Film students vanish, coherence follows
Stoker Hills is one of those movies that clearly started life as a decent idea scribbled on a bar napkin:
“What if film students are making a horror movie… and then they actually get abducted by a real killer, and the cops find the footage?”
Not bad as a hook. Unfortunately, the final product feels less like a tight thriller and more like someone accidentally hit “shuffle” on their own screenplay and shot whatever pages fell on the floor.
It’s a “mystery horror thriller,” which here means, “we promise there’s a mystery, but please don’t look too closely, it’s shy.”
The setup: student film from hell
We start with three film students:
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Ryan (David Gridley) – the sort-of lead whose main traits are “holds camera” and “has hair”
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Jake (Vince Hill-Bedford) – the jokey one
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Erica (Steffani Brass) – trying her best to be in a better movie
They’re shooting a horror film in the middle of the night, because of course they are. Their professor, played by Tony Todd, has sent them out to make art or at least something he can grade without crying.
Then a creepy car, a creepy guy, and some bad decisions later, the trio get abducted. Their camera is left behind, conveniently waiting to be discovered by the police so the film can flip into its second mode: grim detective drama.
On paper, the dual narrative could be cool:
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Found footage of the students in danger
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“Real world” detectives trying to piece together what happened
In practice, it plays like two mediocre movies interrupting each other.
The detectives: Law & Order: Confused Victims Unit
Enter Detectives Adams (Eric Etebari) and Bill Stafford (William Lee Scott), who find the camera and start watching the footage like they’ve just rented the world’s grainiest rental.
These two are supposed to anchor the “serious” half of the film, but they feel like they wandered in from a cop show pilot that didn’t get picked up. They:
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Frown at screens
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Argue about procedure
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Drive around a lot
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Occasionally bark at subordinates
There’s a faint attempt at giving them inner lives, but the script isn’t that interested. Their main function is to move from Point A to Point B whenever the found footage runs out of gas.
The result is a weird stop-start rhythm: just when the student storyline starts to build a little tension, we cut back to two guys in a dark office saying, “Run that back” for the fifth time. It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone pausing a scary movie to tell you about their day.
Found footage with no reason to exist
Found footage can be great when it’s justified: we know who’s filming, why they keep filming, and how the footage survived. Stoker Hills checks exactly one of those boxes and shrugs at the rest.
The students’ footage looks suspiciously clean and composed for something supposedly shot by stressed-out twenty-somethings in mortal danger. At certain points, it feels like you’re watching a regular movie that just occasionally remembers, “Oh right, this is ‘found.’ Shake the camera a bit.”
There’s also the classic issue: characters refusing to drop the camera while running for their lives. At this point in movie history, that’s less “stylistic choice” and more “war crime.”
Tony Todd: tragically underused horror royalty
When you cast Tony Todd as Professor Smith, you’re making a promise: “Don’t worry, horror fans, we know what we’re doing.”
Then Stoker Hills proceeds to give him:
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A couple of classroom scenes
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Some ominous lecturing
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A general vibe of “I’m only here because the check cleared”
The man oozes presence even while reading the syllabus, and yet the movie treats him like a prestige accessory instead of a weapon. Horror royalty reduced to “Professor Who May Or May Not Be Relevant, Please Keep Watching.”
If you’re going to bring in Tony Todd, at least let him chew something besides chalk dust.
Mystery, now with extra nonsense
The “mystery” portion of Stoker Hills mostly consists of:
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Detectives rewatching footage we’ve already seen
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Brief interviews with side characters we’ll never care about
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Dramatic revelations that land with the force of a slightly damp tissue
Red herrings are tossed around, connections are hinted at, and there are a few nods toward a larger conspiracy, but it all feels half-baked. The third act tries to pull the rug out from under you with late-stage twists, but by then you’re mostly just wondering where the rug even was in the first place.
It’s less “mind-blowing” and more “mildly irritating.”
Characters, or: people you met in lab once
One of the big problems is that almost nobody feels like a real person. The film students are sketched in like this:
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“The nice one”
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“The jokey one”
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“The girl one”
And the detectives are:
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“The serious one”
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“The slightly less serious one”
Everyone else is either a suspect, a victim, or a name on the cast list. There’s a whole web of parents, professors, and creepy background figures (hey there, John Beasley as Dr. Jonathan Brooks; Danny Nucci as Erica’s dad; Tyler Clark as Dani) who could have made the story richer. Instead, they’re used like set dressing: “Look, we have adults. Anyway, back to the tunnel of confusion.”
When bad things happen—and they do—it’s hard to care beyond a vague “ah, yes, consequences.”
Atmosphere without impact
Stylistically, Stoker Hills is not awful. There are some nice nighttime shots, eerie forest bits, and moody campus scenes. You can see flashes of a better movie trapped in there somewhere, banging on the walls with a boom mic.
But even when the visuals work, the scenes rarely build real dread. Scares fizzle out, tension evaporates, and what should be a grim, creeping panic turns into, “Oh, there’s the hooded figure again. Neat.”
The editing doesn’t help. Constantly jumping between the found footage and the detective storyline kills momentum. Just when your brain starts to go, “Okay, I’m in this moment, I feel the danger,” the movie cuts away to two guys in a squad car arguing about jurisdiction.
The big “WHAT?!”… more like “oh”
The third act is clearly meant to be the “holy crap” section: this is where everything we’ve seen is supposed to click into place, make sense, and retroactively justify the hour-plus investment.
Instead, you get something more like:
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A reveal that’s foreshadowed just enough to be predictable but not enough to be satisfying
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Motivations that range from vague to nonsensical
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A final stretch that feels both rushed and dragged out somehow
If you’ve ever watched a student short film where the ending is just “and it was all connected and everyone was bad, THE END,” this will feel familiar. And not in a good way.
Wasted cast, wasted time
This is what’s most frustrating:
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David Gridley, Vince Hill-Bedford, and Steffani Brass are fine. Given more character work, they could’ve been compelling leads.
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Eric Etebari and William Lee Scott occasionally hint at a more interesting cop drama lurking under the surface.
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Tony Todd and John Beasley are iconic presences who could anchor whole horror movies by themselves.
Instead, they’re all orbiting a script that never figures out what it wants to be: a found footage horror, a procedural thriller, a campus mystery, or a meta-commentary on filmmaking. So it tries to be everything and ends up being “kinda nothing.”
Final verdict: hills? More like flatline
Stoker Hills (2020) is the cinematic equivalent of getting really excited about a haunted house and then realizing it’s just a mildly disappointing corn maze with a fog machine.
It’s not unwatchable. It’s just deeply, aggressively average—painful, given the talent involved and the decent central idea.
If you’re a hardcore Tony Todd completionist, you might endure it just to watch him assign film projects with ominous gravitas. Everyone else can safely skip this one and go rewatch literally any other found footage thriller instead. At least then, when someone keeps filming during a murder, you’ll actually care why.
