TRAUMATIKA (2025)

Available On Demand soon from Saban Films!
Directed by Pierre Tsigaridis.
Written by Maxime Rancon, Pierre Tsigaridis.
Check out the trailer here!!

TRAUMATIKA opens very similarly to THE EXORCIST, as an exhausted man carrying a pagan artifact passes out in the desert, leaving the artifact to be buried under the sands. Some time later, this artifact falls into the hands of a single father John (Sean O’Bryan) who is warned not to open the artifact and of course, he does so anyway. This sets in motion a series of horrifying events that passes from one person to the next like the worst kind of plague leaving horror and destruction in its wake.

TRAUMATICA is going to be a hard watch for some. It involves all of the taboo subject matter; incest, rape, kidnapping, murder, ritual sacrifice. Nothing is off limits. This is a dag-nasty little movie that packs some extremely horrifying moments. Director Pierre Tsigaridis was responsible for the October surprise from a few years ago called TWO WITCHES. That film played with timelines, interweaving a number of different stories together into one potent narrative. It also relied heavily on jump scares but unlike the cat leaping from a window or familiar person sneaking up on the protagonist, these jump scares actually work and follow through with an image that is too terrifying to believe. TRAUMATIKA does the same thing and in many ways, could be yet another chapter in TWO WITCHES. Flipping and flopping from one series of horrors to another, TRAUMATICA begins in the Middle Ages where an artifact is lost, then moves to the 1990’s where the same artifact has been recovered by some petty thieves which leads to possession and a series of kidnappings of young children. The film then shunts to the present day where one of the surviving children must face their own demons. There is a throughway, and that’s the intense level of horror going on in each segment, all the way up to the tension-shredding end.

I’ve seen criticism of TRAUMATIKA stating that many of the scares in this film have been lifted from other films. While some of that may be true, director/writer Pierre Tsigaridis and his co-writer Maxime Rancon lace all of these scares with an raw originality that makes it their own. Sure the ghostly figure trick or treating might be reminiscent of Michael Myers from the first Halloween or the possessed people may seem reminiscent of the Deadites from EVIL DEAD, but filmed in this kinetic and brutal way, it all feels original. There are scares galore in TRAUMATIKA and any similarity with other films was definitely taken as more of an homage than anything else.

I loved the way this film reveals its tale by moving through time, telling a raw and unflinching story of how abuse and trauma is passed down from one generation to the next. While the scares and tension are in your face and gruesome, TRAUMATIKA always seems to be treating the trauma in a delicate way, still pushing the ugliness of this abuse to it’s painful max. There are scenes that left me quivering from head to toe in this film.

TRAUMATIKA’s pace is non-stop. You’re trapped in a basement running from a demon one minute then stalked by a trick or treater from hell the next. This is a film comprised of so many scenes of horror smooshed together that it barely takes time to catch a breath. The acting is pretty solid and shrewd eyes will recognize A.J. Bowen as a petrified cop and THE PEOPLE UNDER THE STAIRS’ Sean Whalen as one of the fencers of the cursed artifact. The true standout is Rebekah Kennedy, who also appeared in TWO WITCHES in one of the segments, and goes through a grotesque gauntlet of horrors again in this one. All in all, the acting is good, though, most of the time everyone is simply scared shitless the whole time.

With TWO WITCHES, Pierre Tsigaridis could have been seen as a fluke, getting the scares right as a one-timer. But with TRAUMATIKA, it’s made clear that this director is the real deal. Offering up a variety of terrifying scenes that range from peak-high tension to gutter-wallowing gore and everything in between, TRAUMATIKA is going to leave bruises. The tagline to TRAUMATIKA is that you don’t watch this movie, you survive it. I survived it and loved it and hope you take a chance on this indie treat arriving right on time for a Halloween watch.