A group of female friends, a haunted hotel, a mysterious grifter, deadly secrets, terrible childhood memories, and temptation. Sounds like a recipe for one Hell of a thriller, doesn’t it? Shudder might just have one with Bad Things, a film that upon viewing the trailer looks like a queer take on The Shining or Psycho.
Directed and written by Stewart Thorndike, whose film Lyle made a splash at Outfest in 2014, Bad Things stars GLOW actress Gayle Rankin, Barbie‘s Hari Nef (she was the doctor Barbie), screen legend Molly Ringwald, plus Annabelle Dexter-Jones (Succession) and Rad Pereira (Betty).
Here’s the synopsis: 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.
“With ‘Bad Things,’ I wanted to create a world of women and non-binary people who shake off polite conditionings and finally roar,” Thorndike said in a previous statement. “Where are all the female Travis Bickles and Jack Torrances? ‘Bad Things’ answers that.”
Rankin, who was also great in Worth and hilarious in The Climb, is deserving of a spotlight role like this. And I’m a huge fan of Hari Nef and have been since Assassination Nation. This looks like a lot of fun to me.
Bad Things hits Shudder and AMC+ on August 18th.
