This Road-Trip Horror Will Make You Terrified to Drive at Night

NEON The road to hell is paved with bizarre mystery in It Ends , the latest excellent horror debut in a summer teeming with them.

First-time writer/director/editor Alexander Ullom’s film is a thriller that thrums with existential dread, embracing the irrational and incomprehensible to unnerving ends.

A twisted take on the teen road trip movie, it’s further confirmation that the genre’s future is in masterful hands.

Hot on the heels of Obsession , Backrooms , and Leviticus from big-screen neophytes Curry Barker, Kane Parsons, and Adrian Chiarella, respectively—not to mention fellow seasonal standouts Hokum and Evil Dead Burn — It Ends (August 21 in New York and LA; August 28 nationwide) locates terror in ambiguity and abstraction, all via the story of a young quartet of friends whose evening takes a decidedly inexplicable turn.

Or, rather, it takes no turn at all, as their unassuming journey along a forested stretch of two-lane blacktop becomes, for reasons that wholly escape them, seemingly endless.

At a location that’s difficult to identify, Tyler (Mitchell Cole) picks up James (Phinehas Yoon), Fisher (Noah Toth), and Day (Akira Jackson) in his Jeep.

As they head out, James and Fisher begin a debate—courtesy of a meme—about whether a collection of ferocious animals or a man with a gun would win in a fight.

On a basic level, this conversation is juvenile nonsense.

Yet as a hypothetical question with no definitive answer, it winds up being eerily relevant to the ensuing action, in which Tyler determines that, despite their GPS instructions to proceed straight ahead, they’ve been driving too long in one direction.

He does a vehicular about-face, and a short time later, they hit a dead end, which James, Fisher, and Day chalk up to Tyler taking a wrong turn.

Tyler, however, denies diverting from their path—a puzzling state of affairs which swiftly goes from bad to much, much worse. [ WARNING: Minor spoilers follow.] In the blink of an eye, these BFFs are beset by a horde of anonymous screaming men and women who emerge from the woods and violently ambush their car in an apparent attempt to commandeer it.

During this out-of-the-blue melee, Fisher suffers serious arm scratches, but the rest emerge unscathed, albeit shaken from both the assault and their hasty retreat from the strangers.

Heated post-calamity talk naturally revolves around the nature of their situation.

When subsequent stops trigger identical sieges by woodland marauders, the crew starts logically trying to figure out how this craziness works—a transition from the hypothetical to the experimental that yields a few intriguing revelations.