Some horror movies want to scare you. Some want to disturb you. Traumatika wants to do both at the same time, and then change the rules halfway through just to keep you off balance. Director Pierre Tsigaridis — the man behind Two Witches — is back with a film that is chaotic, punishing, and genuinely unsettling in ways that are hard to shake.
What It’s About
The film opens in Egypt, 1910, with a man stumbling through the desert clutching a mysterious idol linked to a demonic entity called Volpaazu. Cut to Pasadena, California, 2003 — a young boy named Mikey is hiding in a dark house, calling 911 to report that his mother is a monster. He’s not wrong.
From there, Traumatika jumps around in time: back a year to show how Mikey’s mother Abigail became possessed, then forward twenty years to a world where a true crime TV show is exploiting the tragedy of the Pasadena murders, and grown-up survivors are still dealing with the fallout.
It’s part demonic possession film, part slasher, part media satire — and it switches between all three with very little warning.
What Works
The first half of this film is legitimately great. Tsigaridis wears many hats here (director, co-writer, editor, cinematographer) and his visual instincts are strong. The handheld, first-person POV sequences inside that dark, decaying house are genuinely terrifying. The creature design — a charred, hollow-eyed thing that works best in brief glimpses — is effectively nasty. And the sound design is oppressive in the best possible way, recalling the sensory assault of early 2000s French extreme horror like Haute Tension and Ils.
Rebekah Kennedy as Abigail is a standout. She commits fully — physically, emotionally — to a role that demands an enormous amount from her. The tragedy underneath the horror is real, and she makes sure you feel it. Young Ranen Navat as Mikey also impresses, selling the pure helplessness of a child trapped in something he cannot understand.
The film’s central idea — trauma as a demonic contagion, passed through families and generations like a curse — is compelling and gives the gore some actual weight.
What Doesn’t Quite Work
The second half loses momentum. Once the film jumps forward to the present and leans into true crime TV territory, the pacing slackens and the tonal whiplash becomes harder to ignore. The shift from harrowing psychological horror to goofy slasher territory feels like two different movies stitched together — and the runtime at just over 80 minutes is too short to fully develop either thread.
The non-linear structure also works against the film at times. Jumping between 1910, 2003, 2002, and the present is a lot to track, and not all of it pays off.
The Bottom Line
Traumatika is a mess, but it’s a genuinely scary mess made by someone with real talent. If you have any affection for extreme horror, wild tonal shifts, and films that try to mean something while also making you deeply uncomfortable, this is worth your time. It’s bleak, it’s bloody, and some of its images will stay with you long after it ends.
Just go in knowing the second half doesn’t quite stick the landing — and make sure your trailer is banned from YouTube before you invite the extended family over.
Traumatika (2024) | Dir. Pierre Tsigaridis | 87 min. | Horror