Demon Hunter: Time 2 Kill Review: Zoe Kavanagh Goes Full 1987

Zoe Kavanagh has never made a quiet film, and Demon Hunter: Time 2 Kill is her loudest yet. Her long-awaited sequel flings Niamh Hogan’s Taryn Barker out of the present and into a 1987 summer camp, where a slasher called Lucien Krull is already hard at work. Add a doomsday cult run by A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Lisa Wilcox, a hunt for the ancient Necrox, and buckets of practical gore, and you have the daftest, most enjoyable action horror on the indie slate this year. Here is my full review of Kavanagh’s time-hopping summer camp slasher.

Demon Hunter: Time 2 Kill | Zoe Kavanagh | 2026 | 97 minutes | NR |

Somewhere in 1987, a demon hunter with a sword is babysitting a summer camp full of teenagers who are all absolutely going to die, and I have never been happier.

That is the pitch. That is the whole glorious thing. Zoe Kavanagh took her goth warrior, shoved her through a hole in time, and dropped her into a slasher film. Machete country. Bad decisions and worse haircuts. I sat down for a laugh and got the best daft night in front of the telly I have had all year.

Right. Deep breath. Let me set the table.

Taryn Barker hunts demons and cracks jokes, roughly in that order. She is after a lump of ancient tat called the Necrox. In her way stands Elysia Cronika, boss of Illumini Industries and head of a cult called the Stygian, a woman with all the warmth of a walk-in freezer. Cronika wants the Necrox so she can pop the lid off Hell. Taryn shreds her demon goon squad. So Cronika does the pettiest thing any villain has ever done. She flings Taryn back to 1987 and leaves her there.

Cue campfire. Cue screaming. Cue a demon hunter on babysitting duty.

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Here is what watching it feels like. It rips. Ninety-seven minutes and not one of them is wasted. No moody prologue. No twenty minutes of grief in a grey kitchen. The film grabs you by the collar in the first reel and drags you along, whooping.

The tension does not simmer. It hurtles. Demon action, then a hard left into slasher land, then a time-travel puzzle, and it never once trips over its own feet. On paper that is a car crash. On screen it sings, because Kavanagh never winks too hard. She loves this stuff. You can taste it.

And the film is funny. Properly funny. Taryn knows exactly what kind of movie she has fallen into, and she is scunnered about it. She knows the rules. The kids do not. She has to save a pack of teenagers who keep doing the precise thing you are screaming at the telly about. Splitting up. Wandering off. Going for a swim. The film plays that for laughs and for panic at the same time, which is a proper high-wire act.

I have not grinned this hard at a horror film in ages.

Quick digression, and I promise it goes somewhere. When I was a boy the video shop was the whole world. Big clamshell boxes. Lurid painted covers promising things the film could never deliver. You picked one on the strength of the art alone and took your chances. Half of them were rubbish.

But the good ones had a scrappy homemade energy that the polished stuff never had. They felt like someone had actually made them, in a field, with their mates. That is precisely the frequency this film broadcasts on. It could sit on that shelf tomorrow and look right at home, and I mean that as the highest praise I have got. This was an era where horror movies, in the main had a heart.

Right. Back to the mayhem.

Now the good stuff. The gore.

Kavanagh went practical, and thank the dark lord for that. Real prosthetics. Real goo. Real weight when a body hits the deck. There is a heft to it no computer has ever managed. When something gets ripped apart here, it looks like something got ripped apart. You can nearly smell the latex. That is a compliment, and if you know, you know.

The fights are a huge step up. The stunt team earn their chips. Taryn throws hands like she means it, and Kavanagh does the bravest thing a low-budget director can do. She holds the shot. No blender editing. No forty cuts to hide a double. You see the boot land. You feel it.

She shoots wide, in scope, and she runs a lot of the camera herself. That shows. The framing is blunt and sure, the work of someone who knows the shot and just takes it.

And the sound. Oh, the sound. The first film sounded like it was taped in a bin. This one thumps. It has been rebuilt from the floor up and the gap is night and day.

