Panic Fest 2024: Jill “Sixx” Gevargizian returns our screens (and our screams) with Ghost Game

Ghost Game. // Courtesy EPIC

This is part of our coverage of local horror/sci-fi’s biggest event of the year, Panic Fest 2024. For more from the fest, click here.

2020’s The Stylist was director Jill Gevargizian’s first feature. Unfortunately, because it premiered during the pandemic, it didn’t get the in-person fanfare to match its breakout reputation.

Fortunately that’s not the case for Gevargizian’s new feature Ghost Game. Not only did it premiere to a sold-out hometown crowd at Panic Fest on Saturday, it’s also got even more genre bona fides in front of and behind the camera.

In addition to Gevargizian, Ghost Game features a script by Clown in a Cornfield author Adam Cesare. The Blair Witch Project co-director Eduardo Sánchez executive produced. Blair Witch star Michael C. Williams has a juicy featured role, as does academic and Glorious director Rebekah McKendry, in an uncredited cameo. The Stylist announced Gevargizian as an emerging talent after years of making short films and producing shorts and features. Ghost Game cements her status as part of the indie horror establishment. 

Ghost Game follows a group of phroggers (a real-life phenomenon in which strangers infiltrate a person’s home and live there for as long as they can undetected). Laura (Kia Dorsey) and Adrian (Sam Lukowski) are long-time partners in hiding. Laura does it out of admiration for a legendary online figure named Mr. Whatley. Adrian does it because he’s a punk who considers quietly terrorizing homeowners a form of social anarchy. Laura’s new boyfriend Vin (Zaen Haidar) is unimpressed by her creepy hobby, but joins Laura on an ambitious phrogging challenge—the “ghost game” of the title—to keep from losing her.

Laura’s target is the famously haunted Halton House, a decaying farmhouse that was once the site of a gruesome family murder. As it happens, a new family — writer Pete Trammel (Williams), his new wife Meg (Emily Bennett) and his autistic stepdaughter Sam (Vienna Maas) — are about to move into the place. Laura and Vin get there first to set up camp and watch the chaos (and viral clout) roll in. Little do they know that they’re far from the only unseen inhabitants at Halton House.

Ghost Game makes much of its creepy setting, essentially using the abandoned house to power parallel storylines (between this and Gevargizian’s producing work on John Pata’s Black Mold, she’s becoming the go-to person if you need to source crumbling, empty buildings for a shoot). Laura and Vin’s phrogging expedition makes up one half, with tensions rising when it turns out an embittered Adrian has also shown up. Pete, Meg and Sam’s experience in the house is The Shining-esque, with the financially and professionally desperate Pete as the movie’s Jack Torrance. 

Both sides are united (though not fully aware of each other) by an escalating series of strange occurrences throughout the house. Are the missing items and disappearing people the product of our jealous protagonists sabotaging each other? Is there someone else in the house? Or could it be…GHOSTS?!

Gevargizian keeps us guessing until an action-packed final third that employs the house’s history to frightening and tragic effect. The film ends with a nasty gut-punch, though one that’s almost undone by a coda that muddies our understanding of what we’ve just seen.

While it’s not quite as masterful as The Stylist, Gevargizian’s Ghost Game is lots of creepy fun, with references and in-jokes for genre heads popping up like so many spectral whack-a-moles.

There are neat visual details sprinkled throughout (the masks Laura, Vin and Adrian wear during their sneaky sojourns are truly unsettling). Gevargizian, buoyed by Cesare’s nasty script, also goes extra hard in the film’s final moments, committing to a twist that yanks the rug out from under the characters, and relishing in the cracking sound of their heads hitting the floor.