If you’ve ever had one of those weeks where everything is collapsing—your job is awful, your parent is sick, your meds aren’t working—and you think, “If one more thing goes wrong, I’m going to turn into a feral animal,” Fang basically takes that feeling literally and runs with it. Into a sewer. With a knife.
Richard Burgin’s Fang is a scrappy, uncomfortable, borderline grimy little psychological body horror film that somehow manages to be tragic, gross, and weirdly funny in a “wow, this is bleak” way. It’s low-budget, yes. It’s rough around the edges, absolutely. But it swings for the fences with such earnest, deranged energy that it’s hard not to appreciate what it’s trying to do: depict mental illness, caretaking trauma, and family decay through the lens of a guy who believes he’s turning into a rat. Honestly? Fair metaphor.
Meet Billy: Neurodivergent, Overmedicated, and Rapidly Rodentifying
Billy Cochran (Dylan LaRay) is a 23-year-old autistic cartoonist living with his mother Gina (Lynn Lowry) in a decaying Chicago neighborhood that looks like tetanus in architecture form. He works a dead-end job at a meat processing plant under Mr. Wolfson, who has all the empathy of a tax audit. Billy is anxious, medicated, and barely holding it together while also dealing with his mother’s advanced Parkinson’s.
This is not your usual horror protagonist. Billy is not a Final Boy. He’s not secretly a badass or a hidden genius. He’s socially awkward, heavily medicated, and drowning in responsibility he’s not equipped to carry. His autism isn’t played as a quirky superpower; it’s woven into how he processes stress and reality, and the spiral he falls into as everything breaks. That alone makes Fang feel different from your typical “I’m losing my mind” horror story.
Dylan LaRay really leans into the role. He plays Billy with this vulnerable twitchiness—eyes scanning, shoulders hunched, constantly on the edge of fight-or-flight. When he starts believing rat fur is growing under his skin, it doesn’t feel like some random horror gimmick. It feels like the logical endpoint of a guy whose brain has been overloaded for too long.
Mom, Disease, and the House That Hygiene Forgot
Gina, played with unnerving intensity by Lynn Lowry, is both victim and monster in Billy’s life. She’s frail, ill, hallucinating, and increasingly detached from reality—but also controlling, emotionally volatile, and capable of inflicting real harm. She’s trapped in her body; he’s trapped in her orbit.
The house they share is practically a character: cluttered, dirty, tired. The perfect place for vermin—literal and metaphorical—to thrive. As Gina’s Parkinson’s advances, she needs round-the-clock care. Dr. Decanthian spells this out clinically; Billy basically disassociates mid-sentence. You can almost see the circuit breaker flip in his brain.
Enter Myra, the new caregiver, who is somehow both a beam of light and a reminder of how bad things really are. She’s kind to Billy, asks about his art, listens to his sci-fi Graixian saga, and gently suggests self-help books and coping mechanisms. She’s the one person treating him like a human being instead of a burden or a malfunctioning appliance.
Naturally, the situation goes straight to hell.
It Starts with a Rat in the Tub (It Always Does)
The turning point, literally and metaphorically, is the rat in the bathtub. Billy finds it, panics, chases it around the living room in a scene that is equal parts funny and distressing, and gets bitten. He lands in the hospital and receives a mysterious tetanus shot cocktail that feels like it came straight from the “this will matter later” drawer.
After that, things get weird fast. Billy finds bumps on his skin. Then he peels away some flesh and sees rat fur beneath. He draws it. Fixates on it. Shows it to Myra, who gently suggests it might be anxiety and paranoia. Unfortunately, his brain has already decided it’s body-horror time.
From there on out, rat imagery invades everything:
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Strange fur patches on his body.
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Nightmares featuring humanoid rat entities like the Rat King and Dr. Rat.
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Chanting about “red meat.”
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Increasingly blurred lines between hallucination and reality.
If you’ve ever had intrusive thoughts or dissociative episodes, this plays less like “spooky transformation” and more like watching someone’s mind tear itself apart while they desperately try to map it into a story that makes sense.
