Wild Eyed and Wicked

Wild Eyed and Wicked

Name	Wild Eyed and Wicked
Director	Gordon Shoemaker Foxwood
Producer	Gordon Shoemaker Foxwood;; Powell Robinson;; Patrick Robert Young
Writer	Gordon Shoemaker Foxwood
Starring	Molly Kunz;; Michael X. Sommers;; Stefanie Estes;; Colleen Camp;; Claire Saunders;; William Ford-Conway;; Evyn Flanders
Music	Kyle Hnedak
Cinematography	Matheus Bastos
Editing	William Ford-Conway
Production Companies	Big Bad Film;; New Mythology Productions
Distributor	Gravitas Ventures
Runtime	99 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Wild Eyed and Wicked is a 2024 American fantasy-horror feature written and directed by Gordon Shoemaker Foxwood and led by Molly Kunz as Lily Pierce, a modern-day “knight” confronting a hereditary, medieval-tinged terror that shadows her family line. Blending psychological drama with armor-and-broadsword imagery, Wild Eyed and Wicked premiered at the 2023 Austin Film Festival (AFF), where it won the Dark Matters Feature Audience Award. The film later screened as an international premiere at SoHome Horror Pride 2024 and was released in North America via TVOD and cable on demand on 11 June 2024 by Gravitas Ventures; it subsequently became available to stream on Paramount+ in the United States.

Wild Eyed and Wicked has been noted by critics for its genre-bending approach, which reframes grief, therapy, and intergenerational trauma through the language of quest myths and chivalric ritual.

Plot

Wild Eyed and Wicked opens with a childhood memory that never quite lets go. Years earlier, Lily Pierce—introduced in flashback as a brave but terrified girl—eavesdrops on a late-night disturbance. The threat outside is indistinct, more felt than seen, but the event culminates in an irrevocable loss that calcifies into recurring nightmares and panic attacks in adulthood.

As the anniversary of her mother Silvia’s death approaches, Lily (Molly Kunz) compartmentalizes via routines that suggest both control and avoidance. She teaches fencing lessons—ritualized combat, safe and bounded—and checks in with her therapist, Genevieve (Colleen Camp), whose sessions nudge Lily toward an unavoidable confrontation with the past. Lily is additionally steadied by the presence of her girlfriend, Willow (Claire Saunders), who wants to help but recognizes there are battles only Lily can fight.

A message from her estranged father, Gregory (Michael X. Sommers), a disgraced history professor, becomes the catalyst. He invites Lily back to the Pennsylvania farm where she grew up—home, but also the locus of hauntings. Lily, both wary and defiant, makes the trip, pistol concealed, and finds her father living with artifacts of another time: medieval armor; a broadsword; handwritten notes; and a tattered bestiary of a creature tied to the family’s bloodline.

Father and daughter circle a conversational minefield. Gregory has theories—grasping and grandiose—that explain the apparition as a generational “hunt” with rules and patterns; Lily clings to what therapy has given her: a frame for grief that does not require monsters. The farm’s edges blur at night, though, and something old and deliberate stalks the treeline. To face it, Lily must adopt tools that feel like play-acting—mail, gorget, visor—until, in the film’s defining image, she chooses to wear the armor fully and raise the sword with purpose.

What follows blends siege logic with psychological reckoning. The creature’s incursions mirror Lily’s memories and guilt: locked rooms, cassette tapes that play by themselves, the same few awful seconds replayed as if trauma were a loop. The more Lily leans into the knightly ritual—oaths, stances, the physical weight of steel—the more she experiences a paradoxical lightness, as if inhabiting a role gives her distance from the pain. The final confrontation is a duel, but also a conversation: between versions of Lily, between inheritance and autonomy, and between the fantasy of total victory and the reality of doing the next right thing.

Cast

Molly Kunz as Lily Pierce

Michael X. Sommers as Gregory Pierce

Stefanie Estes as Silvia

Colleen Camp as Genevieve (therapist)

Claire Saunders as Willow

William Ford-Conway as Liam

Evyn Flanders as Young Lily

Development

Writer-director Gordon Shoemaker Foxwood has described Wild Eyed and Wicked as a fantasy-psychological horror story born from close-to-home experience. In interviews surrounding the release, he notes that the narrative’s focus on trauma, recovery, and resilience drew on his wife Elizabeth’s work as a physician supporting patients through mental health struggles; in some sequences, Elizabeth even doubled for fully armored sword and riding shots. The project grew out of Foxwood’s shorts and poetry-film work and was positioned as his feature debut in the festival circuit.

