There are bad Halloween movies, and then there’s Hellions — a film so bafflingly incoherent it makes you nostalgic for Hocus Pocus 2. Directed by Bruce McDonald and written by Pascal Trottier, this 2015 Canadian horror film tries to be a surreal nightmare about teen pregnancy, motherhood, and demonic trick-or-treaters. What it actually delivers is 80 minutes of migraine-inducing pink filters, logic-free mayhem, and a story so hollow it makes a jack-o’-lantern look profound.
1. The Setup: Teen Angst, Blood, and Prenatal Demons
Dora (Chloe Rose) is your typical horror-movie teenager — she’s moody, horny, and incapable of making a single good decision. It’s Halloween, and she’s more interested in partying and smoking weed than dealing with anything resembling reality. Then, in the first of many tonal misfires, her doctor (Rossif Sutherland, doing his best “Discount Keanu Reeves” impression) tells her she’s four weeks pregnant.
She’s understandably shocked — mostly because, like the audience, she didn’t realize sex actually has consequences in horror movies anymore. Before she can even process her accidental entry into motherhood, she’s visited by creepy, pint-sized trick-or-treaters wearing burlap masks and whispering like they just escaped from a Hot Topic clearance rack.
They want her unborn baby. Why? Who knows. The film never explains it. Maybe they’re agents of Satan. Maybe they’re pro-life activists with bad fashion sense. Maybe the screenwriter forgot to tell us.
2. The Premise: Rosemary’s Baby Meets an Edgelord Pumpkin Patch
The film clearly wants to be a symbolic descent into madness — Rosemary’s Baby by way of Pan’s Labyrinth. The problem is that it’s neither terrifying nor coherent.
Once Dora locks herself in her house, the movie devolves into a series of nonsensical sequences that feel like deleted scenes from a music video directed by someone who just discovered color correction.
Time stops making sense. The moon turns pink. Dora’s pregnancy accelerates like it’s been powered by a demonic microwave. The creepy kids teleport around, giggle ominously, and occasionally wave around severed heads like they’re auditioning for a Slipknot cover band.
You can practically hear the director whispering, “It’s a metaphor,” while frantically trying to remember what for.
3. The Visuals: Instagram Filters from Hell
If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like to watch an entire movie through a red Jell-O mold, Hellions has you covered. The moment Dora’s nightmare begins, the film drowns in a wash of pink and orange hues that make it look like a Lisa Frank fever dream gone to hell.
It’s not scary — it’s like watching a Valentine’s Day card suffer a nervous breakdown. The color grading is so aggressive it could qualify as a war crime.
You keep thinking your TV’s broken, or maybe your corneas are melting. But no — it’s intentional. Because apparently, “distorted reality” now means “film the entire third act through a strawberry milk filter.”
4. The Plot (or Lack Thereof): The Womb Is the Real Villain
After about thirty minutes, Hellions stops pretending to have a narrative and just free-falls into chaos. Dora hides in closets. Dora screams at children. Dora yells at her phone. Dora gets covered in blood, screams some more, and occasionally hallucinates.
Her pregnancy accelerates — one moment she’s four weeks along, the next she’s ready to give birth to whatever demonic avocado pit is living inside her. There’s no sense of time, no sense of logic, and absolutely no sense of pacing.
Robert Patrick eventually shows up as a sheriff — or maybe an exterminator? a ghost? a metaphor? — who exists purely to deliver exposition that explains nothing. He warns her the kids are “Hellions” (roll credits!) and that they want her baby. And then he dies, or doesn’t. Honestly, by that point, you’ve stopped caring who’s still alive.
5. The “Monsters”: Trick-or-Treaters from Spirit Halloween’s Discount Bin
The Hellions themselves should be creepy — small, giggling demons in Halloween masks have serious horror potential. Instead, they look like toddlers in papier-mâché helmets having a sugar crash.
They move awkwardly, attack inconsistently, and occasionally burst into laughter like they just remembered the script. They’re supposed to represent something — lost innocence, corrupt motherhood, the inevitable chaos of creation — but they mostly represent “actors who can’t see through their masks.”
Every time they appear, you’re not scared. You’re annoyed. They look like what would happen if The Purge was remade by preschoolers with papier-mâché and spite.
6. The Performances: Everyone’s Doing Their Best, Unfortunately
Chloe Rose tries her hardest as Dora, and she deserves a medal for managing to emote while buried under this much pink lighting and metaphorical nonsense. She screams, cries, and crawls through fake blood with admirable commitment. The problem isn’t her acting — it’s that she’s trapped in a script written like a bad fever dream.
Rossif Sutherland pops in for about five minutes to deliver the most unconvincing pregnancy diagnosis in cinematic history, then disappears. Robert Patrick, an actual acting legend, drifts through the movie like a man who got lost on his way to a better set.
By the end, everyone looks exhausted — and not in a method-acting way. In a “please end this movie” way.
7. The Metaphors: So Deep They Collapse In On Themselves
You can tell Hellions wants to say something profound about pregnancy, womanhood, and fear of motherhood. But whatever message it’s trying to convey gets lost somewhere between the jump scares and the kaleidoscope lighting.
Is it about abortion guilt? Bodily autonomy? Puberty? Climate change? The dangers of eating expired Halloween candy? Your guess is as good as mine.
The symbolism is so heavy-handed it should come with a chiropractor’s warning. Dora’s pregnancy accelerates, her home becomes a haunted womb, and she’s besieged by monstrous children demanding to be born. Subtle, right?
It’s as if the script read: “Theme: Motherhood is terrifying.” And then someone wrote “literally” in the margins and went with it.
8. The Tone: Existential Horror Meets After-School Special
The film teeters between being a serious psychological horror and a campy slasher, never committing to either. One minute Dora’s sobbing in existential despair; the next, a masked child is holding her boyfriend’s severed head in a candy bag like a punchline from Beetlejuice.
You can’t tell if you’re supposed to feel empathy or laughter — so you end up feeling both, awkwardly. The film’s mood swings harder than Dora’s hormone levels.
9. The Ending: Trick, No Treat
By the finale, time has ceased to exist, logic has filed for bankruptcy, and Dora’s womb is basically a cosmic gateway to hell. She gives birth — or maybe doesn’t? There’s screaming, fire, and a baby wrapped in irony. The film ends ambiguously, which is a polite way of saying “it doesn’t make sense.”
It’s the kind of ending that tries to be profound but lands somewhere between WTF and Are We Done Yet? You don’t walk away with closure. You walk away with a headache.
10. Final Thoughts: A Pregnancy Scare You Can’t Abort
Hellions is one of those movies that makes you appreciate even mediocre horror. It’s not the worst film ever made — it’s too competently shot for that — but it’s a mess of ideas, aesthetics, and metaphors that never coalesce into anything meaningful.
It wants to be profound, but it’s shallow. It wants to be scary, but it’s silly. It wants to be art, but it’s just noise with a womb fetish.
The result is like watching a Halloween episode of Degrassi that got hijacked by David Lynch’s less talented cousin. It’s weird, it’s pretty, and it means absolutely nothing.
Rating: 3/10 — “Hellions” is what happens when your Halloween candy is laced with existential despair and bad cinematography.
