SerpApi.Org
The theatrical horror market has rarely looked healthier than it does right now. Indie horror is having a strong year in 2026, with films like Obsession and Backrooms reinforcing how dependable low-budget genre fare can be at the box office. Now another festival favorite is about to test that momentum.
The film premiered at SXSW in March 2025 to genuine acclaim. Along with winning a Grand Jury Award there and picking up another prize at the Florida Film Festival, it currently holds a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. The film never arrived on streaming, though it briefly surfaced as one of the first exclusives on Letterboxd's Video Store, where it debuted on December 10, 2025, and remained available for just one month. That unusual digital detour could have been the end of the road. Instead, it caught NEON's attention.
The distributor has now unveiled the official trailer for It Ends, the feature debut from writer-director Alexander Ullom. The film opens Aug. 21 in New York and Los Angeles before expanding nationwide.
From the moment the trailer begins, It Ends makes its premise clear. Four friends turn onto a lonely stretch of highway during a late-night reunion drive and realize the road does not appear to end. They cannot return the way they came. Worse, if they get out of the car for too long, dozens of figures swarm them from the woods. It Ends sits squarely within the liminal horror subgenre that Backrooms pushed further into the mainstream earlier this year. Liminal horror has always been difficult to pin down because its aesthetic grew out of internet culture.
Films like Skinamarink and Exit 8 have carried that same sense of disorientation to the screen, but a car on an infinite road adds something those movies didn't have: the illusion of progress. Arguably, that's a crueler trap than any locked room, and it's not hard to see why the concept caught fire with festival audiences. Speaking to Bloody Disgusting, Ullom said It Ends was always meant to be less about the horror itself than about living with it:
"This was always a movie that was more about how we live with horror than about the actual horror. I make this joke too much, but I always wanted to see the family in Hereditary give a postgame interview and just be like, 'Yeah, that was terrifying. That was absolutely terrifying.' Then, they all die, obviously, but like they go about their lives. The movie is constantly recontextualizing the things that happen in it."
A car full of twentysomethings driving endlessly toward a destination that never arrives, sustained only by the vague faith that something better is coming, is post-grad life with the subtext removed. It is not subtle, but the best high-concept horror is often not, and many of the indie horror films that have broken through lately — Talk to Me, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Backrooms — worked for the same reason: they put Gen Z anxiety front and center and trusted the audience to recognize itself.
For Ullom, the strong response to It Ends has already led to something bigger. NEON has tapped the newcomer to direct 4 X 4: The Event. It is a considerably louder proposition than his debut, with the energy of Battle Royale, Saw, and Climax all crashing together.
