The Clovehitch Killer

This is a movie that creates fear out of creepy moments and by playing on the natural desire of wanting to feel safe with family. There's no need for blood or excessive acts of violence when the scares are this unsettling.

Skiles's film doesn't care so much if you think you know how it ends, even if you're right. It's all about twisting the knife in the process of confirming those fears.

As good as Plummer and McDermott are here, [writer Christopher D. Ford] ultimately writes himself into a corner that requires actions in the final act that don't ring true.

Unlike so many recent horror movies, The Clovehitch Killer is patient with its thrills, almost excruciatingly so.

An excellent McDermott embodies Don with just enough strangeness to keep audiences from knowing precisely where The Clovehitch Killer is heading.

McDermott is admirably unsettling, and Luke McCoubrey's artfully sterile cinematography adds an air of suffocating wholesomeness that can make you squirm.

“The Clovehitch Killer” is ostensibly focused on an investigation, but the subtext is how our American Christian culture pathologizes normal teen development, especially sexuality, while providing cover and bolstering the authority of predators.

The horror lies not so much in the destination, but the journey, and I was shocked by how wrong The Clovehitch Killer was willing to make that journey seem and feel

This movie grabs you right away, giving us a 16-year-old narrator who has skills of observation, meticulousness, self reliance, and preparedness, as instilled in him by his Scout leader dad.

Amplifies its serial killer material craftily, notch by notch.