There are certain horror movies that feel like polite dinner parties—you show up, someone offers you lukewarm wine, and you leave early, making excuses about your cat. Then there are movies like Slaughter Night (Sl8n8), which gleefully lock you in a collapsing, corpse-stained mineshaft with your drunkest friends and dare you to claw your way back to the daylight. This Dutch-Belgian fever dream from directors Edwin Visser and Frank van Geloven is the latter: a grimy, chaotic, and occasionally absurd horror ride that rewards patience with buckets of blood, a touch of folklore, and enough bad decisions to fill a European Union conference.
Car Crash to Hell: Kristel’s Really Bad Day
We meet Kristel (Victoria Koblenko, quickly cementing her status as the Dutch scream queen), who has the kind of day that makes you wish you’d stayed in bed. First, her father dies in a car accident. Then she decides the best way to process her grief is to investigate the same serial killer case that consumed him. Therapy? Nah. Journaling? Too soft. Instead, she and her college buddies hop into a van and head straight for a cursed, abandoned mine where convicted killers once moonlighted as human canaries, sniffing out explosives until they exploded themselves.
Because if you’ve lost a parent, the logical next step is a spelunking trip with ghosts. That’s just math.
The Mine: OSHA’s Worst Nightmare
Once inside, the group finds that the mine doesn’t just look like death—it is death. Picture rusted elevators that drop sixty meters without warning, miles of tunnels lit like a Nine Inch Nails music video, and an atmosphere so damp you expect trench foot after five minutes. Add in the restless spirit of child killer Andries Martíns, and you’ve basically built the Airbnb from hell.
And oh, Andries. Ghost or demon or both, he stalks these tunnels with the gleeful efficiency of a mall Santa hopped up on Red Bull, picking off Kristel’s friends one by one. You know it’s only a matter of time before someone gets carved like a Thanksgiving ham, but Slaughter Night doesn’t skimp on variety: decapitations, impalements, dismemberments—this film is a smorgasbord of splatter. It’s as if the production team bet each other who could make the audience squirm the most. Spoiler: everyone wins.
Friends Don’t Let Friends Go Into Haunted Mines
Kristel’s ragtag group of college companions prove one thing: higher education does not prepare you for survival scenarios. You’ve got the skeptic, the coward, the too-cool-for-this-guy, and the token couple whose relationship is already falling apart before the first jump scare. The film practically slaps sticky notes on their foreheads: “soon-to-be corpse.”
And yet, their banter feels oddly familiar. It’s less “Shakespearean ensemble” and more “group project gone horribly wrong,” complete with finger-pointing, breakdowns, and at least one person insisting they know the way out. They don’t. They never do. Watching them bumble through the labyrinth is perversely satisfying—you almost root for the mine to swallow them.
Victoria Koblenko: Scream Queen with Homework
As Kristel, Victoria Koblenko doesn’t just scream—she owns it. She screams with conviction. She screams with range. She screams like a woman whose agent forgot to warn her about the slime-covered prosthetics lurking in her next scene. But between the shrieks, she delivers genuine pathos. Her grief over her father gives the film just enough emotional grounding to make the bloodletting sting a little more.
By the third time Kristel faces Andries’ gory handiwork, you start to realize: this isn’t just another Final Girl phoning it in. Koblenko makes you care about Kristel, even when every choice she makes screams bad idea. That’s horror heroine alchemy right there.
The Ghost of Andries Martíns: Freddy Krueger’s Low-Budget Cousin
Let’s talk villains. Andries Martíns isn’t subtle. He’s not lurking in the shadows, whispering sweet nothings. No, he’s swinging pickaxes, popping up in dream sequences, and generally behaving like Freddy Krueger’s Dutch cousin who failed out of charm school.
And honestly? It works. He’s not meant to be sophisticated—he’s a blunt force specter, a child killer who has returned to settle scores and leave the tunnels slick with student gore. The make-up effects (crafted with help from a team partially involved with The Lord of the Rings, of all things) give him a half-rotted menace, the kind of face you’d cross a street to avoid, even in broad daylight.
Blood, Gore, and Maggots—Oh My
If you’re squeamish, Slaughter Night will chew you up and spit you out like one of its many doomed victims. This film leans hard into practical effects: severed limbs look meaty, burns look blistering, and maggots—dear God, the maggots—make more cameos than some of the supporting actors.
There’s a certain charm in how unapologetic it all is. This isn’t horror dressed up for a first date; this is horror showing up in sweatpants with a bucket of chicken and daring you not to look away. Compared to the CGI slop dominating mid-2000s horror, Slaughter Night’s commitment to rubber, goo, and gallons of fake blood feels downright refreshing.
Pacing: A Rollercoaster in the Dark
Is the story predictable? Absolutely. You know from frame one that most of these kids aren’t making it out alive. But the directors keep things clipping along at such a breakneck pace that you rarely have time to roll your eyes. There’s always another trap, another hallucination, another chance for someone to trip over their own panic and fall into a grisly fate.
And when the film slows down—rarely—it’s only to set up the next grotesque punchline. Think of it as a horror rollercoaster: you might see the loop-de-loop coming, but it still flips your stomach when you hit it.
Why It Works: Pure, Uncut Campfire Terror
At its core, Slaughter Night is a campfire story stretched to feature length. Don’t go into the abandoned mine. Don’t summon the killer’s ghost. Don’t split up. And yet, everyone does, and the audience gets rewarded with a buffet of carnage.
It’s not trying to be prestige horror. It’s not A24’s next awards darling. It’s a grubby, nasty little film that knows exactly what it is: a ride for gorehounds who want their popcorn dripping red.
The Humor in the Horror
Here’s the thing: the movie knows it’s ridiculous. When you’ve got college kids spelunking with all the survival instincts of a wet sponge, a killer ghost who swings pickaxes like he’s auditioning for a metal band, and a mine that seems to have been designed by Satan’s interior decorator, how can you not laugh?
The dark humor isn’t in punchlines—it’s in the absurdity of it all. Slaughter Night winks at you with every improbable survival attempt and every inevitable dismemberment. It dares you to laugh through your gag reflex.
Final Verdict: A Bloody Good Time
Slaughter Night (Sl8n8) isn’t high art. It’s not even mid-tier art. But it is a rollicking, gore-slick, midnight-movie delight. Victoria Koblenko shines as a scream queen worth rooting for, the kills are imaginative in their nastiness, and the whole thing has the manic energy of filmmakers who spent five years dreaming up ways to gross you out.
If you want elegance, look elsewhere. If you want two hours of students getting lost, ghosts getting stabby, and mines that would make OSHA inspectors faint, this is your jam.
The lesson? Never investigate your dad’s serial killer files, never trust a Dutch abandoned mine, and never—ever—underestimate the power of a good splatterfest.
