Director/Screenplay/Photography – Calvin McCarthy/Calvin Morie McCarthy, Producers – Chad Buffett, Michelle Cain, Edgar Conroy, Michael Conroy, Marc Helfirch, Susan Helfich, Jake Hershman, Scott Motisko & Rich Wolff, Music – Feeding Fingers, Visual Effects/Special Effects/Production Design – Raptor Studios/Raptor FX Studios (Coordinator – Chad Buffett), Visual Effects Supervisor – Megan Noble, Makeup Effects – Chad Buffett,. Production Company – 7th Street Productions.
Cast
Laura Welsh (Samantha), Chynna Rae Shurts (Barbra), Allegra Sweeney (Miles), Jax Kellington (Alana), Neil Green (Office McLoughlin), Stephanie Leet (Office Shauna Cunningham), Daniel Donlon (Chris Greene), Jon Meggison (Adam), Savannah Raye Jones (Ashley), Nicolette Pullin (Mikki), Amy DiLorenzo (Mrs Fisher), Sebastian Bjorn (Carter Fisher), Calvin McCarthy (Parker)
Plot
At the Corman High School graduation party, several students play a prank on Ashley, convincing her to meet Carter in the bathrooms to make out, only for all of them to be waiting to go “surprise!’. This causes Ashley to snap and shoot Carter. Two years later, Samantha and four other girls get away to the cabin in the woods for the weekend. Samantha still feels guilt about the prank they pulled on Ashley. They receive news reports that someone has escaped from the asylum, which Samantha believes might be Ashley. A masked figure then begins killing people in the vicinity and then coming after them.
Calvin McCarthy, also listed on the credits as Calvin Morie McCarthy, has made a modest output of low-budget horror films since the mid-2010s with the likes of Bedtimescarries.com (2015), 3 Flies in a Widow’s Web (2016), If These Walls Could Talk (2017), Jesus I Was Evil (2018), An Amityville Poltergeist (2020), A Haunting in Ravenwood (2021), Mutant Vampires from the Planet Neptune (2021), Conjuring: The Beyond (2022), Insidious Inferno (2023), Beware the Boogeyman (2024), Conjuring the Cult (2024) and an episode of the anthology Spunk’s Not Dead (2018). He has also produced Dead Man Island (2013) and Exorcism in Utero (2023) for other directors.
Pillow Party Massacre is very much a throwback and homage to the 1980s Slasher Film. It is not a film that comes steeped in nods and winks to an audience – apart from a Corman High School – nor is it parodying or deconstructing the genre. It is just a competent and quite well made reworking of the genre’s essentials. There are all the familiar tropes of the genre – the killer hidden behind a mask; the girls at the isolated cabin being stalked; the traumatic prank gone wrong that ends with someone in the rubber room and the belief it is them come to wreak revenge a la Terror Train (1980).
Girls settle in for a pillow party – (l to r) Chynna Rae Shurts, Allegra Sweeney, Laura Welsh and Jax Kellington
Calvin Morie McCarthy surprises you. In what you expect as being no more than a standard throwaway B-budget slasher film – there are dozens of them out there – he and his cast invest it with some solid characterisations. None more so than the scene that immediately follows the prank gone wrong with Laura Welsh expressing guilt to her partner (who is played by McCarthy). Welsh in particular gives a good performance, while the others combine to give the usual one-dimensional parts of the victim line-up more coloured depth than usual.
One of the things that Pillow Party Massacre also manages is some quite good kills – an essential aspect of any slasher film. There is a fine one early on where Nicolette Pullin is attacked and a knife comes right through her eyeball from behind. In another shot, we see a person hacked in half vertically with a machete – with both halves falling on the ground following by a pile of guts. There is no particular surprise to this in that Chad Buffett, who is responsible for the makeup effects, is also one of the film’s primary producers.
With the addition of some decent kills, a good cast offering some more rounded than usual characterisations, Pillow Party Massacre is actually a modern slasher revival that far exceeds expectation.
