Psycho Killer (2026)
Directed by: Gavin Polone
Premise: A Kansas Highway Patrol officer (Georgina Campbell) hunts the mass murder (James Preston Rogers) who killed her husband. She follows his trail as the killer crosses the country.
What Works: Psycho Killer is exceptionally well shot. Dark scenes are lit in ways that allow us to follow the action and the use of color effectively creates atmosphere. The movie is mostly set in the Midwest during the winter and the filmmakers capture the bleak and barren look of the landscape in that season. Wide exterior shots frame the action against the landscape and capture twilight in ways that have a foreboding beauty. The cinematic style lends itself to Psycho Killer’s apocalyptic tone. The movie begins as a standard serial killer thriller but it goes off in unexpected directions. The killer is introduced as a standard masked hatchet man but he’s demonically inspired and takes his religion seriously. Psycho Killer takes a weird tangent in which the murderer connects with a fraudulent spiritualist played by Malcolm McDowell. This character is probably inspired by Anton LaVey of the Church of Satan and this part of the movie is darkly funny while also demonstrating the killer’s ideological seriousness. The very end of Psycho Killer takes the story in unexpected directions that we wouldn’t normally see in this kind of slasher horror.
What Doesn’t: Psycho Killer is very grim. Its bloody violence is in the spirit of the Terrifier films but the digital blood effects look fake and are inconsistent with the movie’s organic tone. The script for is credited to Andrew Kevin Walker who also wrote Se7en and 8mm. Psycho Killer is tonally consistent with Walker’s other movies but it also feels anachronistic. The script was reportedly written in the mid-2000s but it feels older than that. No one uses the internet or smartphones and characters communicate through classified ads in newspapers. Psycho Killer feels like a post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer thriller and the satanic panic elements are rooted in the early 1990s, especially the links between the killer and heavy metal music. Those details wouldn’t be bothersome if Psycho Killer were a period piece but it’s not clear when this story is set and the film’s ideas about the occult and apocalyptic obsessions come across out of touch with the present moment. Psycho Killer is also a police procedural but the law enforcement aspects are not credible. There are also some big coincidences with characters showing up in the same place by chance.
Bottom Line: Psycho Killer is messy and anachronistic and not all of it works but its weirdness makes Psycho Killer a fresh and distinct title in the current horror marketplace. Contemporaneous reviews have been very negative but Psycho Killer could be up for a reevaluation in a couple of years.
Episode: #1089 (March 1, 2026)