I'll be honest: The Benefactress is not the kind of film I would normally gravitate toward. Had director Guerrilla Metropolitana not personally reached out and asked for an honest, open-minded opinion, it's likely this would have remained outside my radar. After watching it, however, I found myself unable to dismiss it.

Spider One's Big Baby is the kind of indie horror oddity that feels assembled from a lifetime of genre obsessions and late-night creative anxieties. Part slasher, part dark comedy, and part meditation on the frustrations of the artistic process, it lands somewhere between Stranger Than Fiction, Ruby Sparks, The Dark Half, and Secret Window, while still managing to carve out its own identity through a distinctly punk rock sensibility. The story follows successful horror screenwriter Adam Lewis, whose recurring nightmares about a maniac in a baby mask become the inspiration for a new screenplay.

Tim Riedel's Ancestral Beasts isn't interested in cheap scares or easy answers. This psychological horror debut digs into mental illness, family dysfunction, and intergenerational trauma, wrapping them inside a haunted house story that becomes increasingly unsettling the deeper it goes. While the film occasionally struggles with tonal inconsistency, it ultimately delivers a memorable and genuinely creepy horror experience anchored by a strong central performance from Morgan Holmstrom.