Director/Screenplay – Chad Crawford Kinkle, Producers – Robert Tonino & Andrew van den Houten, Photography – Christopher Heinrich, Music – Sean Spillane, Visual Effects – ZP Studios, Makeup Effects – Robert Kurtzman, Production Design – Kelly Anne Ross. Production Company – Moderncinė/New Company.
Cast
Lauren Ashley Carter (Ada), Sean Bridgers (Dawai), Larry Fessenden (Sustin), Sean Young (Loriss), Daniel Manche (Jessaby), Mathieu Whitman (Bodey Jenkin), Jennifer Spriggs (Eilen Jenkin), Marvin Starkman (Coops Jenkin), Kaitlin Cullum (Christie), Katie Crosshong (Pyer), Scott Hodges (Corber), Chip Ramsey (Store Keeper), Alex Maizus (Emaciated Boy)
Plot
Ada grows up with a backwoods hillbilly family that worship a pit in the woods. Her father then announces that Ada is to be ‘joined’ with the neighbour Bodey Jenkin. However, Ada has previously had sex with her brother Jessaby and this endangers the joining and threatens to madden The Pit. Ada decides to say nothing about what happened but then discovers that she is pregnant. She also hides the fact that another family member Dawai has produced a Jug Face, which heralds a new birth. However, this has angered The Pit that now requires sacrifices and starts killing among the two families.
Jug Face is an interesting example of US Folk Horror, made before the genre emerged proper in the 2020s. It sits more in the vein of films like Pumpkinhead (1988) and Children of the Corn (1984) than the later likes of Sator (2019) and The Long Night (2022). It is set around hillbilly families united by strange rituals that seem to govern when they can marry and produce children and where they worship a pit in the ground in the woods. What The Pit is is not clear – when we see it it is like budget-H.P. Lovecraft – no more than a hole a few feet deep dug in the ground filled with a few inches of dirty red-brown water – but seems to exert a malign influence around the region and demands sacrifice for certain things.
The film creates a fascinatingly different set-up and one where it teases questions – of what The Pit is, why it influences the lives of these two families, why it demands sacrifices, how it influences marriages and births, and what exactly the production of the jug faces are meant do? On the other hand, I spent much of the time watching Jug Face in search of some type of explanatory rationale without ever receiving it. All of this mythology just Is and we are expected to take it for granted. However, as many of the details particularly surrounding the joinings, jug faces and what exactly The Pit does and requires of the families is never exactly clear, it leaves you watching a film where it feels as though big chunks of exposition ended up on the cutting room floor.
Films like Jug Face are fascinating to watch in retrospect and see the confluence among some of the names present. There’s Andrew van den Houten who has become a modest genre producer since then (see below). van Houten produced The Woman (2011), which starred Sean Bridgers – both Bridgers and that film’s director Lucky McKee are present here credited as producers, while Bridgers plays a central role on screen as the half-witted brother. A central acting role is also played by Larry Fessenden, who has a strong background as an actor and producer in genre cinema, also having directed the likes of Wendigo (2001), The Last Winter (2006) and Beneath (2013), among others. A couple of years later, Fessenden produced the word-of-mouth hit of Darling (2015), which featured this film’s fresh face Lauren Ashley Carter and proceeded to give her a name.
Lauren Ashley Carter holding a Jug Face
Jug Face was a directorial debut by Chad Crawford Kinkle. Kinkle subsequently went on to make Dementer (2019), which also featured Larry Fessenden and had a similar theme about a woman fleeing from a backwoods cult.
Andrew van den Houten has produced a number of other genre films with The Girl Next Door (2007), Home Movie (2008), Lucky McKee’s The Woman (2011), Ghoul (2012), All Cheerleaders Die (2013), Malignant (2013), Ascent to Hell (2014), Slumlord (2015), Central Park (2017), Camera Obscura (2017), No Way to Live (2017), The Night Sitter (2018), The Ranger (2018), Sadistic Intentions (2019), Darlin’ (2019), The Honeymoon Phase (2019), Sadistic Intentions (2019), The Block Island Sound (2020) and Good Samaritan/Don’t Look Back (2020). He has also directed the quite interesting Headspace (2005) in which a teenager gains expended mental powers and Offspring (2009) about a savage feral family who exist by preying on others.
