Oddities

There is something immediately appealing about a horror film that understands the pleasure of entering a place where every object seems to have a history and every shadow might conceal another story. Oddities, written and directed by Tyler Savage, embraces precisely that sensation. Not to be confused with Damian Mc Carthy’s 2024 film Oddity, this American horror thriller initially presents itself as a grimy crime story about two young women making spectacularly bad decisions before quietly changing shape. Rose, played by Lilimar Hernandez, and Makenna, played by Lovie Simone, are self-destructive best friends whose already chaotic existence takes a disastrous turn when they accidentally kill their drug dealer. Their solution is hardly sophisticated: get out of town, keep moving and hope distance can bury the consequences. Inevitably, it cannot. A roadside antique store seems to offer temporary sanctuary, but in Oddities, refuge is simply another word for trap.

The antique shop is where Tyler Savage reveals the real personality of his film. Shelves packed with forgotten possessions, curios and objects whose original owners are best left unimagined turn the location into something between a thrift store, a museum and a supernatural waiting room. Cinematographer Antonio Cisneros makes excellent use of that clutter, allowing the eye to wander through frames without ever becoming entirely comfortable with what might be hiding at their edges. At the centre of this strange little kingdom is Betty, embodied with delicious ambiguity by Adrienne Barbeau. Initially warm, almost grandmotherly, Betty appears to be exactly the person Rose and Makenna desperately need: someone willing to help without asking too many questions. Yet Adrienne Barbeau has spent far too much of her career around cinematic monsters for an audience to trust that smile completely. Her performance works because she never rushes the transformation. Kindness and menace coexist in Betty long before the screenplay explains why.

There is also a wonderful bit of genre history behind that casting. Oddities did not begin as a feature but as a 2023 short written and directed by Tyler Savage, with Adrienne Barbeau already occupying its sinister antique-shop universe. The short followed different characters and functioned as a compact, nasty little genre tale; the feature is less a simple stretching of fifteen minutes into ninety than a substantial reinvention of the premise. Even more charmingly, Cody Carpenter, the son of Adrienne Barbeau and John Carpenter, reportedly helped bring the original screenplay to his mother’s attention. That connection gives the finished film an amusing circularity. Adrienne Barbeau, whose collaborations with John Carpenter helped make her one of horror cinema’s most recognizable faces, is not being deployed merely as nostalgic decoration. Tyler Savage gives her the keys to the building and lets her determine its temperature. At the film’s Brussels premiere, she recalled the contrasting acting advice she had received from John Carpenter, who encouraged restraint, and George A. Romero, who wanted considerably more expressiveness. Betty rather wonderfully seems to live somewhere between those two approaches.

What prevents Oddities from becoming merely an exercise in horror nostalgia, however, is the relationship between its two fugitives. Lilimar Hernandez and Lovie Simone play Rose and Makenna as women whose friendship has survived largely because each understands the other’s capacity for catastrophe. They are not conventional spotless final girls waiting for evil to invade their lives; when we meet them, their lives are already burning. That distinction matters. Their impulsiveness, drug-fuelled mistakes and questionable survival instincts generate both comedy and tension, while their loyalty provides the emotional thread holding together a screenplay increasingly determined to go off the rails. Lovie Simone brings an especially grounded quality to the escalating madness, while Lilimar Hernandez supplies nervous energy and vulnerability. Once the pair understand that Betty’s shop may be considerably more dangerous than whatever they were fleeing, their transition from irresponsible runaways to reluctant survivors feels earned rather than mechanically imposed by genre convention.

And then Oddities gets weird. Very weird. The film’s smartest decision is not to reveal its entire hand too quickly. Tyler Savage begins with crime-thriller ingredients, flirts with home-invasion mechanics and gradually opens the door onto occult horror, arcane mythology and increasingly monstrous possibilities. Comparisons with The Cabin in the Woods are understandable, particularly in the film’s pleasure in manipulating familiar horror expectations, but Oddities is less interested in dismantling the genre than playing enthusiastically inside its toy box. There are traces of EC Comics and Tales from the Crypt, flashes of Tobe Hooper-style grotesquerie and the mischievous feeling that every new revelation might expose another hidden compartment in the story. Xander Berkeley and Will Oldham contribute to an ensemble populated by people who seem just eccentric enough to belong in this universe, while Sarah Durn, Annie Fitzpatrick and Bonita Elery help give its margins the feeling of a larger, stranger world. Not every tonal swerve lands with equal precision, but the film’s willingness to risk excess is considerably more entertaining than cautious horror assembled according to an algorithm.

The filmmaking has that same handcrafted quality. Antonio Cisneros photographs the shop as a tactile space rather than a generic haunted location, and editor Stephen Boyer keeps the film moving as its initially contained narrative begins accumulating bodies, threats and increasingly bizarre complications. At roughly ninety minutes, Oddities understands the value of momentum. Once the various parties converge on the property, Tyler Savage accelerates rather than overexplains, allowing violence, black comedy and supernatural mythology to collide. There is a gleeful B-movie streak here, but never the sense that “B-movie” is being used as an excuse for indifference. The production clearly loves practical spaces, peculiar characters and the physical texture of horror. Most importantly, the humour rarely cancels the danger. We can laugh at the absurdity of Rose and Makenna’s predicament while still believing that the next room could contain something genuinely awful.

If Oddities has a weakness, it comes from the same ambition that makes it enjoyable. Tyler Savage throws so many genre ingredients into the cabinet that some receive only a tantalizing glance, and viewers looking for a tightly controlled, purely frightening experience may find the tonal mutations excessive. The mythology occasionally feels less like a closed narrative system than an invitation to imagine further stories, and the film clearly enjoys withholding certainty. Yet that incompleteness also gives it personality. Its final movements refuse the safest possible resolution and reinforce the idea that Betty’s world extends well beyond the particular nightmare Rose and Makenna have stumbled into. Rather than exhausting its central concept, the film leaves the cabinet door conspicuously ajar.

Oddities ultimately succeeds because it knows exactly what kind of audience it wants to entertain: viewers who enjoy horror as a vast shared language of monsters, occult secrets, doomed criminals, eccentric villains and affectionate cinematic references. Tyler Savage demonstrates genuine affection for that language without simply copying it, while Lilimar Hernandez and Lovie Simone provide the human chemistry needed to stop the film becoming an empty parade of twists. Above all stands Adrienne Barbeau, simultaneously comforting and alarming, turning Betty into the kind of shopkeeper who could persuade you to stay for tea even while every survival instinct is screaming for the door. Messy in places, mischievous almost everywhere and increasingly unhinged as it approaches its finale, Oddities feels like discovering an unlabeled object at the back of an antique shop: you know touching it is probably a terrible idea, but there is absolutely no chance you are leaving it alone.

Oddities
Written and directed by Tyler Savage
Produced by: David Sherman Broad, Javier González, Noah Lang, Max Neace
Starring: Adrienne Barbeau, Xander Berkeley, Lovie Simone, Lilimar, Will Oldham, Sarah Durn, Annie Fitzpatrick, Bonita Elery
Cinematography: Antonio Cisneros
Edited by Stephen Boyer
Production companies: Fryman Films, Wrigley Media Group
Distributed by NC
Release dates: NC
Running time: 91 minutes

Viewed on August 22, 2026 (Tubi Frightfest 2026 press screener)