Eighteen years after he brought body-snatcher horror back from the grave with his cult anthology favourite I Sell the Dead (2008), and fourteen years since he updated the summer-camp slasher for the found-footage era with his segment in the original V/H/S (2012), Irish filmmaker Glenn McQuaid has returned to reinvigorate another classic and underappreciated horror sub-genre – the killer hand movie. The Restoration at Grayson Manor is a dirty, campy, and ultra-queer throwback to the likes of The Hands of Orlac (1924) and The Beast With Five Fingers (1945), a tale of mad (motherly) love and idle hands full of enough blood – and other fluids – to bring a twisted smile to any late-night movie-goer’s face.
Having its UK Premiere at the 2026 edition of Glasgow FrightFest, The Restoration at Grayson Manor follows celebrated queer pianist Boyd Grayson (Glee’s Chris Colfer), who loves nothing more than to spite his homophobic, controlling, legacy-obsessed mother, Jacqueline (Alice Krige, best known as Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Borg Queen) – often by bringing his male fans to the family’s ancestral abode, the titular Grayson Manor. When Boyd inadvertently saves her life by pushing her out of the way of a falling pane of glass, he loses his hands, his career, and his freedom, trapped within the walls of his mother’s mansion home. That is, until she presents him with a gift: Jacqueline has enlisted the services of Dr. Jeffrey Tannock (Daniel Adegboyega – Skyfall), a biomechanical scientist who has discovered a way to give Boyd a new pair of hands, controlled by his subconscious. However, as it turns out, Boyd’s subconscious has a bone to pick, and his new prosthetic appendages gain a vengeful life of their own – whether attached or not.
The Restoration at Grayson Manor is the kind of film that you hope to see on a genre festival line-up, it’s a picture undeniably inspired and influenced by the mad scientist / creature-feature classics of the Universal Monster era, yet one with a decidedly modern sensibility to it, full of vicious wit, wacky humour, and thoroughly welcome dose of queer sexuality. I can’t say that every aspect of it was for me – it’s an oddly-structured, unevenly paced feature that features plenty of wonderful aspects, but doesn’t focus on all of them enough, and the ending (though fun) is far too abrupt given how much of the film is spent building up to the inevitable climactic scenes of bloodshed. Make no mistake, though – there’s a lot to love about McQuaid’s film, especially in the moments where it gets properly strange and nasty. I can’t even begin to imagine how a cinema audience might react to some of the wilder turns that The Restoration at Grayson Manor takes – the highlight of which is a truly deranged twist reveal, which actor Colfer delivers the perfect hilarious reaction to.
Speaking of Colfer’s performance, his deeply toxic dynamic with Krige’s cruel, controlling matriarch makes for the blackened, rotten heart of the piece, and the two do a superbly melodramatic yet nonetheless believable job at portraying a mother and son at each others’ throats. Make no mistake, The Restoration at Grayson Manor is played to soap-opera levels of heightened camp, yet Colfer and Krige deliver performances compelling enough to sell the serious dramatic threads buried beneath the silliness, reminding the viewer that this isn’t only a catty, comic creature-feature, but also the story of two deeply toxic and spiteful individuals drawn into a perpetual battle with one another simply because they are bound by blood and a prestigious family name. The creature-feature part is also, as one might assume, a lot of fun, and the prosthetic work used to bring Boyd’s biomechanical hands to life is extremely impressive for an independently-made feature; there are some other ghoulish surprises in store, of course, but in order to find out what those are, you’ll have to pay a visit to Grayson Manor yourself.
The Restoration at Grayson Manor is a thoroughly watchable, if uneven, classic B-horror throwback that serves to remind us that the ties of blood that bind can sometimes cut off circulation – or, at the very least, cause carpal tunnel.
The Restoration at Grayson Manor had its UK premiere at Glasgow Frightfest 2026
