In Ben Sottak’s Hallowarrior, Milly Shapiro stars as Pumpkin, a young Halloween obsessed teen doing her best to survive the apocalypse. Having lost all of her family to a deadly virus, Pumpkin has existed alone in the world for years, the experience sending her slightly peculiar. Then one Halloween night, a trio of strangers arrive at her home and upset her isolated existence.
Despite starring in 2018’s horror classic Hereditary, Milly Shapiro has appeared in very few projects since. The young star has clearly been careful not to oversaturate themselves in the market, and so her return to horror in Hallowarrior is an exciting prospect for her fans. Her work as Pumpkin is wonderfully quirky and she is able to draw the audience into Pumpkin’s sorry existence. Pumpkin’s loneliness is felt throughout the opening moments and the monotony of her daily routine is a sad glimpse into her life.
Pumpkin suddenly being confronted with new, living people, should be a good thing. The innocent Pumpkin certainly takes it that way, but this is the apocalypse after all, and anyone that has watched any number of other apocalypse movies and shows understands that the most dangerous element of these environments is other people. Here the group is lead by Shannyn Sossamon’s Thalia, and their appetites are exactly what one expects from this genre of film, which is where the disappointment starts to creep in.
Hallowarrior leans too much in familiar tropes of both the home invasion and apocalypse subgenres. Sottak tries to put his unique spin on it through the zany characteristics of Pumpkin, but after a while this starts to grate. When coupled with a retreading of a very familiar road, Hallowarrior becomes more of a slog than the kickass chiller that it could be.
A well made, but unfortunately overly formulated film, Hallowarrior is a fine way to whittle around some Halloween season hours, but not quite punchy enough to become a future classic.
Hallowarrior
Summary
Ben Sottak’s debut feature shows promise, but winds up relying too heavily on tried and tested elements, which dilutes its fleeting instances of originality.
Hallowarrior arrives on Shudder from Friday 16th October 2026.
