Panic Fest 2025: Marshmallow isn’t your standard summer camp slasher. It’s the soft launch of several promising careers.
Director Daniel DelPurgatorio and writer Andy Greskoviak have created a movie that mashes up Stephen King and Are You Afraid of the Dark? with a talented cast of child actors.
Marshmallow. // Courtesy Panic Fest
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.
When you attend a genre-specific film festival like Panic Fest, it’s hard not to get a feeling of samey-ness after a while. The subgenres announce themselves clearly: here’s the babysitter slasher, here are the folk horror offerings, here’s a paranoid thriller. This isn’t a criticism—fans know the predictability of certain story beats can make a horror movie feel comfortable. But it’s a real treat when you get a plucky, low-budget movie that reminds you even long-established subgenres can still feel fresh and exciting.
Such is the case with Marshmallow, an indie summer camp slasher that’s far more than what it first appears. Director Daniel DelPurgatorio and writer Andy Greskoviak have created a movie that feels like the truest possible mashup of Stephen King and Are You Afraid of the Dark, accomplished with the help of an incredibly talented cast of child actors.
Morgan (Kue Lawrence) has just moved to a new town with his family, and is having trouble making friends. The social awkwardness caused in part by his vivid night terrors isn’t helping matters. So, mom and dad ship Morgan off for the summer to Camp Almar, where he’ll hopefully meet some new pals and get over his crippling fear of swimming.
Camp Almar has everything you’d expect from a movie summer camp: a swimming hole, an archery range, horny counselors, and at least one camper who’s a King-style homicidally aggressive bully. It also has a ghost story, featuring a doctor who once lived nearby and saved lives by day, while chopping up bodies in his basement at night. If the kids don’t stay in their cabins after curfew, they might just end up under his spectral knife. Morgan and his new friends Dirk (Max Malas), Pilar (Kai Cech), Raj (Winston Vengapally), Caroline (Jordyn Raya James) and Sam (Dylan Friedman) don’t believe the tale, until Morgan spies a strange figure with a head lamp wandering the woods.
Most summer camp slashers—like Hell of a Summer, which showed Thursday night at the Fest—are focused on the counselors, which makes sense for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s easier to unleash dismemberment and disembowelment on goofy grown-ups than on innocent kids, who do not. The other is more practical: child actors have to work within specific constraints, particularly on night shoots, which means that logistically it’s almost impossible to make movies like this work with a cast that’s largely under 18.
To the first issue, Marshmallow does go to some dark places thematically, but fear not: you won’t see any Friday the 13th-level violence directed at children—this is Goosebumps level, with more cursing.
To the second, DelPurgatorio and his team smartly produced this thing to account for their shooting needs, and were apparently working with the most professional child actors I’ve ever seen. The dynamic between Morgan and his friends is believable and sweet, with occasional sharp one-liners that you can tell the kids relish getting to deliver. The script spends a lot of time developing these characters up front so that when the action hits, the stakes are clear.
Marshmallow announces DelPurgatorio as a filmmaker worth watching, and Greskoviak as a skilled writer. The solid script is the foundation for a movie so efficiently produced that wise studios should take note. Marshmallow is a clever take on a subgenre that usually thrives on the expected and familiar, and accomplishes impressive results on a teensy budget. If DelPurgatorio can do this much with a little, it’s exciting to imagine what he can do with a lot.
Marshmallow. // Courtesy Panic Fest
