Celebrating Horror’s Present: Film Review - It Feeds

Director: Chad Archibald
Genre: Horror
Format: Streaming - Disney+

It Feeds follows a clairvoyant therapist who uses her powers to help clients overcome great traumas. She has developed a safety routine with her teenaged daughter, who vets all clients before she meets with them to ensure the family’s safety. That is until a fourteen-year-old girl shows up begging for help, a dark energy that only the therapist can see attached to her shoulders.

I went into this movie expecting nothing and was immediately terrified. Possession movies always bother me, but this one was particularly well crafted and with enough differences from your average possession movie to keep the audience interested. The setting and stakes were clear from the very beginning. I was locked in right away, drawn in both by a solid first scene and the tension inherent in the teen actors, both of whom were excellent. The scenes are lean enough to keep us tense and the subject matter is typical horror – done well and with tact.

The tight first act is followed by an equally tight second act. The tension is high, and the physical plot moves quickly. My only complaint here is that the adult actors weren’t nearly as strong as the teen leading the action. The lighting also bothered me. I love dimly lit movies, but they are just too hard for me to see nowadays. Back in the nineties, they were dark but still viewable. This one isn’t unless you watch with all the lights off.

The third act reduced some of the tension that had been built up in the first and second acts. I wasn’t entirely mad at the turn it took, but it had a different feel than what came before and almost felt like it could’ve been a separate movie. We shift genres/tones like we do in Saloum – a powerful genre bending horror movie. But with Saloum, the transitions between genres and tones feel natural, allowing us to flow through any changes with ease. It Feeds doesn’t fully set up our transition, which leaves act three feeling somewhat disjointed from the first two. That said, as a standalone, it still works reasonably well.

It Feeds isn’t flashy. It’s not doing anything new, and it doesn’t really need to. We are given lots of good horror movie staples: slow camera rolls, flashes of scary demons in the backgrounds and corners of things. It’s female-led, and the main characters aren’t the annoying, helpless horror leads we’re used to: they have grit, knowledge, and paranormal skill, along with their own trauma.

This film was super spooky. The camera angles, solid score, and jump scares had me tense. I wish the third act aligned more with the first two, but either way, It Feeds is an interesting watch that will keep you guessing. 3/5.

Review By:

Chelsea Catherine
chelseacatherinewriter.com