Horror has always known what to do with Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Long before The Shell Brothers set their version inside a throbbing industrial nightclub, Clive Barker made a silent short of it in 1973, Ken Russell turned it into a garish, perverse cabaret in 1988, and Atom Egoyan wove it through a multi-layered psychological study in 2023.
Each generation of filmmakers looks at this one-act tragedy, with its severed head on a silver platter and its teenage girl naming a price for her dance, and sees a horror story wearing historical costume. So the question a new Salome review has to answer is not whether the material works for the genre—it demonstrably does—but what fresh voltage a pair of Texan brothers working under the Crucible Media banner can bring to material that has been adapted, reinterpreted, and dissected for more than a century.
Salome Review: The Shell Brothers’ Wilde Horror Adaptation
A warehouse throbs with strobe lights and modernised classical music while Oscar Wilde’s banned language fills the air, and somewhere in the centre of it all, a woman in red is about to name her price.
The Shell Brothers’ Salome compresses Wilde’s scandalous tragedy into 76 minutes of claustrophobic, hypnotic horror, anchored by Jessie Epstein’s riveting performance as a woman who discovers that being looked at is not the same as being powerless. This is literary adaptation as controlled detonation.
The first thing you notice is the red.
Not the warehouse. Not the thumping, modernised classical score. Not the slow-motion bodies swaying under strobing lights. The red. Jessie Epstein, playing Salome, wears a dress the colour of arterial spray while everyone around her moves in black and white, and the effect is so bluntly effective that you almost laugh.
Of course she’s in red. She’s the only thing in the room that matters, and the Shell Brothers want you to know it before she speaks a single line of Wilde’s language.
Austin Shell and Dylan Shell, working as The Shell Brothers under their Crucible Media banner, have done something genuinely unexpected with Salome. They have taken Oscar Wilde’s banned, scandalous, blood-drenched one-act tragedy and set it inside an industrial warehouse. Herod’s palace is now a nightclub.
The feast for Roman envoys is now a debauched party with drugs and alcohol and bodies in motion. And Wilde’s language, every ornate and repetitive and incantatory syllable of it, remains intact. This is not an update that sands down the original. It is a collision between a 19th-century text and a 21st-century location, and the friction generates the film’s entire voltage.
What kind of horror is this? It is horror of the slow-creep variety, the kind that does not announce itself with jump scares but accumulates through atmosphere, language, and the dawning realisation that every person in this room is hurtling toward something irreversible.
A modern take on classical music that pulses like a second heartbeat. Slow motion that makes the dancers look like they are moving through honey. Then Salome enters, and the slow motion intensifies around her alone, and every eye in the club follows her, and yours does too, and the film has already made its argument. This is what it feels like to be looked at. This is what it feels like to be the object of every gaze in the room. Now watch what she does with that power.
The dread architecture here is unusual. Most horror films build tension through what might happen. Salome builds tension through what you already know will happen. The story is famous. The beheading is inevitable. The severed head on the silver platter is one of Western culture’s most durable images.
So the horror is not in the surprise. It is in the waiting, in watching characters make decisions that close off every exit, in seeing lust and power and political desperation braid together into a rope that will hang everyone in the room. The Shell Brothers understand this. They do not try to hide the destination. They make the journey toward it suffocatingly beautiful.
The Shell Brothers’ Salome turns Oscar Wilde’s banned play into a hypnotic horror of looking and being looked at, where every gaze has a price and the only colour that matters is arterial red.
Craft-wise, the film operates with the resourcefulness of filmmakers who, in Dylan Shell’s own words, have always had “ideas bigger than our budgets.” The Shell brothers never attended film school. They learned by doing, by failing, by “figuring out workarounds on projects that didn’t have the correct gear.” That scrappiness is visible in Salome, but not in the way you might expect. It does not look cheap. It looks deliberate.
The colour strategy is the most legible craft decision, and also the smartest. Everyone who is not Salome wears black and white. Simple, elegant, anonymous. Salome wears red. When Herod appears, he sometimes wears red too, but he rarely shares the frame with her in equal measure. The visual language is unambiguous: this is a film about who commands attention, and red is the flag of command. The lighting works in concert with this.
The Bains review notes how light is used to “accentuate her beauty and her prowess,” and the effect is less about making Salome look attractive than about making her look inevitable. She is not just the most beautiful person in the room. She is the only person who seems fully real.
The sound design deserves particular attention because it performs an almost subliminal function. Epstein’s voice is higher and smoother than anyone else’s in the cast, and the mix has been shaped to “amplify her voice to a degree” that ensures it cuts through every other sound. This is the aural equivalent of the red dress. While other characters’ voices exist in the normal register of a scene, Salome’s voice seems to come from a different acoustic space entirely, closer, more present, less mediated. It is an unsettling effect once you notice it, and the film counts on you noticing it only gradually.
Austin Shell, who co-directed and also plays Iokkanan, makes an interesting choice by casting himself as the prophet. Iokkanan spends most of the play speaking from off-screen, a voice from a cistern condemning the decadence above him. Having the filmmaker embody the moral voice that the entire narrative moves toward silencing creates a strange meta-textual tension. The man who built this spectacle also plays the man destroyed by it. Whether this was intentional or a matter of low-budget practicality, the effect is thematically coherent.
Epstein’s performance anchors everything. Her training in Shakespeare and the Patsy Rodenburg method, disciplines built around voice, breath, and the physical embodiment of heightened language, is exactly what Wilde’s text demands. The play was written in French, translated into English, and structured around repetitions and incantations that can sound absurd if an actor does not commit to them fully.
