96 min | R | October 11, 2023 | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Every Halloween a small town arms its teenage boys and sends them into the cornfields to kill a scarecrow with a pumpkin head. The winner gets money, a car, and a ticket out. The monster is real, but the town is worse.
Richie Shepard is a teenager in a small Midwestern town where every Halloween the boys arm themselves and hunt a monster. The monster is Sawtooth Jack, a scarecrow with a carved pumpkin head who rises from the cornfields each year. The boy who kills him wins money, a car, and escape from the town. David Slade’s film is a slasher dressed as American myth, and underneath the gore it is about a community that feeds its children into a ritual and calls it tradition. The hunt is rigged, the prize is a lie, and the adults all know it.
Casey Likes plays Richie as a kid who wants out and slowly realizes the way out is the trap. He carries the dawning horror without overplaying it. Luke Kirby plays Officer Jerry Ricks as the town’s enforcer, and Kirby finds the menace in a man who treats brutality as civic duty. West Mulholland plays Mitch Crenshaw with the swagger of a boy who believes the system rewards the cruel. Emyri Crutchfield plays Kelly Haines as the outsider who sees the town’s racism and its violence as the same machine. Jeremy Davies and Elizabeth Reaser fill the parents with the quiet complicity of people who survived the ritual and learned to keep their mouths shut.
Slade directs from Michael Gilio’s script with a palette soaked in autumn orange and arterial red. The creature is a practical build, and Dustin Ceithamer wears Sawtooth Jack as a lurching slab of straw and candy guts that the camera lingers on with real affection. Slade shoots the cornfield chases with handheld urgency and lets the kills land in close, tactile detail. The problem is the script. Gilio compresses the source material until the story skips its own connective tissue, and characters make leaps the film never earns.
The result is a horror film with a strong central image and a hollow middle. Slade knows how to stage a hunt and how to make a scarecrow terrifying. He does not have a screenplay that slows down long enough to make the town’s mythology cohere. The ideas about class, conformity, and the cost of belonging are all present and none of them are developed. It is a stylish, mean, watchable picture that gestures at something larger and never grabs it.