HARROW LAKE

A teenage girl obscured behind her single father’s scary stories fights to get her own last word.

The daughter of iconic horror film director Nolan Nox, 17-year-old Lola has only sardonic quips for comfort after she finds her father stabbed. His assistant sends her away from New York City to stay with her maternal grandmother while her father is in the hospital. Lola’s prickly attitude and macabre imagination fuel the narrative as she explores Harrow Lake, Indiana, the creepy hometown of a mother she hasn’t seen since she was 5. After Lola’s mother, Lorelei, starred in a film her father shot there, she got the hell out and never came back. Years later she left her husband and child and disappeared. After Lola arrives, her suitcase mysteriously vanishes, leaving Lola to wear Lorelei’s old film costumes in ominous homage. Lola knows her dad’s movies inside and out, and she’s full too of classic scary movie references: Pennywise, Chucky, even Ellen Ripley. A sympathetic, quick-witted heroine, she at first refuses to be terrified as Harrow Lake presents her with all the trappings of a malevolent place: skittering bugs, disappearing girls, disembodied hands, a living doll, and a nightmare figure who goes by Mister Jitters. Her unflinching devotion to her absent father, whose stern voice rings in her head, tells a sinister story that slowly builds to a heart-pounding climax. Main characters are white.

A satisfying quasi-supernatural thriller.