There’s always at least one film per festival that knocks me so far sideways I need to take extra time to process. Historically, for Panic Fest, it’s been things like Robbie Banfitch’s THE OUTWATERS and Kyle Edward Ball’s SKINAMARINK. It seems almost like being made deeply upset is one of my favorite pastimes. So maybe it’s no surprise that this year’s top contender of Panic Fest for me was Stephen Simmons’ LEAD BELLY.
LEAD BELLY is a dense, slow beast of a film. It throws viewers immediately into a feeling of intense danger, as we’re given just enough visual and audio cues to put together a mental image of a summer afternoon gone wrong, but never truly given the full view. The kind of thing warning labels are made for, certainly, and a more complex and powerful tone setter for the rest of the film than may first appear.
The overarching plot tells us 12-year-old Kyle (Bastian Carrasco Betemps) and his older brother Marcus (Liam Foehl) are spending the summer with their dad Michael (Danny James). Recently divorced from their mother, Michael is clearly bitter about the fracture in the family—but it’s also made clear pretty immediately he’s the only one who feels this way. The kids are fine with it, and in the moments we encounter their mother, it’s obvious that particular relationship train was always going to explode at the station. Just to really drive the point home about what we’re dealing with here, there are continuous moments up from that clearly illustrate two things: Michael is, in fact, consumed by the bitterness he feels toward his ex-wife, and he has absolutely no idea about anything to do with actually taking care of his children.
There is hardly any food in the house at all—and certainly nothing to the dietary tastes of his sons. His only point of reference is a meal they enjoyed years ago, that holds no sentimental value for either of the boys. The cable and Internet are coming to the house by way of a series of sketchy-looking extension cords lining the walls and running out to the neighbors’ house. The beds they get to sleep in are bunk beds that almost struggle to contain their full length. Michael is stuck in a grimy, deadbeat present because he cannot move on from a past it becomes obvious he painted with rose-colored glasses.
What, exactly, made the boys want to spend the summer with their father seems…unidentifiable, given the setup, but if you have ever been in a situation like the one painted in the family dynamics of LEAD BELLY, it’s easier to see—although no less uncomfortable for it. The horrors at the heart of this film are slow to leak out, and there are so many twists of the knife in the plot that it’s almost impossible, at moments, to describe the nightmarish sense of impending doom it leaves you feeling right through to the end.
LEAD BELLY is a descent into a very specific kind of hell, and the things that truly cement us there are the intimate performances by Betemps and Foehl and, at moments, some truly unsettling cinematography by Trevor Turpin. This is the kind of film that will seep under your skin and make its dark and slimy way into your dreams. It’s also fairly heavy in its content, in a way. I don’t think you have to have gone through this kind of dynamic to feel its weight—which is what makes the storytelling so effective—but, just as with OUTWATERS and SKINAMARINK and their ilk, it may not hurt to have a lighter toned chaser to follow this one. The dedication at film’s end, even, is but one last emotional punch to the gut. It’s clear this was the kind of project that lived inside its maker and had to come out in an attempt to exorcise some inner demons.
We’re all the better for it as horror fans, even as it leaves a lingering darkness in the back of your mind that will take a whole lot of processing to fully eradicate.
Tags: Bastian Carrasco Betemps, Danny James, Film Festivals, Katelyn Nelson, Kyle Edward Ball, Lead Belly, Liam Foehl, Panic Fest, Panic Fest 2025, Robbie Banfitch, Skinamarink, Stephen Simmons, The Outwaters, Trevor Turpin
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