Wormtown is a sci-fi-horror movie directed by Sergio Pinheiro, and the cast includes Caitlin McWethy, Rachel Ryu, Emily Soppe, Maggie Lou Rader, Madison Murrah, and A.J Baldwin
My Thoughts on Wormtown
What does it mean to survive when the world you knew has already collapsed?
That question will hover in your mind as you watch Wormtown, a small indie horror that somehow manages to be about worms and human emotions at the same time,.
The story is set a year after an outbreak in Ashland, Ohio, where three survivors - Jess, Rose, and Kara - are hiding in a bunker while the “Nightcrawlers” wander above ground, and these things are still thinking, still alive, and unnervingly loyal to their leader, Mayor Joshua.
He’s this odd mix of radio-host charm and authoritarian control, and the way the worms manipulate people without wiping out their personalities entirely is what I found truly unsettling, as it’s like they’re hollowed out from the inside, obedient but not quite dead.
Caitlin McWethy, playing Jess, carries the film in a way that makes you pay attention to her every choice, as we watch her constantly calculating the next step, but the quiet moments - the ones where she’s just breathing, just watching the world she knew get devoured - is just there, simmering under the surface.
Maggie Lou Rader as Alice is fascinating in the opposite way, as her character is gentle but twisted, a kind of maternal figure who recruits others into the hive, and watching her manipulate the infected felt unnervingly tender.
Wormtown also doesn’t shy away from being gross when it needs to be, and the practical effects are genuinely disturbing - worms wriggling under skin, tendrils snaking through flesh, and that recurring heart - like parasite under translucent skin.
You will appreciate the commitment to practical effects, as there’s something tactile and visceral about them that CGI often misses.
The story itself gets more intriguing when it is moved outside, where Jess eventually escapes and stumbles into an Amish community, where heir world is quiet and low-tech, which contrasts sharply with the hive above, and this contrast became one of the film’s most interesting aspects.
Jess finds a kind of reprieve there, but it’s not easy or magical - grief doesn’t disappear simply because the worms aren’t around. - and those quieter, slower moments were even more interesting than the gore-heavy sequences, maybe more so because they gave the story room to breathe.
Pacing wise, it is OK, but some stretches felt too slow, but those moments also gave the characters a chance to live outside the horror for a little while, and the slower rhythm made the moments of terror hit differently when they arrived to be fair.
The cinematography by Roy Rossovich deserves a mention here as well, as the landscapes are bleak and empty, with pale, washed-out light that makes every ruin and abandoned street feel like a place that’s been waiting for something terrible for a long time., and the visuals reinforced the mood without being overbearing - the horror isn’t just in the creatures - it’s everywhere.
Something I found particularly fascinating was the film’s exploration of community and control, as the worms don’t just kill, they reshape people into a hive, and there’s an uneasy sense of order under the infection, and I kept thinking about what it says about loyalty, leadership, and the ways people follow others in extreme circumstances.
Jess resists, Alice enforces, and the people in between shift depending on circumstance, and there’s a moral ambiguity here that I wasn’t expecting, and while the story doesn’t hand you neat answers, it does let you sit in the tension of choices and consequences.
It’s easy to think of Wormtown as just a body horror movie, but it’s really about emotional survival, and the psychological weight on the survivors - the fear, the grief, and the need to protect themselves and others.
Jess isn’t a superhero, and she isn’t a perfect leader, as she’s human, with doubts and regrets and fear, and I think that’s what makes her journey interesting, as she’s navigating not just a physical threat, but the erosion of everything familiar.
Wormtown is strange, unsettling, and emotionally complex in a way I didn’t expect from a movie about parasitic worms, and while the worms are the obvious horror, the real tension comes from watching people navigate fear, loyalty, and grief.