According to Foxwood, the design brief was to merge the tactile language of medieval chivalry—steel, leather, chainmail—with a contemporary therapy arc without ironizing either one: Lily’s armor is not cosplay but a ritual garment; her broadsword is an heirloom and a coping tool. The narrative emphasizes agency (Lily chooses the quest), mentoring figures (therapist and father), and a foe that is as much metaphor as monster.

Pre-production and casting

Kunz, coming off TV work on The Irrational, signed on to lead Lily’s transformation from haunted survivor to self-authorized knight. Interviews across the press tour foregrounded her physical preparation and her interest in playing a character who actively reshapes the story’s iconography rather than being cast primarily as a victim. The main ensemble—Sommers, Camp, Estes, Saunders—was built to reflect Lily’s intersecting support systems and conflicts: parent, clinician, partner, and the memory of a mother whose absence structures the drama.

Filming

Foxwood has stated that Wild Eyed and Wicked was shot on an ultra-low budget over a 16-day principal photography schedule, largely on his family’s farm in Pennsylvania. His wife, Elizabeth, trained for months in sword and horseback to double armored fighting and riding moments, reflecting how the film’s themes and family collaboration extended into production logistics. The cinematography by Matheus Bastos emphasizes contrasting textures—moonlit silhouettes against tree lines, oppressive interiors, the gleam of plate—intended to keep the fantasy grounded in a material world rather than a stylized digital one.

Cinematography and design

While Wild Eyed and Wicked functions as psychological horror, it courts medieval adventure iconography. Bastos’s camera, paired with Ultra Primes, privileges available darkness and practical sources. Reviewers have noted a “slow-burn” visual strategy that holds back the creature and prioritizes Lily’s point of view, switching to fuller-body frames when the armor—and Lily’s commitment—comes into play. Production design by Hanna Hamilton keeps interiors intimate and lived-in—family rooms, barns, improvised practice spaces—so that the sudden presence of helm, gauntlet, and blade feels at once alien and inherited.

Practical action and training

Wild Eyed and Wicked banks on tactile action. Kunz’s fencing background, plus on-set coaching, supports the film’s disciplined, non-flashy fight beats; the armored work, which could not reasonably be handed off in every angle, required close-coordination between Kunz and the armor double for continuity in gait, stance, and weight transfer. The design of Lily’s armor (color, silhouette) doubles as character arc: defensive at first—closed, dark, heavy—then purpose-driven as she decides what parts of the “knight” identity she wants to keep.

Music

Composer Kyle Hnedak’s score threads melancholy strings and low brass into a spare percussive palette, moving from therapy-room hush to ritual drums without fetishizing the medieval. The cues are often felt more than foregrounded, swelling when Lily puts on armor or commits to the duel—moments that risk melodrama if pushed too hard musically. Credits across film databases and industry trackers list Hnedak as original music composer.

Post-production

Editor William Ford-Conway cuts on rhythm rather than jump scares: nightmares play like intrusive thoughts rather than edit-punchlines, and dream logic frequently drifts into waking life without a hard seam. That choice keeps the film’s “monster logic” in conversation with therapy’s lived experience, emphasizing that no clean break exists between diagnosis and day-to-day coping.

Themes and analysis

Trauma and ritual

Wild Eyed and Wicked is blunt about trauma but refuses a purely clinical framework. Therapy is central and respected—Genevieve is not a plot obstacle—but the film argues that recovery can also look like reclaiming dangerous tools under safe conditions. In Lily’s case, “safe conditions” paradoxically means controlled contact with literal danger: steel, edge alignment, controlled strikes. The monster, whether read as entity or metaphor, demands a ritual answer; the film asks whether rituals can be rehabilitated for healing rather than domination.

Inheritance and choice

Gregory’s academic obsession with myth and lineage risks re-inflicting harm, yet it also provides Lily with a map—flawed, perhaps, but a starting point. The script maps a tension many families recognize: the old way that hurt us is sometimes the only way we were taught to fight. Lily’s agency is measured less by whether she rejects or accepts that inheritance and more by how she edits it to fit the person she is now.