Epstein commits. Her Salome moves from bored stepdaughter to calculating negotiator to something more disturbing, a woman who discovers, in the act of demanding a man’s death, a form of power she has never held before. There is a moment, unverified in its specifics but legible in the film’s architecture, where the request for John the Baptist’s head shifts from revenge to something closer to ecstasy. That transition is where the horror lives.
Zachary Thomas, as Herod, has the less showy role but the more difficult one. Herod is a pathetic figure, a king terrified of his Roman overlords, drunk at his own party, lusting after his stepdaughter in ways that disgust everyone, including himself. Thomas portrays him as a man whose authority is already crumbling before Salome makes her demand. His drunkenness is not theatrical. It is the kind of drinking that makes a person smaller, not larger, and when he promises Salome anything she wants in return for her dance, the scene plays less as a bargain than as a man handing a loaded weapon to someone he has underestimated.
Beneath the plot, Salome is about the economy of looking. Who gets to look. Who must be looked at. What looking costs. Wilde’s play has been read for over a century as a text about the male gaze and its destructive consequences , Herod and the Syrian captain both fixate on Salome with sexual desire, and this looking is repeatedly condemned within the play as an omen of disaster.
The Shell Brothers’ adaptation sharpens this theme by literalizing the gaze. The opening sequence, in which every person in the club watches Salome move through the space in slow motion, implicates the audience directly. You are watching. You are part of this.
But the film complicates the dynamic rather than simply condemning it. Salome is not a passive object. She understands the power of being looked at. Her dance, the famous Dance of the Seven Veils, which Wilde’s stage directions announce but never describe, is the moment she converts the gaze into currency. She has been watched her entire life.
Now she will name the price. The film does not present this as empowerment in any simple sense. It presents it as a transaction that destroys everyone involved, Salome included. The femme fatale archetype, which Salome helped invent in the cultural imagination, has always been a double-edged figure: powerful and doomed, agent and victim, the woman who burns down the house while standing inside it.
There is also a class dimension that the warehouse setting introduces. Herod’s feast is not in a palace but in an industrial space repurposed for decadence. The Roman envoys he is trying to impress represent a distant imperial authority. Herod is middle management desperately seeking wealth and power he does not actually possess. The warehouse, with its exposed infrastructure and borrowed grandeur, is a lie. Herod’s authority is a lie. The entire party is a performance of status that collapses the moment a teenage girl calls the bluff.
The Shell Brothers arrived at Salome through an unconventional path. Their earlier work, Ready Cash (2023), a crime-horror about a drug-fuelled bender and a deal with a dangerous organisation, and Slice (2024), a collaborative horror project, established them as capable genre filmmakers working within the constraints of micro-budget production.
But neither film suggested the leap that Salome represents. Ready Cash is gritty and contemporary. Salome is stylised and literary. The former is about desperation in the modern world. The latter is about desire in a world that feels simultaneously ancient and immediate.
What connects the three films is an interest in people making irreversible choices under pressure. In Ready Cash, a man accepts a deal to pay off a debt. In Salome, Herod makes an oath he cannot break, and Salome makes a demand she cannot take back. The Shell Brothers are drawn to stories where a single decision sets the rest of the narrative on rails toward destruction. This is a recognisable horror impulse. It is the logic of the trap.
Epstein brings to the film a background that bridges classical theatre and indie horror. Her training in Shakespeare and Chekhov prepared her for Wilde’s language. Her appearance in Into the Dark: Pooka Lives! (2020), part of Blumhouse’s horror anthology series, placed her within the genre before this project. The combination matters.
Salome needs an actor who can handle both the music of Wilde’s sentences and the slow-building dread of a horror film, and Epstein’s career has quietly prepared her for exactly that. Her filmography, which includes everything from network television (Stumptown) to Ryan Murphy productions (The Prom) to micro-budget indies, suggests a performer comfortable moving between registers.
Austin Shell’s dual role as director and actor playing Iokkanan is harder to contextualise within a career arc
Where does Salome sit within horror as a genre right now? It occupies a small but persistent tradition: the literary horror adaptation that treats its source material not as a property to be exploited but as a structure to be inhabited. Ken Russell made Salome’s Last Dance in 1988. Atom Egoyan made Seven Veils in 2023. Each generation produces filmmakers who look at Wilde’s play and see not a period piece but a horror story wearing historical costume.
The Shell Brothers’ version distinguishes itself through its use of compression. At 76 minutes, it is shorter than most adaptations, and the warehouse setting eliminates the need for elaborate production design. Everything is stripped to essentials: language, bodies, light, sound, and the colour red. The film does not try to compete with Russell’s opulence or Egoyan’s psychological complexity. It goes smaller, tighter, more claustrophobic.
It also belongs to a moment in horror that is increasingly comfortable with artifice. The naturalistic horror of the 2010s, the slow-burn trauma allegories, the A24 house style, is giving ground to films that embrace stylisation, theatricality, and the knowingly artificial. Salome, with its warehouse-as-palace and its commitment to Wilde’s heightened language, has more in common with the operatic excess of The Substance or the controlled theatricality of The Lighthouse than with the vérité horror of the previous decade. It trusts its audience to accept the contract: this is not real, and that is the point.
The film also occupies an interesting position in the landscape of faith-adjacent horror. The biblical story of Salome and John the Baptist has been adapted countless times, but rarely as horror, and almost never with Wilde’s particular emphasis on Salome’s desire rather than Herodias’s vengeance. By centring Salome, her gaze, her voice, her impossible demand, the Shell Brothers shift the story away from moral fable and toward psychological horror. This is not a story about why John the Baptist had to die. It is a story about what it feels like to want something so badly that you will destroy everything to have it, including yourself.
The film ends where it must. You know the ending before the film begins. That is not a weakness. It is the whole mechanism. Salome is a film about watching the inevitable arrive, and the horror is in how beautiful the approach turns out to be.
