The Dare (rent or buy) - Stream It or Skip It

When exploring the abject horror of childhood abuse, The Dare finds a devastating voice, but it quickly makes a fatal mistake of placing its attention on Saw-inspired gore. The Dare is available to stream and buy from the 12th of October.

What do you get if you mix Hostel with Saw with a sprinkle of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre? The answer is a gruesome, blood-drenched piece of body trauma horror that delights in making the audience squirm. However, if you then lace this with a backstory based around childhood trauma, you get Giles Alderson’s The Dare.

Alderson’s movie opens with an eerie, atmospheric home-invasion thriller before descending into the murky depths of a classic basement horror. Following that home invasion, a dad of two, Jay Jackson (Bart Edwards), finds himself chained to a wall alongside three fellow prisoners, Adam (Richard Short), Kat (Alexandra Evans) and the half-dead Paul (Daniel Schutzmann) – their inescapable prison a mere playpen of torture and pain at the hands of a mysterious figure wearing a mask made from human flesh.

READ MORE: WRONG TURN

But as the grisly and uncomfortable Saw-inspired events begin to play out, we are taken back in time to a lonely, abused and damaged young boy, Dominic (Mitchell Norman), who suffers daily under the hand of a brutal pig farmer (Richard Brake). Dominic’s life is one torment after another as he is enslaved by the devilish farmer who claims his folks abandoned him. But as we jump from the horror of the past to the pain of the present, a truth emerges alongside a childhood game of life and death—a truth with answers that lie in long-forgotten memories.