Panic Fest 2025: Dead Lover is the latest Grace Glowicki body-horror bash
The Panic Fest horror/genre film festival is currently running in KC for its 2025 season at Screenland Armour. These film reviews are from indie and studio horror/comedy/sci-fi features premiering right now in the Northland, or hitting major theaters/VOD soon. Catch up with all our coverage here and there’s still time to get tickets for individual screenings at the Panic Fest 2025 website.
If I tell you the new film Dead Lover is essentially Garth Marenghi’s Masterpiece Theater, and you’re someone who understands what this means, then this film was made for you. Skip the review, get thyself into a screening. You’ll be greatest by one of the singular most original, wild, strange, unique, and often hilarious “slight” adaptations of horror royalty.
In the 1800’s English countryside, a lonely gravedigger (Grace Glowicki) longs for love. The problem is, while keeping her family tradition alive, she’s developed a rather strong stench she can’t wash off. In the hopes of attracting a mate, she attempts to concoct a perfume to mask her scent, made from her makeshift garden. After several failures to brew a successful potion, she’s ready to give up until fate intervenes.
When a famous opera singer (Leah Doz) passes, her eccentric poet brother (Ben Petrie) is struck by the gravedigger’s particular stench. He finds beauty in her foulness, which would stop most dead in their tracks. Their torrid affair quickly becomes love. Yet when he leaves for foreign waters to improve his fertility to give his love the family she deserves, he dies at sea—with only his ring finger surviving.
Determined to overcome the minor inconvenience of death, the gravedigger launches into a series of experiments to resurrect her love. To say the results run the gamut from horrific success to frightening failure would be an understatement. Her first attempt results in a garishly long appendage, with a mind of its own. Her second attempt is to graft the remains of her lover to a full body, resulting in a monster that threatens all life in the village.
It should be said that Dead Lover is a “love it” or “hate it” experience—the kind where you know within a few minutes if it’s your jam or not. That’s because writer-director-star Glowicki has painstakingly made a film with such a singular vision and loving attention to detail. Like some monster concoction between John Waters, Frank Henenlotter, and Guy Madden, this is a sight to behold—a treat for fans of indie films and theater alike.
Trying to capture in words what Glowicki puts into her work is a little difficult. There’s a menagerie of gaudy lighting gels for the colors. The small troop of actors plays multiple parts, regardless of gender. Not to mention the “community theater” aspect of the staging, acting, and sets. Some would look at what’s on display and think, “cheap.” The thing is, it’s all on purpose. Tossing around the names of Garth Marenghi and Masterpiece Theater wasn’t a knock on the production, but the best way to capture the essence of what makes this film so compelling.
As the film wears on and Frankenstein of it all takes hold, Dead Lover investigates body horror on a level that’s as funny as it is horny. The gravedigger’s green thumb unleashes a torrent of insanity that has to be seen to be believed. Anyone who may have been turned off by the recent Nosterafu’s literal translation will bear witness to what “adaptation” should and could be. Familiar beats are strewn throughout, or subverted with tongue firmly planted in the cheek.
You could easily tout Dead Lover as the kind of film “they don’t make anymore”—but in truth, there hasn’t been anything quite like this before.
Glowicki’s film is a true distillation of cinema as an “art form”. By placing a strong focus on a making unique and idiosyncratic experience, the team behind the film shows that taking audacious swings will always be more rewarding than hoping merely to achieve the status quo.
