FrightFest 2020: ‘Triggered’ is rad as hell

There are few settings as innately haunting as the woods. Whether you’re talking Friday the 13th or The Blair Witch Project or The Ritual, crackling of twigs and dead leaves casts a frigid chill to any tale you’re willing to tell. In the case of Triggered, playing this year’s FrightFest, director Alastair Orr hits an absolute homerun through relentless carnage, blood-curdling screams, and the perfect Saw-meets-Lord of the Flies volatility.

Whatever it is you’ve done in the past will always come back to torment you. And that’s certainly a guarantee when nine friends, who probably wouldn’t otherwise hang out, decide it’s a good idea to head out into the woods, 30 miles away from town, for a weekend of reminiscing about high school, drinking, and sex. The cast have their roles to fill, and they play them well. Rian (Reine Swart) is the intellectual with the pixie cut, while Ezra (Stephen John Ward) is the dashing leading man, with PJ (Cameron Scott) filling the resident rocker arcetype. Elsewhere, you have the shy quiet one (Erin, played by Liesl Ahlers), the bubbly popular girl (Cici, played by Kayla Privett), and the narcisstic jerk-off (Kato, played by Russell Crous).

Once they’ve set up camp, Orr hauls the viewer right into the middle of all the drama, and unlike most flicks of this sort, it’s actually compelling enough to keep you locked in. Who has slept with who and who has cheated on who is the character filler, assembling the dynamics and smaller circles within the group at large. They’re all interconnected, but such friction later propels the bloodshed. It’s all for a reason, and it just works. When Erin trails off into the darkening woods for the bathroom, she is ambushed by a man in a black robe, who we later learn to be Mr. Peterson (Sean Cameron Michael), their old high school science teacher. Erin awakes in a sticky sea-green fog, obviously dazed from the punch out, and discovers not only a device strapped to her chest but her friends coming to, as well.

Left stranded and confused, the group must learn the rules of the game all on their own. The contraption, as they discover, contains an LED screen with a countdown, and as the numbers tick past, the person with the least amount of time is at the mercy of Mr. Peterson and his sick, sadistic playtime. When time finally runs out, the person explodes. What we have here is a survival of the fittest, or, more aptly, survival of the person willing to kill or who can hunker down and stay hidden until the end.

Triggered ( written by David D. Jones) plays largely an ensemble piece, each crucial to the much larger whole ⏤ but it is Crous’ turn as the maniacal, blood-thirsty Kato that steals the entire show. “Thanks for the good time, slut!” he spouts one-liners like venom falling from his tongue. He is downright savage, both in willingness to slaughter his friend and to curse them off while doing it. Crous delivers his lines with a sinister coolness, leaning into the macabre humor and built-in cruelty.

One by one, the players fall like flies, and you never know who could possibly be the last person standing. Orr fiddles with expectations while also tethering to genre tropes, but the execution unfurls in such a way that’s punk-rock-fueled fun. Triggered could have used some tune-ups with bits of dialogue ⏤ and a good erasure to a reveal that sides very homophobic (a character has been blackmailed to assist in this night of terror, which reads like something out of most, dated ’80s cinema, let’s be honest). There remains some delight in such hamfistedness, particularly when characters must pack every emotion they can muster into long, breathy speeches.

Coupled with some sick special makeup effects, Triggered is a full-throttle, totally rad, no-fucks-given escapade in the woods.

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