Big Baby

Spider One’s Big Baby understands a particularly modern form of creative masochism: making something intensely personal, releasing it into the world and then searching the internet to discover exactly how much strangers hate it. Horror screenwriter Adam Lewis, played with mounting exhaustion and wounded pride by Brandon Scott, has just experienced that nightmare. His latest film has been savaged, but instead of ignoring the noise, Adam listens to a pair of obnoxious podcasters, played by Jordan Elsass and Radek Lord, gleefully dismantling his work and eventually crossing the line from criticism into personal cruelty. It is an amusingly uncomfortable starting point for a film review because Big Baby is, among other things, a horror movie about people reviewing horror movies. More importantly, it asks a question critics do not necessarily enjoy confronting: when does criticism stop being discussion of the work and become entertainment built around humiliating the person who made it?

Adam’s problem is not simply that people dislike his movie. He desperately wants to be taken seriously, and that distinction becomes the key to understanding his increasingly unstable behavior. His partner Kate, played by Krsy Fox, reminds him that plenty of viewers actually enjoyed his work, but compliments slide off him while insults become permanent residents inside his head. After drinking and stewing over his professional frustrations, Adam experiences a grotesque nightmare involving an enormous figure wearing a distorted baby mask and wielding an axe. Most people would probably interpret this as an excellent reason to sleep with the lights on. Adam sees intellectual property. Soon Big Baby, physically embodied with imposing menace by Adam Marcinowski, becomes the foundation of a new screenplay. Yet the more Adam writes, the less certain he becomes that he invented the character at all. Cuts appear where they should not exist, imagined people begin addressing their creator and scenes conceived as fiction appear capable of bleeding into reality. Big Baby consequently settles into its strongest territory: not quite supernatural horror, not quite psychological breakdown, but the disturbing space where neither Adam nor the audience can confidently tell the difference.

The concept inevitably evokes films about creativity becoming dangerous, from The Shining to Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, but Spider One is less interested in building an elaborate mythology than in examining the unhealthy relationship between an artist and his creation. Big Baby is simultaneously muse, tormentor, commercial opportunity and manifestation of resentment. There is even something wonderfully absurd about Adam believing that the answer to his artistic crisis might be a hulking murderer dressed like an enormous infant. Beneath the joke, however, sits one of the film’s sharper observations. Adam wants prestige but needs inspiration; he considers himself more sophisticated than the uncomplicated slasher material he begins writing, yet that supposedly inferior form suddenly restores his creative energy. The monster therefore exposes his hypocrisy as much as his fear. Adam complains that contemporary audiences no longer understand nuance while becoming increasingly incapable of recognizing the contradictions in himself. The filmmaker-versus-critic argument is consequently more interesting when Big Baby turns it inward. Adam is certainly wounded by cruelty, but he is also vain, self-absorbed and remarkably talented at transforming every conversation into another referendum on Adam Lewis.

That imperfection is precisely why Brandon Scott becomes so important. A lesser performance might have made Adam unbearable, whereas the actor keeps revealing the frightened man underneath the professional ego. His scenes with Krsy Fox provide the film with an emotional center considerably more convincing than its bloodshed. Kate is supportive without becoming blindly accommodating, gradually recognizing that loving someone does not require following them indefinitely into their obsession. Their domestic exchanges sometimes have more tension than the overt horror sequences because they depict the collateral damage of creative fixation in recognizable terms: one partner disappears into a project while the other becomes therapist, audience, critic and emergency support system. The film could have pushed Kate further beyond this function, but Krsy Fox gives her warmth, intelligence and enough frustration to prevent the relationship from becoming merely mechanical. Their chemistry allows Big Baby to operate for surprisingly long stretches almost like an intimate drama that happens to have an axe-wielding nightmare waiting outside the bedroom.

