Feminist horror filmmaker Stewart Thorndike’s BAD THINGS is now streaming on Sudder and AMC+, as of August 18. BAD THINGS stars Gayle Rankin, Hari Nef, Annabelle Dexter Jones, Rad Pereira, Jared Abrahamson, and Molly Ringwald.
Thorndike describes BAD THINGS mission as so: “BAD THINGS is the second film in a trilogy about the power of motherhood. It’s an unrequited ghost love story between a mother and a daughter. It isn’t polite. I wanted to obliterate the societal norms of what a mother and daughter are–not subtle, loving, passive, healers–but epic and frightening and active. It’s a celebration of this first primal relationship and how blurry and complex that can be. Especially an unrequited one.” Thorndike’s debut feature LYLE, a queer horror film starring Gaby Hoffmann, premiered in 2014 and continues to play at festivals. She is currently working on her third feature, FRIGID, a slasher film with older women.
Synopsis: When a group of friends escapes 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.