Queer presence without tokenization

Lily’s relationship with Willow is woven into everyday beats: morning routines, small jokes, boundary-setting around family trips. It grounds the mythic with the quotidian and quietly insists that heroes in armor may be queer, tender, and contemporary. Festival programming positioned the film alongside LGBTQ+-forward titles at SoHome Horror Pride 2024, further underlining this dimension.

Fantasy grammar in modern horror

Critics highlighted the way Foxwood borrows the grammar of fantasy—quests, armor, oaths—and lays it over a realist base. Austin Chronicle’s review explicitly links the film’s imagery to classical adventure touchstones while noting that Wild Eyed and Wicked is not trying to reinvent horror so much as to dignify its heroine’s ritual with sincere, even romantic, iconography.

Festival run

Wild Eyed and Wicked world-premiered at AFF as part of the Dark Matters slate, winning the Dark Matters Feature Audience Award. It then held its East Coast premiere at Dances With Films NYC on 2 December 2023 in the Midnight Series, billed at 99 minutes with Kunz, Sommers, Estes, Camp, and Saunders listed as principal cast. The film’s international premiere played at SoHome Horror Pride 2024, with festival materials framing it as “medieval revenge and sapphic redemption” within a queer horror showcase.

Release

Gravitas Ventures handled North American release. The film launched across transactional digital storefronts and cable VOD on 11 June 2024, with availability aggregators and reviewers listing Apple TV and other platforms; Rotten Tomatoes also tracks availability and runtime. By early autumn 2024, the title was additionally available to stream on Paramount+ in the U.S., a window promoted in trade and horror outlets and reflected on platform listings.

Reception

Critical response

Early notices emphasized the film’s sincerity and hybrid tone. On Rotten Tomatoes, Wild Eyed and Wicked has a modest-sample Tomatometer and a synopsis that foregrounds the film’s blend of fantasy, family drama, and horror. Film Threat critic Bobby LePire praised the film’s ambition and cross-genre balance, assigning a positive score and arguing that the approach “for the most part, succeeds.” The Austin Chronicle noted that the film is “not a radical reinvention,” but that by deploying Excalibur-adjacent imagery with a straight face, Foxwood affords Lily’s quest a kind of shining valor. Coverage from niche outlets around the SoHome Horror Pride run—Nerdly, HorrorBuzz, and other blogs—tended to applaud the character focus and the tactile sword-and-armor beats, while sometimes critiquing the darkness of certain night sequences common to low-budget indies.

Audience response

AFF’s Audience Award signaled strong in-room response at the world premiere, with the festival highlighting Foxwood in its “Screenwriters to Watch 2024” features thereafter, tying the victory to industry exposure and a streaming on-ramp.

Accolades

Selected accolades for Wild Eyed and Wicked

Year	Award/Festival	Category	Recipient(s)	Result	Ref.
2023	Austin Film Festival	Dark Matters Feature — Audience Award	Film	Won
2024	SoHome Horror Pride	International Premiere selection	Film	—

Marketing

Digital marketing for Wild Eyed and Wicked centered on a key art poster juxtaposing contemporary costuming with plate armor, and a trailer emphasizing Lily’s dual arcs: clinical recovery and mythic preparation. Trailer debuts and clips circulated across Apple TV, YouTube, and niche horror sites in the run-up to the June 2024 TVOD window and the October 2024 Paramount+ streaming date.

Legacy and influence

Although too recent and small-scale to register a broad cultural footprint, Wild Eyed and Wicked has found a particular niche among viewers receptive to sincere mythic language in contemporary horror. Festival programmers and reviewers have singled out the film’s queer throughline and its refusal to treat therapy and ritual as mutually exclusive toolsets—an approach that may influence other microbudget genre projects looking to escape the irony trap.

Home media and availability

As of 2025, Wild Eyed and Wicked is listed on Apple TV with Paramount+ availability (subject to regional windows), and it has circulated across mainstream TVOD outlets and cable VOD packages typical of Gravitas Ventures’ indie pipeline. Availability windows vary by platform and territory.

See also

List of films featuring the Knights Templar or medieval chivalry themes

Films about post-traumatic stress disorder

Queer horror

External links

• Wild Eyed and Wicked at Apple TV
• 19224314
• SoHome Horror Pride 2024 – Wild Eyed and Wicked