So Fades The Light / Head Like A Hole / Pater Noster And The Mission Of Light
Below is a smattering of capsule reviews of select films playing at the 2025 Salem Horror Fest. The horror movie Festival runs from April 30 to May 4, 2025.
SO FADES THE LIGHT
So Fades the Light is a haunting meditation on the trauma that religion can inflict — not only on the individual, but on the broader national psyche. It conjures echoes of real-world tragedies like Waco, capturing both the micro and macro dimensions of faith distorted into fanaticism. Yet what distinguishes the film is its fairness: it preserves a reverence for personal spirituality, carefully separating the sincerity of belief from the devastation wrought by human institutions.
The film’s greatest strength lies in its treatment of memory and grief. It moves with a quiet solemnity, suspended between the slow processing of wounds and the quiet ache of mourning. Every frame carries the weight of unspoken sorrow, yet the film resists sentimentality, allowing its sadness to linger naturally without artifice.
At the center of it all is Kiley Lotz, whose performance radiates a quiet humanity and understated charm. They not only grounds the film emotionally but shoulders its immense psychological weight with remarkable grace, anchoring the story with a performance that is both deeply felt and quietly shattering.
HEAD LIKE A HOLE
Despite its modest resources, Head Like a Hole emerges as a strikingly assured and invigorating work. It operates on multiple levels at once. At its center is a deceptively simple narrative: Asher, facing economic desperation, accepts a job to monitor and measure a growing hole in the wall of a basement, under increasingly cryptic and constraining instructions. What unfolds is less a descent into traditional horror than a slow dissolution of reality, as the film envelops both character and viewer in a pervasive atmosphere of dread.
What distinguishes Head Like a Hole is its handling of the surreal. Rather than deploying dream imagery as mere ornamentation, Stefan MacDonald-Labelle uses it structurally, introducing moments of nonlinear, almost incidental weirdness that feel less like narrative beats than like dissonant echoes within a deteriorating mindscape. The result is a disquiet that operates at the edges of comprehension, enhancing the film’s sense of instability without sacrificing its forward momentum.
Equally remarkable is the film’s achievement as a model of DIY filmmaking. Shot over the course of a week, predominantly in the director’s own basement, and executed by an almost solitary production crew, Head Like a Hole demonstrates what is possible when limitations are treated not as obstacles but as creative opportunities. The stark black-and-white cinematography and minimalist set design are not signs of austerity but deliberate aesthetic choices that heighten the story’s existential bleakness.
In a cinematic landscape often preoccupied with spectacle and excess, Head Like a Hole is a refreshing affirmation of the power of economy, ingenuity, and thematic focus. It is a film that lingers, not through force, but through the quiet accumulation of unease—a testament to how much can still be done with so little, when guided by a distinct and uncompromising vision.
PATER NOSTER AND THE MISSION OF LIGHT
This is real DIY filmmaking — messy, passionate, and alive. Pater Noster and the Mission of Light doesn’t just build toward an explosive ending; it earns it. Christopher Bickel drops us into the orbit of Max, a record store clerk who stumbles on a rare LP tied to a 1970s hippie commune. Following her curiosity — and a genuine love for music that seeps into every frame — Max and her friends head to the commune’s compound, where the trip gets weirder and darker under the control of the cult’s leader, Pater Noster.
But what really makes it work is how much the film trusts the quiet moments. Adara Starr holds the whole thing together with a performance that’s all curiosity and low-key charisma, keeping you locked in even when the story drifts into something more dreamlike.
When the movie finally lets loose, it hits harder because it didn’t rush. It earned your trust first.
In a year full of horror movies trying to split the difference between vibes and carnage, Pater Noster and the Mission of Light gets there better than most — and definitely better than Opus. It’s scrappy and handmade and rough around the edges, but that’s exactly why it feels so alive.