Blood Barn, on Screambox

Ironically, Josie’s friends survived working a season as camp counselors, just to die in her barn. Technically, it has been converted into a farmhouse. Honestly, except for Simon, the nice guy, they are all basically animals, who should be sleeping on straw and drinking out of a trough. Regardless, they will probably die like lambs to the slaughter in Gabriel Bernini’s Blood Barn, which premieres tomorrow on Screambox.

This is one of those intentionally grainy-looking, deliberately cheesy, VHS-approximating retro-horror films. For what its worth, Bernini and the design team get the look perfect. Paradoxically, the filmmakers who cranked out the films that inspired Blood Barn would have been thrilled to have the modern techniques available to Bernini for a more polished look. Be that as it may, nostalgia always has a place in horror.

Josie is wildly insecure, so she invites her new “friends” to finish the summer at her family’s old lake house. They should have the place to themselves, because her other relatives never stay there anymore—with good reason. As it happens, Josie’s own memories of the place are rather foggy, in a repressed kind of way. At least the video tape of family home movies her so-called friends start jeering at slowly reawakens bits and pieces buried in her head.

It is hard to really say what the heck is going on, but it seems vaguely Lovecraftian, in a way possibly inspired by Possession. Whatever the heck it is, you do not want to let it get its tentacles into you, in a very literal sense.

Once you get past the look of the film, clearly intended to invoke memories of the original micro-budget Evil Dead, there isn’t much to the film. The only “name” is Chloe Cherry, the former adult performer turned Euphoria co-star, as the sexually forward Rachel, but her charms will elude most mortal viewers unfamiliar with her previous work.

Weirdly, Lena Redford is rather likably earnest as Josie, so it is hard to uderstand why she is investing so much emotional capital in these raging jerkweeds. Frankly, several cast-members look a little to old to be camp counselors, but you can argue that follows in the tradition of vintage 1980s summer camp slashers.

In many ways, Blood Barn is a lot like Third Saturday in October Parts V & I. Both (or all three) films channel most of their energy into recreating the look and texture of 1980s VHS horror, but have little to actually say about those films. Bernini and co-screenwriter devote more effort to characterization, which is nice, but it lacks the affectionate meta-cleverness of a horror spoof like The Final Girls. Just okay as a nostalgic time-killer, Blood Barn starts streaming tomorrow (2/17) on Screambox.