Human Trailer Turns a Late-Night Hook-Up Into a Blood-Soaked Supernatural Nightmare
Being awake after midnight and deciding to message an ex rarely ranks among life’s greatest decisions, but Dani Ferris is about to discover considerably worse consequences than an embarrassing conversation the following morning. Dark Sky Films has released the trailer for Human, the new supernatural horror film from Tonight She Comes director Matt Stuertz, ahead of its arrival in select cinemas, VOD and digital platforms on October 23, 2026. The trailer largely keeps the film’s most gruesome material hidden, but its festival reputation suggests Dani’s increasingly bizarre night becomes considerably messier than the footage is prepared to reveal.
Played by Jackie Kelly, Dani is exhausted, away from home and alone after midnight when she decides to indulge in a little online flirtation before getting some sleep. Festival descriptions provide a little more context, placing Dani inside the film studio where she is working and temporarily staying, with her late-night distraction involving an old flame. Then comes an unexpected visitor, and whatever has arrived appears capable of turning an ordinary night into something far stranger and considerably more dangerous. From there, Human moves into supernatural territory as Dani finds herself confronting a threat that doesn’t seem interested in obeying the usual rules of reality.
Dark Sky’s deliberately chaotic official synopsis promises friends, lovers, enemies, frenemies, guns, love, hate, life, death and things considerably “more super than natural.” That’s quite a shopping list for one evening, but reactions from the film’s festival screenings suggest that the escalating insanity isn’t simply trailer marketing. Human had its world premiere at FrightFest in London on August 22, 2025, before continuing onto other genre events including Germany’s Obscura Filmfest. The film runs approximately 107 minutes, with much of its story constructed around Dani’s increasingly nightmarish ordeal.
Human Has Already Earned a Reputation for Its Gore
Perhaps the biggest thing missing from the new trailer is the element that helped Human attract attention during its festival run: the gore. Reviews have repeatedly highlighted the film’s practical effects, bodily fluids and increasingly outrageous splatter, with comparisons being made to the anarchic bloodshed of Evil Dead II and the splatter-heavy early work of Peter Jackson. That doesn’t necessarily tell us exactly what Stuertz has created, but it provides a fairly useful warning for anyone planning to watch the film while eating dinner.
That enthusiasm for practical carnage shouldn’t be particularly surprising to viewers familiar with Stuertz’s earlier work. His previous feature Tonight She Comes developed its own reputation for extreme gore after arriving in 2016, and Human appears to push that appetite for messy horror in another direction. Festival reviews have described the new film as changing tone as Dani’s situation deteriorates, moving beyond its relatively simple late-night premise into something much more hallucinatory, supernatural and excessive.
Kelly appears to shoulder much of that madness as Dani, with the film reportedly requiring an especially physical performance as her character is pushed through the wringer. She’s joined by Brock Russell, who previously appeared in Stuertz’s Tonight She Comes, alongside Cecily Dowd, Jeffrey Decker and Mia Sydney. The relatively contained setting and compressed timeline also appear to keep much of the focus firmly on Dani, allowing an initially ordinary situation to become progressively less recognisable as the night continues.
There is one production detail worth clarifying because conflicting credits for the film have appeared online. Early festival listings and databases credited Stuertz as both writer and director, but Dark Sky Films’ current release materials credit David Neiss with the screenplay, while Stuertz is credited as director and producer. Neiss is also associated with Flush, while David Christopher Pitt produced Human alongside Stuertz and served as cinematographer. Based on the distributor’s current information, those are the credits attached to the October release.
The approach taken by the trailer may ultimately work in Human‘s favour. Rather than assembling a greatest-hits collection of severed body parts and ruining its practical-effects surprises before audiences get anywhere near the film, it concentrates on Dani, the isolation of the location and the growing sense that something is profoundly wrong. Anyone arriving unaware of the festival reaction could therefore be in for quite a shock once Stuertz decides it’s time to stop teasing.
After spending more than a year travelling through the festival circuit, Human will finally reach a wider audience when Dark Sky Films releases it in select cinemas and on VOD and digital platforms on October 23. If the reactions to its practical gore are anything to go by, perhaps don’t accompany this particular late-night viewing with anything you’re especially determined to keep in your stomach.
