’ll hear me talking about a good time.