SHUDDER
Presents…
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY STEWART THORNDIKE (LYLE)
STARRING GAYLE RANKIN (GLOW), HARI NEF (BARBIE),
ANNABELLE DEXTER-JONES (SUCCESSION), RAD PEREIRA (BETTY)
JARED ABRAHAMSON (RAMY) AND MOLLY RINGWALD (DAHMER)
“Perfectly eerie and driven by feminine rage. Rankin is exceptional.”
– Coleman Spilde, The Daily Beast
“A refreshing twist on slashers. Thorndike’s queer take on
‘The Shining’ is a great amount of fun…with a killer cast.”
-Samantha Bergeson, Indiewire
“Wonderful and unexpected. Captures the powerhouse that is
Gayle Rankin, the sheer complexity she brings to this character is enthralling.”
-Rebecca Cherry, Film Carnage
When a group of friends escape the city to spend the weekend in an abandoned hotel, a pervading eerie energy begins to illuminate the cracks in their little family unit. Ruthie Nodd (Gayle Rankin) 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 Cal (Hari Nef) drags her there in the hopes of returning it to its former glory. They are joined by their amiable friend Maddie (Rad Pereira) and mysterious grifter Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), 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.
BAD THINGS is coming to SHUDDER and AMC+ on Friday, August 18th, 2023.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
“BAD THINGS is the second film in a trilogy about the power of motherhood. It’s an unrequited ghost love story between a mother and a daughter. It isn’t polite. I wanted to obliterate the societal norms of what a mother and daughter are – not subtle, loving, passive, healers – but epic and frightening and active. It’s a celebration of this first primal relationship and how blurry and complex that can be. Especially an unrequited one.
The story is set in The Comley Hotel, a place where women do bad things. Instead of seeing bad things being done to women, we see women doing bad things. I wanted to create a space for this to be explored. A space apart from the male dominated world. The hotel is distinctly feminine – all mauve and brass and increasingly blood red and milky – and is haunted by ghosts of women who came under its spell. Where are all the female Travis Bickles and Jack Torrances? BAD THINGS answers that with Ruthie Nodd. If THE SHINING unleashed a self entitled monster of patriarchy, BAD THINGS responds with rage. Let rage reign.” -Stewart Thorndike
