Shudder’s new indie sci-fi shocker is one of the most unsettling horror movies I’ve seen in years
Steeped in old-school horror tropes, Grammy-winning musician, rapper, producer and filmmaker Flying Lotus’ (V/H/S/99) new-to-streaming phantasmagoria, Ash, is primed and pumped to provide all the high-octane cosmic nightmare fuel you might ever want to tank up on.
With its first-person shooter video game pedigree and obvious homages to films like John Carpenter’s The Thing and Paul W.S. Anderson’s Event Horizon, with a sprinkling of H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones tossed in, Ash got a theatrical release on March 21, 2025 by XYZ Films and now it’s come to the horror-centric platform Shudder starting on Friday, June 20.
Trust me when I say that you’ve never seen such disturbing, imaginative imagery like this and it’s a must-watch revelation for any card-carrying horror hound or diehard sci-fi aficionado. You might even want to keep all the house lights on and huddle up with braver souls than your own.
The storyline employed is relatively simple and it’s a well-worn plot device in survival horror gaming and sci-fi territory where an astronaut awakens aboard a spaceship with little or no memory of what tragedy has occurred and a mysterious lethal antagonist lurking on the dark.
Aaron Paul (Breaking Bad, Need For Speed) and Eiza González (Baby Driver) star in this extraordinarily frightening project helmed by Flying Lotus from a clever screenplay penned by native Swiss actor Jonni Remmler. Ash carries with it the confident attitude and flair of raw ‘90s-era grindhouse science fiction horror movies such as indie director Richard Stanley’s Hardware or Vincenzo Natali’s chilling Cube. Match that with video game DNA from franchises like Doom, Dead Space, and Silent Hill and you’ve got an idea of what’s in store.
Here’s the official synopsis: “On the mysterious planet of Ash, Riya (González) awakens to find her crew slaughtered. When a man named Brion (Paul) arrives to rescue her, an ordeal of psychological and physical terror ensues while Riya and Brion must decide if they can trust one another to survive.”
The cast also includes Iko Uwais, Kate Elliott, Beulah Koale, and Flying Lotus, who wrote the insanely addictive original synthwave score that acts as a perfect complement to the visionary frights. This atmospheric music was written in off-grid fashion while FlyLo was in New Zealand using only a MIDI controller and his personal laptop computer and the results are astounding.
Punctuate with intense pools of saturated color, monstrous alien entities, and jump scares that might leave you breathless, this a truly something to savor and we’re thrilled to introduce this stellar work by Flying Lotus, one of our best and brightest hyphenate talents on the planet.
There’s also a jaw-dropping unintentional homage to the Palmer Monster scene in Carpenter’s The Thing that ratchets up the blood and gore to ridiculous dimensions that you won’t want to miss.
Now streaming on Shudder, Ash is produced by XYZ Films’ Nate Bolotin and GFC Films’ Mathew Metcalf and executive produced by Nick Spicer, Maxime Cottray, Aram Tertzakian, Maile Daughtery, Flying Lotus, Neill Blomkamp, Dave Brown, and Adam Riback.
You might also like
Steeped in old-school horror tropes, Grammy-winning musician, rapper, producer and filmmaker Flying Lotus’ (V/H/S/99) new-to-streaming phantasmagoria, Ash, is primed and pumped to provide all the high-octane cosmic nightmare fuel you might ever want to tank up on. With its first-person shooter video game pedigree and obvious homages to films like…