The music is where her heart lives. Kavanagh cut her teeth on music videos for My Dying Bride, The Birthday Massacre and Clan of Xymox, and she fronts an industrial rock band herself. That DNA is smeared all over this thing. The soundtrack has a pulse and a leather jacket. It gives the film a swagger that glossier horror simply cannot buy.

Niamh Hogan is having the time of her life, and it is catching. Her Taryn is older now, funnier, less mopey, and twice as lethal. Hogan sells the fights. She sells the one-liners. She sells the tired flicker of a woman who has been doing this far too long and will finish the job anyway, because nobody else will. She is cracking company for ninety-seven minutes.

Then there is Lisa Wilcox, and what a bit of casting this is. If you grew up renting Nightmare on Elm Street sequels, you know her as Alice, the girl who stared Freddy down twice. Here she flips sides and plays the baddie, and she is loving every second of it. Cronika is cold, corporate and gleeful about the end of the world. Sticking a Freddy survivor in charge of doomsday is the kind of move that makes horror fans sit up and cheer.

Kevin O’Malley is back as Ethan, the tech-minded sidekick, and the double act is one of the best things here. He gets far more to do this time. The banter lands because it sounds like two people who have survived a lot of nonsense together.

Lar Mclachlan makes Lucien Krull a proper slab of a slasher. He stalks. He looms. He does not run, because the greats never run. The young cast playing the camp kids throw themselves in with exactly the right mix of daft and doomed.

So what is under the splatter? More than you would think.

There is a big sloppy love letter here to the summer camp slasher, the Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp lot, the sticky-carpet video shop era that raised half of us. But Kavanagh is not just waving at the past. She drops a modern woman right into it and lets her have a go at the rules. Taryn is sharp and switched on in a genre that was rarely kind to its women. Watching her rewrite the rulebook from the inside is the cleverest thing in the film.

There is a class streak too, which is where I live. The villain is a tech CEO in a nice office. The hero is a skint goth with a sword and a mouth on her. Kavanagh made this outside the system, on her own money, through her own company. That outsider spirit bleeds into the story. Corporate evil versus a woman with a grudge and a blade. I know whose corner I am in.

And the time travel does more than shuttle the plot about. It lets Kavanagh poke at fate. At going back to fix a broken thing. At the pull of a past you cannot quite put down. That gives the film a wee bit of ache under the gore. Taryn is stranded in a decade that is not hers, guarding people she cannot save just by wanting it. There is a small real sadness there, and the film is smart enough to let it breathe between the kills.

This fits her story perfectly. Kavanagh dreamed up Taryn back in 2008 as a scribble of a goth girl in the rain with a sword, named with a nod to Clive Barker. She made a short. Then she self-funded a whole feature. Then she hauled it round the festival circuit and won a pile of awards on sheer bloody-mindedness, including Best Director gongs.

Her influences were never hidden. The Terminator for the past-and-present shape. Evil Dead for the smart-mouthed monster killer, because without Ash there is no Taryn. Highlander, Blade Runner, The Crow. It is all here, sharpened up. The debut had the ideas. This one has the ideas and the muscle.

Where does it sit? Right in the legacy sequel wave, but down the scruffy end, which is the only end worth being at. Everyone is dusting off an old franchise these days. Most play it safe and solemn and grey. Kavanagh went the other way entirely. Bigger, dafter, more heartfelt.

The obvious cousin is the jump Damien Leone made from the first Terrifier to the second. That same leap from rough promise to gory swagger. File this alongside the Terrifier films, the Evil Dead line, and anything that still believes practical gore and a good laugh are worth chasing. Action horror, slasher and time-travel yarn welded into one lumpy glorious whole, and it wears all three badges with pride.

What sets it apart is the person behind it. No committee made this. No focus group. It is one woman’s mad goth vision, funded on fumes and flung at the screen with total nerve. Horror needs more of this. More outsiders. More latex. More swords.

Zoe Kavanagh spent a hundred grand and a decade of stubbornness to strand a goth with a sword in 1987, and she has made the most purely enjoyable thing on the indie slate this year. Put the lights out and let it rip.

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