Hunting Matthew Nichols

Actor Markian Tarasiuk, seen in 'There's Someone Inside Your House', makes his directing debut with 'Hunting Matthew Nichols', a Canadian indie horror made on a small budget and shaped like a true crime documentary. He wrote it with Sean Harris Oliver, and it makes no secret of what it owes to 'The Blair Witch Project'.

On Halloween night in 2001, two teenagers from Vancouver Island, Matthew Nichols and his best friend Jordan Reimer, walked into the woods and never came back. Police found their camcorder in an abandoned cabin but no trace of the boys, and the official line was that they'd most likely fallen into a ravine.

Twenty-two years later Matthew's younger sister Tara sets out to make a film about what happened, with Tarasiuk and cameraman Ryan Alexander McDonald playing themselves behind the camera. Armed with police evidence recently handed over to the family, she goes back to the island to interview her mother and the officer who led the investigation, and soon finds details that don't fit the official story. It doesn't help that the two boys were budding filmmakers obsessed with the 1999 film, who may have been trying to shoot their own version when they vanished.

Miranda MacDougall plays Tara, with Christine Willes as Pam Hamilton, the investigator on the case. The film premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival in October 2024 and won Best Found Footage Feature at FilmQuest. Steven Soderbergh called it "a sneaky, simmering take on the true crime folk horror genre that boils over and becomes truly unnerving."

Dropshock Pictures opened it on more than a thousand screens across the US and Canada on 10 April 2026. Reviews were mostly kind, with an average of 65 out of 100 across the 18 outlets collected on Movienco, and in the UK it's now streaming on Shudder.

• Crime
• Horror
• Mystery