Directed by David Ian McKendry and Rebekah McKendry
Written by David Ian McKendry and Rebekah McKendry
Starring Constance Wu and others (see below)
Running time: 1 hour and 20 minutes

by Audrey Callerstrom

All the Creatures Were Stirring was written and directed by the husband and wife team of David Ian McKendry and Rebekah McKendry. Previously, they made a film called Psycho Granny (aka Granny’s Home). Rebekah formerly worked for Fangoria and is now the Editor-in-Chief for Blumhouse Productions, in addition to teaching film at USC. Her husband, David, is a screenwriter. I’m sure they are a fun couple to talk to, and that they had fun making this film. Maybe they got a chance to work with friends and play with the fake blood in between takes (for best results, always play with the props, it’s fun!) I want to be gentle on a film that has such a modest budget and certainly means no harm, but it’s a blah and broken mess.

The actors don’t move or talk like actors who are properly directed. You can tell by how unfamiliar they feel with each other. With a proper lack of context, they’re just strangers in a room reading words on a page. It feels forced and unrehearsed. Lines are awkward and filled with lazy exposition (“We’ve been neighbors for 5 years!”) Recognition to the person in charge of special effects, because they’re surprisingly good for small-budget horror, including a demon that looks not unlike the recent Venom. None of the actors here fare better than any of the others, even Constance Wu. All the Creatures was filmed in 2018 (possibly before then), but wasn’t released until this year. This was before Wu starred in Hustlers and the record-breaking romcom Crazy Rich Asians. She is, not surprisingly, named as the primary star in promotional materials and on IMDB.

The structure for the anthology is amusing enough: Jenna (Ashley Clements) and Max (Graham Skipper) meet on Christmas Eve for a date (maybe?) to see a play, All The Creatures Stirring. It requires suspension of disbelief that two people who barely know each other would choose a play they’ve never heard of as a date. The director and emcee of the play, character actor Maria Olsen (who also played a director in Starry Eyes), introduces each story of the play with title cards. Actors come to the stage and then a short film starts. Why bother with the theater setting, then? It starts with an office Christmas party where a secret Santa gift exchange includes some “killer gifts” – a silly concept executed with complete seriousness, using split screens as a cheap way to try and add suspense. It ends abruptly. Another short features a dad (Matt Long) heading home from the store on Christmas Eve only to be intercepted by occult hotties played by Makeda Declet (Psycho Granny) and Katie Parker (The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor). In what could have been a funny segment, a man named Guy (Mark Kelly) hits a deer only for the deer to seek revenge (hint: it’s a special kind of deer). Another segment finds a real life Grinch/Scrooge type (Jonathan Kite) enduring a series of odd occurrences and hallucinations.

The last segment is a story about a man (Morgan Peter Brown), a werewolf preparing for a full moon, that is surprised by a group of friends who throw him a dinner party. The werewolf element gets tossed aside when one of the guests, Gabby (Wu), nods off while sitting outside (like you do) and has bizarre Twilight Zone-style dreams. The fact that this segment starts in one direction and then drops it completely for a new one makes it feel like it was executed from draft form. All of the stories feel like this. Moments of violence never seem to come as a surprise. Of course a man in an empty parking lot is going to be in danger. Of course a surly Christmas-hater will have a comeuppance. Of course hitting a deer means it will come try to kill you – never mind, maybe that isn’t as intuitive. Even some of the worst horror anthologies, like Holidays, had at least one stand-out story. But then, this is not a typical horror anthology where a different director crafts a vision for each segment. It’s all the same, a disappointing and unmemorable 80 minutes of limp and boring segments.

Available to watch on DVD, November 23.

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