I assume that Delineator Films is really just director and writer , the same man who brought us UFO Top Secret and its spiritual siblings UFO Exclusive and Amazing World of Ghosts. When you watch enough of Dixon’s movies, you start to realize that his filmmaking method is less about directing and more about curating whatever film cans happen to be lying around the room. If there’s a reel of stock footage, a religious educational short or a black-and-white dramatization from the Eisenhower administration, chances are it’s going to show up in one of his movies eventually.

Dixon didn’t shoot any of this, of course. Like most of his work, it’s a cinematic patchwork quilt. The footage comes from productions made by Family Films, pulled from several episodic religious series that were already decades old by the time Dixon got his hands on them. If you want to get technical, and you know I do, the footage seems like it was taken from several episodic series, including The Living Bible, a 26-part series released from 1952-55, and The Old Testament Scriptures, a 14-part mini-series released in 1958 and 1959.

This feels ancient now and probably felt as moldy in 1979.

Narrated by the ever-serious Sidney Paul, this film consists mostly of pantomime reenactments that tell the stories of Moses from the Old Testament and Jesus Christ from the New. If you’ve ever seen those old church-produced Bible films where everyone moves slowly, stares toward heaven and gestures dramatically like they’re trapped in a silent movie, that’s basically the vibe.

The production values scream mid-century religious educational film. The costumes look like something from a church basement pageant. The lighting is flat. The acting is…well, “acting” might be generous. Most of the performers appear to have been instructed to slowly raise their arms, gaze upward, and move around like they’re in a reverent game of charades. The whole thing plays less like a movie and more like a filmed version of a Living Nativity scene your local church would put on in December.

You know the kind. Wooden manger. Plastic sheep. One kid who refuses to stay in character. Someone’s uncle is playing Joseph while trying not to drop his fake beard. Maybe I’m the only one who went to those growing up, but that’s exactly the energy here. Who am I kidding? I was in one of those for almost a decade.

What makes the film fascinating isn’t the storytelling, which is about as straightforward as it gets, but the texture of the footage. The film stock looks faded, as if someone left it sitting in a sunny storefront window for 30 years. Colors bleed, the contrast fluctuates, and every now and then the image looks like it might dissolve into dust right there on the screen.

And somehow that actually adds to the charm.

This whole thing feels like a relic. Not just a movie about biblical history, but a movie that itself feels like a historical artifact. You’re not just watching the story of Moses or Jesus. You’re watching how people in the 1950s imagined those stories should look on film, filtered through the low-budget repackaging instincts of a 1970s exploitation documentarian.

That combination is what makes a Wheeler Dixon production so strangely compelling. He’s the king of the cinematic collage, the patron saint of recycled footage. If he made a movie about aliens, ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle or the Book of Exodus, you can bet that half of it would come from some other movie he found in a bargain bin.

You can watch this on YouTube.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, legendary exploitation-film historian, rapscallion, and frequent contributor to this site, attended the 2026 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He gives us the inside scoop on some upcoming films.

FINAL EXAMINATION—Horror Filmmaking 101

Create a horror feature film using as many types of jump scares as possible. Additional points given for homages to classic horror films with jump scares. Use your imagination and be creative. (Counts for 100% of your grade for the semester)

March 16, 2026

Professor,

As my submission for the final exam, attached is a digital file of my film Hokum, with Adam Scott trapped in an Irish haunted hotel. I hope you like it.

Respectfully submitted,

Damian McCarthy

A mysterious teaser trailer was attached to Oz Perkins’s horror film Keeper last fall. While Keeper was another misfire for the prolific Perkins, the coming attraction was for one of the most anticipated horror films at SXSW 2026, Hokum, writer-director Damian McCarthy’s follow-up to his hit Oddity (2024). While quite a few folks loved Hokum at the SXSW screenings (the young woman sitting next to me watched most of the movie through her hands), it was one of the most infuriating horror movies I’ve seen in years. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Hokum begins with a perplexing scene of a man in armor and a young boy in a desert. They have a treasure map that they can’t get out of a bottle. The scene ends with a cliffhanger, and we soon learn that it’s the beginning of the epilogue of what will be the last book in author Ohm Bauman’s best-selling conquistador trilogy. Yours truly, ever the avid credits reader, sighed and noted that in the opening credits, an Abu Dhabi production company was credited, so this is McCarthy’s sucking up to his foreign investors. We’re not off to a good start.

Adam Scott as Bauman sits in the dark in his sterile, concrete residence with his laptop, drinking whiskey and laboring over how to end his book. He has writer’s block. He also has a small box that contains a revolver and some faded old photographs. Hold the phone. There was a sudden movement of something in the dark, our first jump scare. 

The next thing we know, Scott’s in Ireland to write that damn epilogue and put the ashes of his parents under a big tree where they got engaged. In rather rapid succession, he sees a local with a dead goat in the parking lot of the quaint old hotel. He insults the local. He checks into the hotel. He insults the desk clerk. He insults an old guy in a wheelchair, who is telling a folk story about a witch to some children. The old guy owns the hotel, but Scott doesn’t care. He insults the bellhop who’s a wannabe writer. He then pounds down whiskey, finds out about the honeymoon suite that’s haunted by a witch, so it must remain locked, and only mildly insults the cute young Irish woman tending bar.

