Plot
A group of men enter a snowy forest with various power tools and begin cutting down trees, some of which they burn and some that they package into trucks. The packaged trees are sent to facilities and lumped together to be sold as Christmas trees. The trees themselves are shown to be sentient and feeling everything that is being done to them, attempting to communicate in their language to the humans but being unable to. Several trees are separated from their families and taken by various humans, including a family of four, a man with the intention of having sex with the tree, a girl and her mother, and a woman who is being pressured for sex by her boyfriend. On Christmas Eve, the trees watch as the humans celebrate and ignore their pleadings, not realizing that the humans cannot hear them.
On Christmas Day, the young girl of the family is brutally grabbed and mauled to death by the tree, which launches a Christmas star into the throat of her father as her mother and brother scream in horror. Elsewhere, the mother and girl discover that their tree had decapitated their cat and are chased by the tree outside, where a crowd of trees attacks them. The woman and her boyfriend have their eyes violently removed by the branches, which are then forced through their mouths; the presumed sex offender has his leg severed with an axe. The trees attack the humans all over the world, killing several of them; a woman and her baby are separated and she is forced to watch as a tree jumps on the baby's head, crushing her skull and kills her. The trees proceed to drag the corpses behind them just as the humans had done.
Rabbit-Proof Fence is a 2002 Australian epic drama film directed and produced by Phillip Noyce based on the 1996 book Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence by Doris Pilkington Garimara. It is loosely based on the author's mother Molly Craig, aunt Daisy Kadibil and cousin Gracie, who escaped from the Moore River Native Settlement, north of Perth, Western Australia, to return to their Aboriginal families. They had been removed from their families and placed there in 1931.
Dead End is a 2003 English-language French horror film written and directed by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa, and starring Alexandra Holden, Ray Wise, Lin Shaye, Mick Cain, Billy Asher, and Amber Smith. It tells the story of a dysfunctional family who find themselves on a never-ending road in the middle of a forest during a routine drive on Christmas Eve, while under pursuit of a mysterious hearse and a woman dressed in white.
The final girl or survivor girl is a trope in horror films. It refers to the last girl(s) or woman alive to confront the killer, ostensibly the one left to tell the story. The final girl has been observed in many films, including Psycho, Voices of Desire, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween, Alien, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream. The term "final girl" was coined by Carol J. Clover in her article "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film" (1987). Clover suggested that in these films, the viewer began by sharing the perspective of the killer, but experienced a shift in identification to the final girl partway through the film.
Molly Parker is a Canadian actress, writer, and director. She garnered critical attention for her portrayal of a necrophiliac medical student in the controversial drama Kissed (1996). She subsequently starred in the television thriller Intensity (1997) before landing her first major American film role in the drama Waking the Dead (2000). She gained further notice for her role as a Las Vegas escort in the drama The Center of the World (2001), for which she was nominated for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead.
Amanda Crew is a Canadian actress. Following her film debut in Final Destination 3 (2006), Crew had lead roles in films such as Sex Drive (2008), Charlie St. Cloud, Repeaters, Charlie Zone (2011), Ferocious (2013), Chokeslam (2016), Tone-Deaf (2019), and Some Other Woman (2023), as well as supporting roles in The Haunting in Connecticut (2009), The Age of Adaline (2015), Freaks (2018) and There's Something Wrong with the Children (2023).
The New York City Horror Film Festival is an international film festival based in New York City that screens films from the horror genre. It was founded by Michael J. Hein in 2001. It takes place each year in New York City for a week in November.
Melanie Leishman is a Canadian actress. She is best known for portraying bespectacled Hannah B. Williams, one of the main characters on the cult horror/comedy television series Todd and the Book of Pure Evil. Before that, she had a recurring role on Darcy's Wild Life as Kathi Giraldi and comedy series House Party (2008) as desperate to be popular Mandy. Other TV credits include Being Erica, Republic of Doyle and Murdoch Mysteries. She has also voiced several animated roles in series such as Detentionaire, Grojband and the Total Drama Island reboot where she voices Emma. Film roles include musical/slasher Stage Fright (2014) as Liz Silver, comedy-drama The Exchange (2021) as Diane and Christmas romantic-comedy Single All the Way (2021) as Ashleigh.
Toronto After Dark Film Festival is a showcase of horror, sci-fi, action and cult cinema held annually in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The festival premieres a diverse selection of feature-length and short-films from around the world including new works from Asia, Europe and North America.