Family Horror: Gaslighting, Abuse, and One Horrific Scene
The scenes between Billy and Gina are where Fang is at its most uncomfortable—and most effective. They argue about tiny things (dishwashers, TV channels) that clearly stand in for everything neither of them can actually say. Her neurological decline makes her paranoid and confused; his stress and neurodivergence make him hyper-reactive.
The film goes to a very dark place when Gina, hallucinating and conflating Billy with her dead husband Sam, sexually assaults him. It’s a disturbing, messy, deeply upsetting scene—not played for shock value but as the final, unforgivable fracture in Billy’s already eroded sense of safety.
After that, the rat transformation stops feeling metaphorical and starts feeling inevitable. The abused, overwhelmed caregiver collapses into something feral. It’s monstrous, but you understand exactly how he got there, which is what makes the horror land with such a sickening thud.
From Rodent Mind to Rat Crimes
As Billy’s psychosis deepens, reality becomes a suggestion. The water glass he threw at Gina is suddenly intact again. Arguments she remembers differently—or not at all. Rat kings on television talk shows. Dr. Rat in nightmares chanting “We need red meat” like a butchered mantra.
Add financial desperation—Mr. Wolfson casually mentions half a million dollars in cash at his home—and Billy’s mental state finds a target. Cue lockpick, knife, and extremely bad life choices.
The burglary of Mr. Wolfson’s house is a slow-motion disaster. Billy’s hallucination of the Rat King on TV mid-robbery triggers a breakdown so intense he ends up stabbing his boss to death. It’s not a cool, stylized kill; it’s ugly, desperate, messy. The horror isn’t “ooh, murder!” It’s “oh God, this really broken guy just did something he can never come back from.”
And then the movie says, “You think that’s bad? Watch this.”
Billy returns home, finds Gina immobilized, and in a gruesome, psychotic frenzy, kills her, disembowels her, and eats parts of her. His brief, grotesque transformation into a humanoid rat creature is less werewolf spectacle and more the visual representation of a psyche that has finally fully snapped.
It’s horrifying. It’s also, somehow, the logical end point of all that unspoken pain and resentment. The caregiver finally consumes the person who consumed his entire life. Therapy would have been better, obviously, but here we are.
The Aftermath: Diagnosis, Damage, and a Rat on the Wall
The film doesn’t end with a demon rat apocalypse or a twist; it ends in a mental hospital. Billy is diagnosed with autism, schizophrenia, and severe psychosis. We watch him in a padded cell talking about wanting to get better, while a drawing of the rat creature hangs on the wall like a permanent reminder of what happened when nobody stepped in before everything exploded.
Is it a bit on the nose? Yes. Does it work? Also yes.
What Fang does well is show how a person can slide from “barely functioning” to “dangerously unwell” without any real safety net catching them. Billy’s autism doesn’t cause his violence—but it absolutely affects how he processes stress, and the film treats that with more complexity than you’d expect from a micro-budget horror flick about a man turning into a rat.
Rough, Raw, and Weirdly Effective
Is Fang polished? Not even slightly. You can see the budget limitations in the lighting, the pacing, some uneven performances. The Rat King and Dr. Rat are both creepy and a tiny bit goofy, like mascots for a cursed breakfast cereal.
But there’s something admirable about how hard this movie commits to its idea. It doesn’t flinch away from the grossness—physical or emotional. It treats mental illness, caregiving burnout, and abuse not as edgy plot-decoration, but as fundamental to the horror. The rat body horror isn’t random; it’s an ugly, memorable metaphor for someone who has been reduced to bare survival instincts.
There’s also a streak of dark humor woven through the misery:
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Mr. Wolfson whining about attendance while Billy is literally falling apart.
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The psychotic break happening in the middle of a cheesy talk show hallucination.
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Dr. Rat, essentially a demonic motivational speaker for carnivorous breakdown.
It’s the kind of humor where you laugh and then immediately feel like you need a shower.
If you’re looking for sleek, jump-scare-heavy studio horror, Fang is not it. But if you want something raw, unnerving, and willing to get truly, uncomfortably inside the head of a person losing his grip on reality, this weird little rat nightmare is absolutely worth a watch.
Just… maybe don’t pair it with dinner. Or with calling your mother.
