Products You May Like
Dani Ferris is alone on a film set after dark, killing time on her phone, when somebody starts banging on the door. That is the setup for Human, and Dark Sky Films is putting Matt Stuertz’s film in select theaters and on digital platforms on October 23.
The trailer leans on the quiet part. It holds the practical effects work back and builds tension instead, which is a defensible way to sell a film and a slightly strange one here, because the gore is the thing that got Human noticed on the festival circuit in the first place.
Stuertz Calls It His Most Personal Film
Stuertz directed Tonight She Comes in 2016, a film remembered mostly for how much practical effects work it fit into a small budget. Human is the follow-up, written by David Neiss and produced by Stuertz with David Christopher Pitt. “Human is a movie meant to take people on a ride through the full spectrum of (human) emotions and horrors,” Stuertz said when the first teaser went out. “It’s by far the most personal film I’ve ever made, and I’m extremely excited to premiere it with the FrightFest audience.”
Jackie Kelly carries the film nearly alone, with Brock Russell, Cecily Dowd, Jeffrey Decker and Mia Sydney around the edges. Bloody Disgusting, which debuted that first teaser last August, also reported a voice cameo from Howie Mandel.
It Premiered at FrightFest in August 2025
Human had its world premiere at FrightFest in London on August 22, 2025, and played Obscura Film Fest after that, so the October release comes more than a year after the first audience saw it. The London reviews landed in much the same place. The Hollywood News wrote that the gore gags “ramp up to stomach curdling extremes,” and Rebecca Sayce at Filmhounds called Kelly’s solo performance a tour de force and credited Stuertz with holding the splatter and the comedy at the same pitch. Bloody Disgusting billed the film as Evil Dead II by way of Gregg Araki, which is a specific enough promise to be worth testing.
Dark Sky Is Still Buying This Kind of Film
Dark Sky Films owns the catalogue that includes The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers, and the label has had a busy few weeks. It put Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer back out in 4K for the film’s 40th anniversary, and it picked up the Jamie Lee Curtis thriller Sender for spring 2027. A single-location splatter picture with no stars in it sits squarely in that lane.
What the trailer withholds is the thing the festival crowds went for, which leaves October 23 as the first real chance to find out whether a year of midnight-screening reputation holds up on a laptop at home.