Sean Parker
Local urban legends are stories that make for the best childhood experiences. Somewhere around the time you’re seven or eight, you start hearing these campfire tales, usually through schoolyard misinterpretations. It’s like a game of telephone that began with some truth, which was slightly degraded through each person’s fantastic rendition. Where would society be without its Bigfoot and Mothman, its Area 51, or even local neighborhood haunted houses? Meadville, Pennsylvania, is a small town in the northwestern corner of the state, and it has its own unique local legend emanating from Radio Tower Hill. The stories concern mutated pig-human hybrids, called pig people by the locals, who have ceremoniously dubbed the location Pig Hill.
Nancy Williams understood the allure of such a radical local story, penning her fifth book, Pig, in 2019. About two years later, actors Ted Watts Jr. and R.A. Mihailoff approached the author for the rights to adapt the book into a film, Eerie native Jarrod Burris put the script together, and in 2023, Pig Hill started filming.
Like Nancy’s experience with the place growing up, her protagonist Carrie (Ocean’s Eight actress Rainey Qualley) has heard stories about Pig Hill and her aspirations to put together a book on the urban legend that has entranced her since she was a child. Stories her brother Chris (Evil Dead’s Shiloh Fernandez) tormented her with in their youth now seem to be hitting closer to home, as the popular teenage makeout spot has become a place where ten local women have now gone missing.
To that end, director Kevin Lewis sets up a familiar scene at the start of the film. With a blanket of fog surrounding a car, two lovers are caught in the act by a pig-faced psychopath. The scene ends by taking inspiration from an urban legend we all know and love, and we’re introduced to every reason why Pig Hill should be avoided.
In the aftermath of this latest attack, Reggie (Jeff Monahan), a local homeless man from the shelter where Carrie volunteers, goes to see Carrie before work and tells her that he and another man found a pregnant woman up on Pig Hill the night before. “Pigs got her for sure!” He says. The next night, while working at the shelter, Carrie meets the pregnant Paula Davis (Isabella Brenza), who is beyond adamant that the child inside her cannot survive, so much so that she does everything in her power to terminate the pregnancy.
After the traumatizing event, Chris becomes overprotective of his sister. From his perspective, she’s still dealing with the sudden vacating of her husband, who decided to pull an Irish goodbye on their marriage. The entrance of her new love interest, Andy (Escape the Field’s Shane West), selling books at Carrie’s shop to afford any amount of excess in his life while taking care of his elderly mother’s deteriorating health, is seen as added pressure that Carrie doesn’t need right now in Chris’s eyes. However, while Andy is patient and supportive of Carrie, Chris’ concerns cause him to stand off with Andy at every turn.
I think of movies like The Ring whenever I think of the investigative horror films. It’s not because it’s a high bar, but it’s because of how the scope of the supernatural problem is so much bigger than its affected characters. With Pig Hill, viewers never get that kind of gravity. The investigative thriller is a hard nut to crack, especially when there’s a whodunnit being set up. Move too brutally and you’re flirting with a slasher movie, but move too much in the other direction and it’s a bloodless drama.
Pig Hill leans more toward the slasher end, with some brutal and stomach-churning moments of aggravated violence. Unfortunately, it’s mired in its personal attention to Carrie. While the film’s plot inevitably makes her the key figure (she is the protagonist after all), it almost forgets that there’s a whole town on edge over the disappearances. The whole thing seems a little targeted, and because of that, it becomes supremely easy to intrinsically discern the whodunnit long before arriving at the reveal.
Regardless, Pig Hill still has excellent qualities, particularly in its actors. Rainey Qualley (Margaret’s sister) and Shane West share great chemistry in the film. Seeing them interact on screen as their romance flourishes is a real draw for viewers, and there is general likability in seeing them partner up as clue-seeking detectives. When their efforts take them to Pig Hill to look for a wanted man, there’s more than enough tension supplied by the property owner, Giovanni (Dino Tripodis), attempting to bridge the divide between the fiction of the fantastic and the realism of the people affected by the unwieldy conspiracy theory. But, as previously stated, it never goes far enough to unveil the consequential suffering caused by singling out these folks through the rumor mill.
Pig Hill is an odd hog. There are generally great pieces at play within Lewis’ film, using dark, cold tones to create atmosphere, which imparts a sense of X-Files, particularly the film I Want to Believe, onto the production. The messy Chris Carter-directed series follow-up has similar themes of monsterdom and ostracization during an investigation into missing women that has some supernatural overtones. Pig Hill falls into the same space that The X-Files sequel finds itself, where it entrances you through its complex web of fact versus fiction, but never rises to anything completely satisfying.
Pig Hill held its World Premiere at FrightFest on Saturday, August 23. For more information on this and other films playing at the festival, please see the FrightFest website.
