For as long as humanity has walked the Earth, we have both feared and felt the allure of holes in the ground; the first humans lived in caves, and perhaps that is the reason why many crave the opportunity to return to the dark, confined openings in the earth that our ancestors called home. From a survival standpoint, it makes no sense that we should desire to put ourselves in dark, potentially hazardous spaces, ones which potentially hide many of the real-life threats that informed our species’ most primal fears – yet, year after year, cavers continue to feel the call of the depths.
There’s a good reason why one of the most popular memes on social media last year was a joke about cave divers with happy, comfortable home lives making the decision to cram themselves into horrifyingly-named narrow cave passages – the very rational fear of the dangers that lurk within the bowels of the Earth leaves many with very little desire to explore a cave system for themselves. Yet, for quite possibly the opposite reason, there are many horror films set in caves – for as much as we fear the suffocating dark and the predators that may lurk within, we nonetheless crave to venture into the unknown below, and see what horrifying long-forgotten truths our primordial ancestors must have had to contend with. Bone Keeper, which has its World Premiere at the 2026 edition of Glasgow FrightFest, is one of those films.
The latest film from director Howard J. Ford, best known as the filmmaker behind Africa-set zombie horror The Dead (2010) and clifftop survival thriller The Ledge (2022), Bone Keeper follows Olivia Wheeler (Sarah Alexandra Marks), a young woman on the hunt for her missing mother, Lucy (Angela Dixon), who disappeared during a similar expedition; Olivia’s father, James, went missing in 1976 whilst exploring a woodland cave – leaving behind only his camera and a reel of 8mm film, which seemingly captured a glimpse of something otherworldly lurking in the shadows. When the disappearances of Olivia’s parents are linked to the local legend of the “Bone Keeper”, a monster of myth that stows away the bodies of its victims, she sets out with a team of friends in order to investigate what really lurks in those passageways where so many have vanished – and, in doing so, enters the lair of an ancient extraterrestrial evil which plans on making her crew its latest trophies.
Playing like a tentacular DTV riff on The Descent (2005), or perhaps an unofficial remake of obscure caving horror The Strangeness (1985), the first thing that will stand out to most viewers about Bone Keeper is the fact that it features a prominent role for Welsh veteran actor John Rhys-Davies, best known for his iconic roles in both Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films. The second thing that will stand out to most viewers is the the not great use of CG, which some might mistake for AI given the constant exposure to slop images and animations on social media. As the film progresses, the use of murky, smudgy effects becomes not only more frequent, but jarring as well.
That isn’t to say that all of Bone Keeper’s creature effects were made by machines – some legitimate and established VFX artists are credited on the film, and we get the occasional glimpse of some rather solid and slimy practical tentacles. It’s doubtful that these artists would knowingly add their names to any property that used Generative AI without it being declared, but the increasingly frequent inclusion of these bizarre, muddy, and very inconsistent CG effects are distracting and greatly sour the film as a whole. Horror film festivals are one of the only ways for independent SFX and VFX artists to get their work seen by a crowd that fully appreciates their craft, and it’s more important now than ever for genre festivals to properly showcase the work of those who make the horror genre as goopy, gory, and gorgeous as we know it to be.
Aside from that, Bone Keeper is your average cave-dwelling creature-feature, something which I am always happy to find time for. Unfortunately, for as much as I want to balance out the negatives in this review with some positives, the rest of the film is by no means free from deep-seated issues; front-loading itself with a prehistoric-set cold open which reveals far too much of the titular creature too soon, a large portion of Bone Keeper is spent watching characters wander aimlessly around an admittedly solid cave location, constantly ignoring direct signs that their lives are in danger and that a very real squid-monster is eating their friends. The horror genre frequently gets a bad rap for featuring characters who make “stupid” decisions, many of which can be justified within a narrative as the result of adrenaline and heightened nerves, but in the case of Bone Keeper it gets to a point where the leads come off as entirely desensitised to anything remotely threatening or concerning, a perfect example of this being when a trio of characters find part of a woman’s bloodied scalp, remark that someone must have been murdered in the cavern recently, and then brush it off as though it was nothing – bearing in mind, of course, that our lead protagonist’s mother recently went missing in said caves.
I can imagine, admittedly, that there would be some schlocky B-movie fun to be had whilst watching with a packed FrightFest audience, not least thanks to some entertaining scenery-chewing from Rhys-Davies and an exquisitely trashy one-liner that has to be heard to be believed, but at the same time I can’t imagine picking this to watch over any of the countless other low-budget creature-features on offer that would provide me a more engaging midnight movie-viewing experience.
BONE KEEPER HAD ITS WORLD PREMIERE AT GLASGOW FRIGHTFEST 2026
