The Wretched

• The film's original title was "Hag" — the Pierce brothers changed it to The Wretched after negative test-screening feedback.
• It was shot in and around Omena and Northport, small towns on Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula near the Pierce brothers' hometown, not a bigger city set.
• The Wretch's look leans on practical, low-CGI creature effects, drawing on "Boo Hag" and European skin-walker folklore and designer Drew Pierce's Mike Mignola-inspired sketches.
• The Wretched became the #1 movie at the North American box office for five straight weekends in May 2020 — but mostly because it was one of the only films still playing while most theaters were shut down for COVID-19; it was the first film to hold the top spot that long since Avatar in 2009.
• Lead actor John-Paul Howard did a lot of his own stunts, including grueling multi-day cave-fight scenes with the actress playing the Wretch.

The Wretch's power to erase a family's memory of a missing child — not just take the kid, but rewrite everyone's memory of them ever existing — is the real horror engine of the film: Ben's search for his forgotten brother Nathan isn't just an emotional beat, it's proof the witch has been operating in this exact town for years without anyone catching on.

The skin-shedding, body-hopping mechanic implies the Wretch has no true form of her own — she's a parasite that's been cycling through hosts in small lake towns for who knows how long, which is why the ending has her slide into a new host rather than dying with her old one.

Ben spends the whole movie as the only person who notices something's wrong while every adult around him — his distracted dad mid-divorce, the neighbors — looks right past it; the film's real argument is that the grown-ups are too checked out to protect anyone, so it falls on a pissed-off teenager to do it instead.

Ben Shaw's summer working the marina alongside his dad, the harbor master, turns into a nightmare when the family renting the house next door falls under the influence of something ancient. The creature — known only as the Wretch — doesn't hide in the woods waiting to pounce; she crawls inside people and wears their skin, snatching kids and leaving bundles of sticks where they used to sleep. Ben's the only one who clocks that "Abbie" isn't Abbie anymore, but nobody believes a troubled teenager whose parents are splitting up. Then he finds proof that hits closer to home: he had a baby brother, Nathan, wiped from his memory and every family photo years before the movie even starts — already claimed by the witch long before this summer. As the Wretch keeps hopping from host to host through the small lake town, Ben has to stop her before he loses what's left of his family — but the gut-punch ending makes clear that torching one host doesn't kill something built to survive by jumping bodies. She slips into a fresh vessel in the final scene, and the credits roll on her sitting on a boat surrounded by more kids.