Where Big Baby becomes less assured is in trying to accommodate every idea it introduces. Spider One touches on artistic responsibility, toxic fandom, rage-bait criticism, insecurity, the commercialization of creativity, the ethics of fictional violence and the possibility that creators eventually lose control of what they create. Any one of those subjects could sustain an entire horror film. Big Baby wants several of them simultaneously, and its final movement struggles to bring them into the same thematic orbit. Once the violence accelerates and the movie begins fulfilling more conventional slasher expectations, some of the fascinating ambiguity of its earlier passages gives way to practical-effects carnage and increasingly frantic psychological horror. The kills are effective and Big Baby himself has a genuinely memorable silhouette, but there is an irony here: a film partly concerned with whether horror needs to be more than disposable violence becomes least distinctive when it starts delivering exactly the kind of violence expected from it. The slower first two-thirds may test viewers waiting for a traditional slasher, yet they are ultimately where the movie has the most personality.

There are pleasures scattered throughout that prevent the unevenness from becoming fatal. Torio Van Grol brings an easygoing humanity to Adam’s friend James, while appearances from genre figures including David Howard Thornton, Tracie Thoms, Chaz Bono, Catherine Corcoran, Del Howison and Angel Melanson give the film the atmosphere of a production made by people deeply embedded in horror culture. Chaz Bono in particular participates in one of the movie’s funniest macabre detours, proof that Big Baby works best when it allows its morbidity and eccentric humor to occupy the same room. Behind the camera, the film also resists becoming a straightforward retro-slasher exercise. Andy Patch’s cinematography favors unsettling perspectives rather than drowning everything in nostalgic genre quotation, while the score by Alexander Lewis avoids simply reaching for the familiar synthesizer vocabulary associated with countless contemporary throwbacks. The result may be modestly scaled, but it rarely looks creatively anonymous.

Perhaps Big Baby’s most intriguing achievement is that its flaws mirror the neurosis of its protagonist. Adam desperately wants his screenplay to contain meaning, originality, scares, commercial potential and artistic legitimacy all at once; Spider One’s film occasionally appears to be wrestling with exactly the same ambitions. That makes its inconsistencies frustrating, but also strangely revealing. The movie’s attack on cruel criticism would have been simplistic had Adam merely been an innocent genius persecuted by idiots. Instead, he is sometimes right, sometimes insufferable and frequently both within the same conversation. Likewise, the podcasters are deliberately grotesque examples of an attention economy in which the nastiest sentence makes the best clip. The more interesting point is not that critics are villains but that everyone involved has become trapped inside a system rewarding extremes: artists obsess over validation, commentators compete for engagement and nuanced conversation gets buried somewhere underneath. For anyone who writes about movies professionally, there is an amusing extra layer in having to review a film that is staring directly back at the person writing the review.

Big Baby does not entirely reconcile the thoughtful psychological drama of its opening with the bloodier genre mechanics of its conclusion, and some of its most provocative ideas disappear just when they deserve deeper examination. Yet dismissing it as merely another masked-killer movie would miss what makes Spider One’s approach interesting. Big Baby is really a film about creation as an act of surrender: once an idea leaves the artist’s head, it belongs partly to audiences, critics and culture, and its creator can no longer control what it becomes. The monstrous infant is a wonderfully blunt visual metaphor for that principle — a creation born from Adam that immediately develops needs, demands and destructive impulses of its own. Messy, sometimes indulgent but frequently perceptive, Big Baby works better as an anxious portrait of creative obsession than as a pure slasher. Its monster may carry the axe, but the film understands that the more frightening weapon can be a sentence — whether written by the artist, spoken by the critic or repeated endlessly inside the creator’s own head.

Big Baby
Written and directed by Spider One       
Produced by Krsy Fox, Spider One
Starring  Krsy Fox, Brandon Scott, Adam Marcinowski, Catherine Corcoran, Torio Van Grol, Kate Freund, Jordan Elsass, Radek Lord, Cameron Cowperthwaite, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Nelson Leis, Chaz Bono, Jessica Michelle Singleton, Levi Lavian, Riley London, Angel Melanson, Luke Barnett, Del Howison, Daniel Montgomery
Cinematography : Andy Patch
Edited by Krsy Fox
Music by Alexander Taylor
Production companies : OneFox Productions
Distributed by Brainstorm Media (United States)
Release dates :  NC
Running time : 103 minutes

Viewed on August 19, 2026 (Tubi Frightfest 2026 press screener)