Pig Hill (2025)
Directed by Kevin Lewis
Screenplay by Jarrod Burris
Starring Rainey Qualley, Shane West, & Shiloh Fernandez.

Horror

★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
VERY SLIGHT SPOILERS!
You’ve been warned.

Kevin Lewis’s Pig Hill, penned by Jarrod Burris, centres on Carrie (Rainey Qualley), a woman obsessed with local folklore about pig people since her brother Chris (Shiloh Fernandez) told her about them as a child; now, she’s writing a book about them. She’s also dealing with an estranged husband who up and left without explanation recently. A couple subsequent tragedies occur, leaving Carrie in a deeply vulnerable place. She begins a flirtatious friendship with Andy (Shane West), who even agrees to help her dig into the local pig people stories. Once they start digging, they unearth an ugly darkness.

While there are one or two frankly gross, gratuitous moments in Pig Hill that could’ve been excised without hurting the story and plot, Lewis’s film is still a haunting exploration of how folklore and trauma can both be used against vulnerable people. A couple of these moments could easily be criticised for lazily exploiting women’s pain as a source horror; however, the film does its best to confront that very exploitation. Pig Hill deals with cultures that turn trauma into commercialised folklore, and the horrifying real-life results that can occur when victims have their stories disregarded.
Part of Pig Hill deals with the commercialisation of tragedies into sellable folklore and how victims in real-life tragedies have their voices ignored or outright silenced. In one scene, we get a glimpse of a Pig People beer. There are likely other local products related to the pig people myth kicking around town, too. Carrie captures it all perfectly: “Myth and folklore drown the truth in darkness, leading us to focus on the sensational, not the sad souls lost in the shadows. The only stories we should honour are the victims.” After the film reveals exactly what’s been happening up on the fabled Pig Hill, we witness myth and folklore over real victims in a gruesome fashion. When Carrie starts digging into the truth rather than the local tall tales, she shatters the myth, nearly at great cost to herself.

Women, as in real-life crime, are the casualties in Pig Hill, and the mistreatment of women is at the film’s core. When Carrie goes up to Pig Hill seeking more info, she hears a story from an Italian-American farmer, whose family came from “the Old Country,” concerning a likely origin for the local pig people myth: one of his ancestors supposedly had an intellectually disabled daughter who liked having sex with a special hog called Il Cazo (loosely translated to ‘The Cock’), and there were even pig-fucking spectacles during which men gathered round to watch her with the pig. In a later nightmare sequence, Carrie dreams of bloody pig infants suckling on her many teats, as if she’s a pig-woman hybrid herself. Exploited women on Pig Hill are a common thread going back potentially centuries. This history haunts local women in very real ways. Carrie’s discovery about what’s actually going on up on Pig Hill isn’t that unbelievable of a story, though it’s yet another era of women’s exploitation and pain.

“Their voices & experiences cry out for acknowledgement”

Pig Hill could be dismissed, and likely will be, by some as exploitative horror that opts for disturbing, grisly, graphic imagery over complexity in character and plot, but that’s an oversimplification. Pig Hill is a film that uses folklore and myth as a gateway into exploring genuine horrors straight out of reality. While the film’s story is fiction, it resonates because of the way it deals with women’s terror. There are many men who’ve gone on doing terrible things while their victims have their stories branded as fiction. In the end, Pig Hill is about victims not being believed and having their stories devalued as crazy fabrications, only for these circumstances to give real-life monsters cover to continue being monstrous while everyone’s busy chasing nonsense theories and outright lies. Today, some of the most powerful men in the world are allowed to go on being monsters while their accusers are ridiculed, bullied, or even threatened, and in this context Pig Hill transforms into more than its B-movie vibes might suggest.