Here are three feature films we’re most hyped to see at Unnamed Footage Festival 2025
This year’s festival promises all the chills and thrills.
God bless festivals that include virtual/remote coverage for those critics and writers who, for whatever reason, can not travel. Chattanooga, I’m looking at you! That brings me to the Unnamed Film Festival, taking place in San Francisco. Focused on found footage (!!!), the fest promises to deliver nail-biting suspense, ghoulish scares, and genre entries we won’t soon forget. Fortunately, I’m covering the festival for the very first time!
The days-long festival offers full-length features and shorts to get your blood pumping. This year will be bigger than ever, with a slew of intriguing titles that’ll scratch that itch. Below, I’ve selected three feature films I’m most excited to see.
What I Remember
Director: Alex Hera
Based on Hera’s short film of the same title, What I Remember follows Ryan and Sam, a pair bound together by loneliness and by their deep desire to escape the bigotry and isolation of their rural hometown. Building on the short, What I Remember might lack explicit scares, but it makes up for it with somber dread. Jumping between past and present, we watch Ryan and Sam’s relationship tenderly grow, all-the-while knowing that in the present Ryan has gone missing, may be dead, and that Sam is dead-set on finding the truth. As these characters grow, so do the stakes, and the town central to the story starts to feel like a haunted house, where the film’s central duo may be able to leave, but they can never truly escape.
The Lost Episode
Director: Nick Wernham
Assembled by XPU$HER and made available through the Black-Torrent Release Group, The Lost Episode offers a raw and unsettling look at unaired footage captured during a police ride-along on Halloween night, 2004. The film follows officers Paul Massaro and Terrence Williams as they navigate the sleepy streets of Franklin, uncovering a chain of horrifying events and a disturbing conspiracy rooted in the heart of the small town they swore to protect.
The Unsolved Love Hotel Murder Case Incident
Directors: Dave Jackson and Guy
If you’re not familiar with Dave Jackson’s 2015 slasher film Cat Sick Blues, you’re missing out on one of the best, nastiest, and most original slashers of the 21st century. Similarly, Guy’s freshman feature, The Sound of Summer, and his lurid array of shorts (such as the… uh… aptly named, 2 Girls 1 Gut) reveal the mononymous director as a master of no-budget gore. More-or-less emerging from their collaboration as hosts of the Show Me Something Wrong podcast, The Unsolved Love Hotel Murder Case Incident is a love letter to Japan’s expansive genre of supernatural investigation films.
Drawing inspiration from the likes of Koji Shiraishi, the 25-deep Tokyo Videos of Horror franchise, and countless others, The Unsolved Love Hotel Murder Case Incident has a straightforward plot: Three friends investigate a haunted love hotel and get fucked with by ghosts, but the directing team’s talent, attention to detail, and directing duo’s excellent ensemble performance with co-star Kuromi Kirishima, makes The Unsolved Love Hotel Murder Case Incident a delight to watch.
