[FrightFest 2026]: Big Baby
- Ygraine Hackett-Cantabrana
- 22 hours ago
- 2 min read
Blurring the lines between fiction and reality is director Spider One’s Big Baby, having its UK premiere at this year’s FrightFest. An homage to all those who work in the arts, the film follows a troubled screenwriter as his newest idea for a horror film seems to have physically sprang forth from his dreams and into his everyday waking life.
Big Baby stars Brandon Scott as Adam Lewis, a horror movie screenwriter whose latest film bombs with critics and leads him to feeling frustrated and creatively discouraged. That is until he has a dream about a killer dressed in a disturbing baby mask, violently attacking his girlfriend in bed. With much encouragement from his partner, Adam begins to write a slasher movie with the Big Baby killer as the antagonist, but he soon experiences frightening phenomena in which life imitates his art. Struggling to hold on to any sense of reality, Adam must continue the story, figuring out who will be Big Baby’s next victim.
Attempting a foray into meta-slasher territory, Big Baby is an exploration of the creative process in any sort of artistic process, where the creator pours their life and soul into a project, bringing it to life, living that creation, and then having to present it to the public, and open themselves up to criticism and possible negativity. The film does a good job of portraying how painful and terrifying a procedure that can be for creatives, and Scott plays a frantic and obsessed writer perfectly, teetering over the edge of sanity much to the horror of his loved ones.
Unfortunately despite being full of fun cameos from well known horror associates, Big Baby just doesn’t bring anything new to the genre of writer on the brink of insanity. The design of the killer’s mask is a grotesque standout aspect of the film, but everything else falls flat with predictability and meta deja-vu.
2 Screams out of 5
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