Like so many slashers, 213 Bones begins with a couple doing the nasty, and then getting nastily penetrated with a weapon by a masked figure. Rather less like your average slasher, the victims are not young co-eds having their mortality expedited as punishment for losing their virginity, but rather married, middle-aged Greg (Steve Lloyd) and Lacey (Sarah Brooks), who is very much not his wife and fancies a bit of bondage. In the fictitious Midwestern small town of Bristol Falls, rules – of genre as much as of conjugal fidelity – are being broken. Indeed, the film, though a period piece, takes place not in the Eighties heyday of the genre, but in the early Nineties, when the slasher, not quite yet revived by the postmodernity of Wes Craven’s Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Scream (1996), had famously had its day and lost its way.
Two years later, the focus shifts back to co-eds, as the students in a forensic anthropology class are set a practical assignment by their teacher Kelly Drake (Colin Egglesfield). Smart outsider Lisa (Luna Fujimoto), Eighties gal Candice (Toni Weiss), Candice’s diner-moonlighting roomie Patty (Allegra Sweeney), nerdy Brent (Hunter Nance), couple Joanna (Simone Lockhart) and Eric (Liam Woodrum), studious Jill (Elizabeth O’Brien), feckless dealer Clyde (Mason Kennerly), and mature student Bob (Dean Cameron) must work together to determine the crime that led to a collection of bones that Kelly has carefully staged for them. Yet as this somewhat dysfunctional group participates in this entirely artificial exercise, someone is leaving actual human bones in their vicinity, and soon starts murdering them one by one, so that the student must use their collective skills for real to catch the killer. Few college tests come with such deadly stakes.
As the town’s sheriff Bracco (Ernest Walker), coroner Laurie (Francesca Barker McCormick) and Kelly himself join in trying to solve the crimes, there is no shortage of suspects, even if their numbers are being rapidly, fatally pared down to an ever smaller set of survivors. So 213 Bones is essentially a stabby whodunnit, with a killer whose mask comes straight out of Shohei Imamura’s anthropological feature Profound Desire of the Gods (1968). The solution is so signposted from early on, that viewers may well spend some time imagining that it is too obvious not be a red herring – and when it is confirmed, it is also overly explained with the kind of cackling, gloating exposition that would make even a Bond villain blush. It is, though, more interesting as a dissection of a fractured Twin Peaks-like lumbertown community before the Internet, before smartphones, and before the arrival of self-aware, self-reflexive irony in horror. These young Gen Xers are on the cusp of a fast changing world where they must adapt or die – and the film, like any forensic anthropologist, is shining a light on relics of the past to pin down who we are now and where we have come from.
213 Bones is Jeffrey Primm’s debut feature as director and co-writer (with Dominic Arcelin) – although sadly, despite the film clearly setting itself up for a sequel, it would also be Primm’s final work, as he passed in 2024. In a brief but funny cameo, Primm appears as a backwoods, cross-eyed pizzeria clerk who declares to a bewildered Patty and Lisa: “Be careful, there’s a lot of weirdos out there!” It is a line that serves well as the filmmaker’s last words and epitaph.
213 Bones had its UK première at FrightFest 2025, Sunday 24 August
