Itch! review – skin-crawling body horror meets supermarket standoff in low-budget chiller

A killer itch and a trapped group of strangers make for a tense, if uneven, horror that balances grisly shocks with sketchy character drama

This horror is set in a world where a highly contagious disease causes itching so severe that the scratching proves quickly fatal; finally, a film targeting the under-served eczema community! The body horror elements are realised extremely effectively, with a woman literally tearing at her skin being the most effective set-piece. Alas, the film doesn’t have the scope (on what was clearly a modest budget) to indulge in very many of these. Much of the rest of the runtime is the pressure-cooker conversation that occurs between a motley crew of so-far-uninfected civilians caught out at a department store. While the reason they are trapped is horrific, this makes the film at least as much a character study as it is a horror, with variable results.

Scenarios from classic films which the film-makers may have had in mind include the hard-pressed band of isolated scientists confronting a shape-shifting monster in John Carpenter’s The Thing, the mismatched duo defending a defunct police station under siege in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, or even a non-John Carpenter film, Night of the Living Dead, in which survivors hole up in a farmhouse. The key to these types of films is a blend of genre excitement and character dynamics. It would have been great to see more of this from Itch!: on the one hand, a slightly bigger budget for more of the gnarly effects it pulls off so well in some brief scenes, and on the other, a sharper script to serve the human aspect.