This sets up two huge problems with the film: First, Scott’s an insufferable douchebag. He’s so awful that he can’t really be a surrogate or a hero for the viewer, You can’t picture yourself in his shoes, and you don’t really care what happens to him. Then there’s an unexpected shock behind his hotel room door, and McCarthy begins the mystery part of the narrative to set up the supernatural part, the movie’s second big problem. The young woman mysteriously disappears, Scott feels compelled to help find her, and the supernatural stuff sets in, which means the film will soon become a jump-scare-o-matic. Oh, I forgot to mention that when he buried those ashes, he met an old coot living out of his van in the woods who drinks milk laced with the local magic mushrooms that the goats have been eating. If you’re getting the idea that this film is overstuffed with random tropes and things that will probably end up going nowhere, ding, ding, ding, you are correct.

This mystery of the missing barmaid really cripples the film because McCarthy must interrupt the supernatural stuff to get back to Scott’s playing detective with the old coot from the woods. At this point, I thought to myself, why in the hell did we need all that set up? Just get Scott locked in the haunted honeymoon suite already. 

In the supernatural part of the movie, Scott eventually does get locked in that suite, and we have jump scares galore. I didn’t count them, but, like clockwork, there’s at least one about every 10 minutes. And McCarthy, like he’s fulfilling the requirements of the imaginary film school final exam that began this review, does almost every possible permutation of a jump scare. He gives you the motionless apparition at the end of the hallway, the out-of-focus image suddenly coming into focus outside a window, a spirit suddenly moving across the screen in the background, and a character shifting position to reveal a ghost. That fulfills the homage part of the exam by cribbing from The Shining, Suspiria, The Exorcist III, and Insidious.

But wait, there’s more! A scary thing comes out of the TV as in Poltergeist and The Ring. And The Ring was so cool, hey, let’s pay more homage to it by turning its well into the hotel’s dumbwaiter shaft. I think McCarthy plays all variations on his theme except the cat jump scare and the old chestnut with closing the medicine-cabinet mirror.

At about midpoint, I started to grade the film like an academic exercise because that’s how it felt to me: a semester-long project to see how many times you   can go “Boo!” To its credit, the production is beautiful looking, the visual effects are good, Scott gives it everything he has, and it’s never boring. About half of the attempted jump scares work well, and a couple are almost in the pantheon of the ne plus ultra, the jump scare at the end of Brian DePalma’s Carrie. But the other half don’t work due to poor timing or misdirection or a musical stinger that comes a fraction of a second too soon. 

Even as time is running out in the last act, McCarthy’s not quite finished. Look at this! It’s Inferno! Now I’m going to crib from Fulci without the gore! It’s The Fog! If you’ve been following me, it should be obvious now why the film infuriated me so much. McCarthy’s a talented horror director, for sure, but he’s just punching in all these mechanical shocks, tropes, and references that mostly go nowhere. And speaking of nowhere, we’re going back to that imaginary desert in Adam Scott’s mind for a bookend scene with the conquistador and the boy. But not before McCarthy has a last line of dialogue that pulls the rug out from under the viewer. No, it’s not “it was all a dream,” but it’s pretty damn close. 

When Hokum comes out in wide release from Neon on May 1, a lot of folks are going to rave and say that it’s effing great and scary AF. But the SXSW crowd at my screening didn’t applaud when it was over. It was the only time that happened at a screening while I was in Austin. That’s dire. Maybe other audience members felt, as I did, that McCarthy had just repeatedly punched them in the face and laughed for over an hour and a half, and that didn’t deserve applause. To paraphrase Monty Python, “I came for a horror film, not abuse.” 

Mr. McCarthy, you passed the final, but just barely. You are a smart and talented guy. Next semester, you’d better show improvement, or you’ll have to do remedial work by directing episodes of Goosebumps.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: A.C. Nicholas, legendary exploitation-film historian, rapscallion, and frequent contributor to this site, attended the 2026 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas. He gives us the inside scoop on some upcoming films.

Family Movie, a meta-horror film starring the beloved Kevin Bacon (Friday the 13th, Tremors, Hollow Man, Stir of Echoes, MaXXXine, and many more), wife Kyra Sedgwick (the long-running TV show The Closer), musician son Travis, and daughter Sosie (the TV show Scream and the film Smile) is a strange creation that resides in a murky nether world somewhere between vanity project and high-concept gimmick. In it, the Bacon family members play exaggerated versions of themselves as a family that makes micro-budget horror films.

