Nails
2025 · 15m · US
Directed by William Lott
Genres: horror, satire, thriller
Tones: dark, darkly comic, provocative
A true-crime podcaster chasing viral fame follows a grisly slasher story too far, as classic slasher tropes collide with a livestream-era hunger for notoriety.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a horror-satire that actually *gets* the rot: the true-crime podcaster as modern slasher villain, more dangerous than the killer she's chasing. Lott flips the genre's voyeurism inside out and makes you complicit, which is exactly the kind of subversive premise everyone else will miss until it's too late.
Lott situates himself in a lineage of meta-horror that runs from *Scream* through *Cabin in the Woods*, but the specificity here—the livestream apparatus as narrative engine, the podcaster as unreliable protagonist—shows a filmmaker aware of how slasher conventions have calcified and where they've become obscene.
The decision to make the podcast narrative *voice* the frame rather than the killer's perspective is what elevates this: every cut between the podcaster's curated feed and the reality of her obsession becomes a small formal argument about complicity and consumption that a bigger budget would've diluted.