Coverage from Salem Horror Festival 8
DIRECTED BY KAYE ADELAIDE/2025
The Rebrand is a horror-comedy — but unlike most horror-comedies, it’s actually funny. And maybe even more impressively, it’s genuinely disturbing.
Where a lot of films in this genre lean on scattered bursts of horror, usually in the form of cheap jump scares, The Rebrand manages something trickier: it taps into a real sense of demented, haunted unease. There’s an almost claustrophobic dread to it — you feel trapped inside these characters’ world — but somehow, that suffocating atmosphere never suffocates the humor.
A lot of the comedy stems from the characters’ awkwardness, their occasional aloofness, their deep, committed weirdness. It’s not just random offbeat quips for the sake of being “quirky” — there’s a real sharpness to the writing that keeps the laughs grounded in character, not just punchlines. It’s a rare horror-comedy where the jokes are funny because the situation is horrifying, not in spite of it.
The story follows Nicole, a heavily pregnant videographer, hired by a pair of influencer wives, Thistle and Blair, to help rehabilitate their public image after a public cancellation. But what starts as a gig quickly devolves into something much darker, as Nicole finds herself slowly, sickeningly absorbed into the manipulative world of these two women.
It’s not that you’re going to leave feeling pure terror — the movie leans more into a deep, unsettling ickiness than anything outright scary — but that ickiness sticks to you in a way that’s rare. Maybe the best comparison is Creep with Mark Duplass — only this time, it’s Creep with lesbians. And it gives the same uneasiness you felt while watching Creep the first time.
The Rebrand is a hell of an accomplishment: a movie that’s hilarious, unsettling, and just plain wrong in all the right ways.