Kevin plays Jack Smith, a farmer and struggling filmmaker, whose greatest triumph was when one of his Palonia Brothers-like films opened a crappy regional film festival two decades earlier. He’s trying to finish Blood Moon, the last horror film he’s going to make with his family. (You gotta love the inside references to the horror masterpiece Messiah of Evil in Dan Beers’s screenplay, including the climax of Jack’s film, which is something akin to the never-filmed sacrifice scene from Messiah.) Kyra plays his wife, a failed New York stage actress, who stars in the family’s films and does craft services–humus and stuff that will “bloat” a bit player. Travis is their boom-operator son, a heavy-metal head into martial arts who longs for something more in life. And Sosie is their daughter, of course, a budding actress who has just landed a starring role in a TV series filming in Vancouver, but who is afraid to tell her mom that mom’s former agent, now an enemy, got her the job. It’s just your average family with average problems.

But, as you can guess, things do not go smoothly on Blood Moon. A documentary filmmaker hired by Jack to do a “making of” film keeps catching the family at its worst, a surly neighbor, played by a very funny John Carroll Lynch (Face/Off, Gothika, and Zodiac), has a dog that keeps barking and ruining takes, and wonderful character actor Jackie Earle Haley (Dollman, Maniac Cop III: Badge of Silence, and the remake of Nightmare on Elm Street), playing a Smith-film regular, gets conked on the head with a spotlight. And as his SAG insurance has just expired, he hands Jack the hospital bill, which is huge because the wound reopened and oozed and all that. Then there’s a real murder and we’re off to even broader humor, more murders, lots of gore, family meetings where secrets are revealed, and proof that the family that slays together stays together. 

Sounds like fun, right? Well, for a time it is kind of  fun. The Bacons seem like nice people whom you’d want to hang out with, and they’re clearly having a ball, especially Kyra. But I think my plot synopsis makes Family Movie sound much better than it really is. It’s co-directed by Kevin and Kyra in a slick, fussy way (too many unnecessary tracking shots) that the fictional Bacon clan could have only dreamed of achieving. I hate to use the cliché, but it’s never truer than here: They’re all having more fun than the viewer with this burlesque horror-comedy, which isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either. I’d describe it as kind of the American horror version of an Ealing Studios black comedy like Kind Hearts and Cornets as done by Benny Hill with assistance from the Cohen Brothers, while drunk on Malort. (But if that were true, it would be a much better movie.) It’s cute and pleasant enough, but obvious and predictable, and I’m sure I won’t think about it again after finishing this review. 

Fun fact: A producer friend of mine was invited to the pre-screening party for Family Movie. He told me Kevin Bacon didn’t attend his own party but was seen later looking surly, accompanied by his gigantic bodyguard. Somebody must’ve mentioned Footloose to Bacon, and the bodyguard had to throw the miscreant through a wall. Now that image is better and funnier than anything in Family Movie.

Family Movie has apparently been picked up by Neon but does not have a release date. 

I assume that this is Attack from Outer Space, but when it comes to the paranormal docs of Wheeler Dixon, it’s hard to tell if you’re watching UFO Top Secret or UFO Exclusive and Wheeler is all about recycling footage from his other movies, which include Amazing World of Ghosts, World of Mystery and Mysteries of the Bible.

This is…something.

The man clearly believed that if you’ve already got a blurry light in the sky once, why not show it again? And again. And then maybe tint it purple and pretend it’s new footage. And it all makes sense, believe it or not, because Winston Wheeler Dixon didn’t just make UFO movies. 

According to Wikipedia, his scholarship has particular emphasis on François Truffaut, Jean‑Luc Godard, American experimental cinema and horror films. The Museum of Modern Art has exhibited his work. He’s taught at Rutgers University, The New School in New York, the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and was the James E. Ryan professor emeritus of film studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

So yes: the same guy who gave lectures on French New Wave cinema also directed movies in which a glowing dot over a mountain is supposed to convince you that alien warships are about to level Cleveland.

What makes my brain hurt even more is that he was a member of the New York City underground experimental film scene, wrote for Interview and co-founded the band Figures of Light. That’s right. The man who made bargain-bin— I say that term fondly—UFO documentaries was also helping lay the groundwork for noisy New York punk before most people even knew where or what CBGB was.

This explains a lot about these movies. They feel less like documentaries and more like someone in the early 70s decided to make a collage of every weird thing they could find in a public domain archive.

With a voiceover by Sidney Paul (who was also the narrator of Guerrilla Girl), this explores the wonder and magic of “what if aliens attacked us?” all while we watch tinted photos, NASA-looking stock footage and blurred-out images that could be UFOs…or could be dust on the lens…or could be literally anything.  

Meanwhile, the soundtrack just chills in the background with that unmistakable 70s library-music energy: wah-wah guitars, cheap synth stabs, and the occasional sci-fi sound effect that feels like it escaped from a middle school planetarium show. It’s less about proving aliens exist and more about setting a vibe where you sit back and think, “Yeah, maybe that glowing thing is from another galaxy.”

Star Force comes from that strange era where documentaries were allowed to be a little loose with the facts, a little dreamy and a lot weird. Nobody expected hard evidence. They just wanted spooky narration, grainy footage and the feeling that something mysterious might be happening just beyond the edge of the frame. And yes, maybe the title sounds like another film, so perhaps that gets you in the theater or pulling into the drive-in.

Put it on, dim the lights, light one up and let it wash over you. Just don’t expect answers. That was never really the point.

You can watch this on YouTube.