SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2026
Shudder keeps doing what Shudder does best: finding the next festival horror gem before anyone else can, and planting a flag on it early. This week the genre streamer announced it is acquiring the rights to Split Rock, the sophomore supernatural horror feature from writer-director Ryan Glover, ahead of the film’s world premiere at the 59th Sitges Film Festival on October 9, according to Daily Dead and Bloody Disgusting. The rights cover the United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand — and the plan is already mapped out: Sitges this weekend, a North American premiere at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on October 21, and a Shudder streaming debut on Christmas Day, December 25.
Let’s sit with that last part for a second, because it’s a move. A Christmas Day horror premiere. Shudder knows exactly what its audience wants for the holidays, and apparently it isn’t a cozy rom-com — it’s geologists unearthing something ancient and terrible in the badlands. Honestly? Respect.
What Split Rock actually is
The film follows geologists Lauren (Clark Backo) and Ben (Drew Ray Tanner) as they investigate a strange anomaly discovered deep within the remote badlands, per Daily Dead’s synopsis. After unearthing an ancient force hidden in the hills, the couple and their team must face a series of ever-intensifying horrors. The Saskatchewan badlands, specifically — iHorror notes the production set up in that stark, eroded landscape, which is doing a lot of heavy lifting before a single scare lands. Some locations just feel wrong in the right way, and the badlands are one of them.
And here’s the part that has the film-nerd corner of horror Twitter (sorry, X) nodding approvingly: Split Rock was shot on 16mm. iHorror reports it was filmed on Kodak Super 16mm by cinematographer Nikolay Michaylov. In an era when even micro-budget horror tends to go crisp digital, committing to grain and texture is a statement of intent — this is a movie that wants to feel unearthed, not rendered. It also fits Glover’s whole deal, which we’ll get to.
The cast is quietly stacked
Backo, who recently appeared in Venom: The Last Dance alongside her AMC+ and Apple TV+ genre credits, plays Lauren — and her on-screen partner in both work and life is Drew Ray Tanner, late of Netflix’s Riverdale, as Ben, according to Daily Dead. Rounding out the principal cast are Olivia Luccardi — yes, It Follows and HBO’s The Deuce — as their colleague Sam, and Graham Verchere, who genre fans will recognize from Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher and the cult favorite Summer of ’84, as the team’s intern Trevor, per iHorror.
That’s a smart ensemble for a chamber-piece horror movie. The premise lives or dies on whether you believe these four people would actually stay in the badlands once things start going sideways — and this is a cast with enough genre credibility to sell it. Luccardi in particular is one of those actors whose presence in a horror cast list functions as a seal of quality. If she signed on, the script probably earned it.
Glover and Shudder, take two
For the uninitiated: Ryan Glover’s first feature was 2020’s The Strings, a slow-burn horror film about a musician retreating to an isolated cottage and encountering an increasingly unsettling presence. It also landed on Shudder — which makes this acquisition a reunion, not a first date. Glover said as much in the announcement, telling the trades he is “very excited and thankful to be teaming up with Shudder again for the release of Split Rock, my bloodier, and far more ambitious second film.”
Bloodier and far more ambitious. Those are fighting words for a sophomore feature, and they’re exactly what you want to hear from a director whose debut was a quiet, atmospheric slow burn. The Strings-to-Split Rock jump reads like a filmmaker deliberately testing how far he can stretch — bigger canvas (a team in the badlands instead of one musician in a cottage), bigger horrors, and, by his own admission, more blood. Emily Gotto, Shudder’s SVP of Acquisitions & Productions, said the film was “a meticulously crafted world of psychological tension and haunting performances from its intimate cast,” per Bloody Disgusting.
Behind the camera, the producing team is Brian Robertson of Low End (Cursed Films, V/H/S/Beyond, Darkest Miriam), Jefferson Moneo of Prowler Pictures (Flapjax, Welcome to Kittytown) and Krista Dzialoszynski of Observer Effect (The Strings), with Glover, Kate Melville, Fabiola Caraza, Patrick Hackett and Daniel Futa as executive producers and Joey Montenarello on casting, per Daily Dead. That’s a genuinely deep bench of indie-horror operators — Robertson’s Cursed Films pedigree alone tells you the people involved take genre history seriously.
Why Christmas Day is the perfect slot
Shudder debuting a supernatural horror film on December 25 is one of those programming decisions that sounds unhinged until you remember who the audience is. Horror fans treat the holidays as open season — the same crowd that made December horror drops a quiet tradition will absolutely be watching geologists get terrorized in the badlands between Christmas dinner and leftovers. It’s counter-programming with confidence, and Shudder has the subscriber data to know it works.
It also caps a genuinely stacked fall for the streamer. V/H/S/Mixtape just hit the service — our write-up on the sound-as-killer installment is here — and the broader October horror wave is in full swing, from Flanagan’s Exorcist: Martyrs trailer out of NYCC to the 29 horror movies streaming right now we rounded up earlier this month. Split Rock landing on Christmas Day extends the season past Halloween, which is honestly a public service. Spooky season shouldn’t have a hard end date.
The festival path matters too. Sitges is the right launchpad — it’s where serious genre cinema goes to be taken seriously — and Brooklyn Horror on October 21 puts the film in front of exactly the audience that will champion it loudest. By the time it hits Shudder on December 25, the festival buzz cycle will have done its job. This is how you roll out a horror movie in 2026: festivals first, streaming coronation at the end.