Fantastic Fest is an annual film festival in Austin, Texas. It was founded in 2005 by Tim League of Alamo Drafthouse.
Eileen Mary Theresa Daly is an English actress, director, film producer, writer, singer, presenter, songwriter and former adult film performer. She is also a contemporary scream queen, having starred in numerous cult horror films and fronts her own band Eileen and Ben.
Rec is a 2007 Spanish found footage horror film co-written and directed by Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza. The film stars Manuela Velasco as a reporter who, with her cameraman, accompany a group of firefighters on an emergency call to an apartment building to discover an infection spreading inside, with the building being sealed up and all occupants ordered to follow a strict quarantine.
Dustbin Baby is a BBC television film directed by Juliet May, based on Jacqueline Wilson's 2001 novel of the same name. It was first broadcast on BBC One on 21 December 2008. The film stars Dakota Blue Richards as April, a troubled teenager who was abandoned in a dustbin as an infant, and Juliet Stevenson as Marion Bean, April's adoptive mother. David Haig stars as Elliot, Marion's friend and colleague. The screenplay was written by Helen Blakeman, and the film was produced by Kindle Entertainment. Dustbin Baby deals with themes including maternal bonding, bullying, and youth crime. The story revolves around April running away on her fourteenth birthday, while Marion searches for her. April's life is recounted in flashbacks as she meets people and visits places that are significant to her.
Hobo with a Shotgun is a 2011 exploitation black comedy action film directed by Jason Eisener and written by John Davies. Based on Eisener's fictitious trailer of the same name from Grindhouse (2007), it is the second feature-length adaptation of a fictitious Grindhouse trailer, following Robert Rodriguez's Machete (2010).
Wild Flowers is a Czech drama film released in 2000. It was directed by F. A. Brabec and based on seven poems from Kytice, a collection of ballads by Karel Jaromír Erben. While relatively successful commercially, the film was deplored by critics for its crude literalism of depiction.
Molly Kathleen Dunsworth is a Canadian actress. She is best known for her starring role in the Canadian feature film Hobo with a Shotgun, in which she plays "Abby" alongside Rutger Hauer.
V/H/S/2 is a 2013 found footage horror anthology film produced by Bloody Disgusting and Roxanne Benjamin. The second installment in the V/H/S franchise, it comprises four found footage segments linked together by a fifth frame narrative. V/H/S/2 features a largely different group of directors: Jason Eisener, Gareth Wuw Evans, Timo Tjahjanto, Eduardo Sánchez, and Gregg Hale, and franchise returnees Simon Barrett and Adam Wingard.
The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a 2015 American comedy-drama film written and directed by Marielle Heller, based on the hybrid novel of the same name by Phoebe Gloeckner. It stars Bel Powley as a 15-year-old girl who becomes sexually active by starting a relationship with her mother's boyfriend. It also stars Kristen Wiig, Alexander Skarsgård, Christopher Meloni, Quinn Nagle, and Austin Lyon. It premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and had a limited release on August 7, 2015, by Sony Pictures Classics.
One Small Hitch is a 2012 American romantic comedy film directed by John Burgess and written by Dode B. Levenson. Shane McRae stars as Josh Shiffman, who learns that his father is dying and his only regret is that he will not get to meet the woman who will one day become his son's wife. Desperate to fulfill his dad's final wish, Josh claims that he already met that woman, Molly Mahoney, who is played by Aubrey Dollar.
Bunker 6 is a 2013 Canadian psychological thriller film set in an alternate timeline in which a nuclear holocaust takes place during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Most of the film's action is set a decade later, inside a very large fallout shelter, in which a group of survivors are faced with the dilemma of continuing life in the shelter or facing the uncertainty of life in a world contaminated by radiation. Theatrically released, the film was also destined for television and "direct-to-video" release. Directed by Canadian writer and director Greg Jackson, in his first feature film, it stars Andrea Lee Norwood and Molly Dunsworth. The supporting cast includes Jim Fowler, Glen Matthews and Shelley Thompson. The film was shot in an actual fallout shelter in Nova Scotia.
All Through the House is a 2015 American holiday slasher film written and directed by Todd Nunes and produced by The Readmond Company. It stars Ashley Mary Nunes, Jessica Cameron, and Jennifer Wenger, and follows a masked killer dressed in a Santa Claus costume who terrorizes a neighborhood during the Christmas holiday. The film was shot in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Lake Arrowhead, California over a period of 21 days.
