Fantasia Festival 2025: ‘Hold the Fort’ is a laugh riot

Suburbia is terrifying – ask John Carpenter. His seminal classic, 1978’s Halloween, proved that well-kept backyards, clusters of houses, and amber-lit streets could bring terror right to your doorstep. With his new film, Hold the Fort, writer/director William Bagley taps into a deep well of modern terrors with an eye for situational and physical gags. Playing this year’s Fantasia Festival, the indie feature sits somewhere between Destroy All Neighbors and Mysterious Ways in terms of its approach to humor. It’s often slapstick but sometimes dry.

The film doesn’t waste a single frame and gets straight into the action. Young couple Lucas (Chris Mayers) and Jenny (Haley Leary) are new to the perfectly idyllic neighborhood. They’ve never had to deal with the HOA (Homeowners Association) before, so Jenny expresses her disdain over such a group keeping them on a short leash. There are strict guidelines for everything, as we quickly learn, from putting up bird feeders to the length of your front lawn. Everything comes under an intense microscope. But it shouldn’t be too bad, right?

That’s unless you’ve forgotten to read the teeny, tiny fine print in their housing contract, which all falls on Lucas. In particular, the upcoming Equinox party throws him for a loop when the HOA president informs him it’s happening that very night. “Please don’t die,” reads the party slogan. It’s not only a playful joke but a menacing warning that fails to properly prepare Lucas and Jenny for a night of bloodshed and exploding creatures. You see, the Equinox party is about protecting the community. Every so often, the “party” turns into a night of combat, as the deadliest of monsters and ghouls crawl out of a giant hole in the earth and attack the town. Sounds simple enough, yeah?

Through such an outlandish premise, Bagley makes great use of the situation to explore how different people react to stressful, life-threatening situations. The humor might not always land, and the jokes may just deflate the air from the room, yet there’s a heart that pulses at the core of it all. He sketches the characters with bright colored pencils, each possessing their own quirks and tics. There’s really no telling what this bunch of goofballs will get up to when they are fighting otherworldly monsters.

Hold the Fort is primed and readily made for midnight viewings with your friends and buckets of popcorn. Sometimes, all you need for a horror movie to do is entertain you. It doesn’t necessarily need to dispatch some deeper meaning about human nature or existence; if it can make you laugh, that’s all you really need. When all is said and done, William Bagley’s latest feature checks all the right boxes for a horror/comedy and makes for a real crowd-pleaser.