Dead End

Dead End (2003) is a French-American horror thriller you can watch online on iFILM. On Christmas Eve, Frank Harrington breaks a twenty-year habit and takes a wooded shortcut to his in-laws. It is the last wrong turn he ever makes.

After that, the road stops behaving. A pale woman cradling a dead infant drifts along the verge, a black hearse with no driver carries people off into the dark, and every sign promises a town the car can never reach. Trapped together through the night, the family bickers, unravels and starts disappearing one by one. Ray Wise plays the father and horror regular Lin Shaye the mother, both leaning on raw dread rather than gore.

The directing debut of Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa runs a lean 80 minutes and works almost without blood, building its scares on repetition, a looping dead-end road and a twist you half-guess from the opening shot. It is a tight, mean, blackly funny puzzle-box for fans of Carnival of Souls. Stream Dead End (2003) online on iFILM.