- Film Title: Hellbilly Hollow
- Cast: Kurt Deimer, Kevin Wayne, Danny Vinson, Sandra Ellis Lafferty, Hallie Shepherd, Megan Alexandrea Weaver, Trey Miller, Keller Fornes
- Director: Kevin Wayne
- Writer: Bernadette Chapman
- Distribution: Atlas Distribution Company
- Production: Bald Man Films, Convoke Media, Brick Lane Entertainment, Jinga Films
- Release Date: September 25, 2026 (select U.S. theaters, limited)
- Watched on: Screener
- Review by: Mother of Movies
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This review of Hellbilly Hollow covers the ending and the big reveal in a dedicated spoiler section below. The main review is spoiler-free.
Two Killers, One Real Haunted Attraction
Hellbilly Hollow opens on a fire, a circus attendant, and a boy named Timmy who runs into a burning camper and, by every visual indication, doesn’t come out. Then the film flashes forward and shows you a scarred adult man doing carnival tricks in the dark, and you start doing the math the movie wants you to do.
Hellbilly Hollow was shot entirely on location at the actual Hellbilly Hollow haunted attraction in Vincent, Alabama. This isn’t a backlot standing in for a haunt, it’s a real barn, a real hayride route, and scare zones repurposed as a hunting ground for two killers who treat murder like showmanship.
Tickles (Kevin Wayne, who also directs) is the disfigured, childlike presence doing the actual killing. He’s playful, sadistic, the kind of “performer” who laughs while throwing poison darts at a woman strapped to a spinning wheel. Bull (Kurt Deimer) is his older brother and caretaker, the one who finds him covered in someone else’s blood after a Halloween kill goes sideways. He calmly helps him hide the body instead of calling anyone useful.
The setup: a team of paranormal YouTubers, led by a new recruit at their investigation outfit, arrive to film the attraction the night before Halloween. Meanwhile, a separate pack of drunk twenty-somethings mock the scare actors on their way in. One of them, on a dare, sneaks off for a fortune reading with Virginia (Sandra Ellis Lafferty), the attraction’s resident fortune teller. There’s a voodoo backstory the film only half-explains. She vanishes mid-reading. Nobody clocks it as a warning sign, because in a haunted attraction, vanishing just means the attraction is doing a good job.
The Kills in Hellbilly Hollow
Here’s where Hellbilly Hollow deserves its keep. A haunt is the perfect setting, because guests already expect to be scared, grabbed, and lied to. Tickles doesn’t need to hide his murders, he stages them as attractions. A giant whack-a-mole game with a real person’s head popping up through the hole, a tank underneath her every time she goes under for air. A sword-swallowing act where the “volunteer” isn’t volunteering. A dunk-tank target game over a river where missing the target means someone drowns while their partner is held nearby and forced to watch. The practical effects behind all of this are impressive for the budget level this film is working with. There’s a caravan explosion that looks and feels practical, not composited, and even where the CGI shows a seam or two, it’s not distracting enough to break the illusion.
The executions disguised as carnival games, victims pulled from the crowd of people already misbehaving (vandals, trespassers, drunk hecklers), is smart plotting. It gives the violence a logic beyond “slasher needs body count,” and it means the film’s better eliminations land as set pieces rather than just gore for its own sake.
Where It Loses the Thread
The weak point is everything wrapped around the terminations. There’s a ghost story running parallel to the slasher plot. The paranormal investigator recruit has a personal stake tied to a lost child, and the film eventually ties her arc back to Virginia’s backstory and the spirits haunting the property. The connective tissue between “haunted attraction with real ghosts” and “haunted attraction with real killers” is there, and there’s clearly a version of this film where that reveal lands hard. In this cut, it doesn’t quite. The character work leading up to it is thin enough that by the time the big reveal arrives, it’s easy to miss what it’s actually saying, and the emotional weight it’s reaching for doesn’t fully connect.
A group telling ghost stories exists mostly to deliver Virginia’s backstory in dialogue rather than dramatize it, which is a shortcut the film leans on more than once.
The character work overall is the film’s biggest limitation. With this many named cast members getting lines, it’s a genuinely strong ensemble performance-wise, but the script doesn’t give most of them enough definition to become people you’re rooting against losing. The massacre carries the weight the characters should be carrying, which works fine scene-to-scene and less fine by the finale.
A Southern Slasher With Real Ambition
What sticks with you after Hellbilly Hollow isn’t the plot mechanics, it’s the sense that this indie horror movie had more behind it than most first features get. The stunts feel full-scale in places where a smaller production would have faked it. The location looks spectacular instead of like decorative scenarios. There’s a visible mic in one shot, and a rendered-looking effect here and there, but those are the kind of seams that come from inititiative slightly outrunning budget, not from a lack of either.
Hellbilly Hollow is a hidden gem for genre fans who want their indie horror swinging bigger than its budget technically allows. A Southern slasher built around a real haunted attraction, with practical kills that punch well above the film’s weight class.
Verdict & Rating
Hellbilly Hollow is rated
3.75 sideshow tickets out of 5.
Ambitious, Bloody, Uneven
Hellbilly Hollow turns a real Alabama haunted attraction into an honest-to-God killing ground, and the practical kills live up to the hype. The story around them needed one more pass. But as a directorial calling card, this is a promising one.
Streaming Options
Hellbilly Hollow Is Streaming On:
“A hidden gem for anyone who likes small indie horror with genuinely big ideas.”
— Mother of Movies
Other Movies to Watch if You Love Films Like Hellbilly Hollow
- Terrifier (The Whole Series) — For the same commitment to gleeful, practical-effects brutality over jump scares.
- Friday the 13th (1980) — The backwoods-killer-stalks-victims blueprint Hellbilly Hollow is clearly throwing back to.
- Hell Fest (2018) — A killer loose in a real haunted attraction, so the setting does double duty as story and scenery.
- The Houses October Built (both films) — For more of that “is this haunt too real” unease, minus the found-footage approach.
- My Bloody Valentine (1981) — another masked-killer slasher built around a working-class Southern setting rather than a suburb.
- Hallowarrior (2026) — Millie Shapiro is obsessed with Halloween. Suddenly, that’s all she has left.
- House of 1000 Corpses — for the same rural-horror, larger-than-life-killer energy, with music baked into the mayhem.
Spoiler Section – Hellbilly Hollow Explained
Mother of Movies: Spoiler Territory
What The Haunt Is Really Hiding
Proceed only if you’ve seen Hellbilly Hollow or simply must know how it ends.
Hellbilly Hollow
Director: Kevin Wayne
Date Created: 2026-09-25 15:29
3.75
