Furie’s low-budget British horror flick stars Susan Travers as the daughter of a woman whose mental illness was treated with snake venom by her mad-scientist husband. Herewith, our ranking of the 14 most memorable snake movie moments of all time, from drive-in cheapies, to silly guilty pleasures, to bona fide popcorn blockbusters.
It seemed like as good an excuse as any to tuck our pants into our socks, bust out the anti-venom, and play armchair herpetologist, examining Hollywood’s long, hiss-of-death love affair with nature’s deadliest reptiles. More than just another bleak Appalachian coming-of-age story in the mold of Winter’s Bone, Poulton and Savage’s chilling indie wrings its most squirm-inducing moments not from its cast of religious-zealot, yokel characters (which include Olivia Colman and Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever) or the sight of the always creepy Walton Goggins speaking in tongues from the pulpit, but rather its sheer volume of writhing, rattling, poisonous snakes, which the backwoods sect uses in its religious rituals. Directed by first-timers Britt Poulton and Dan Madison Savage, the film is an unsettling, holy spirit-fueled thriller about a pastor’s daughter ( Top of the Lake’s Alice Englert) who rebels against her isolated Pentecostal community after discovering that she’s pregnant out of wedlock. This past weekend, the Sundance sensation Them That Follow opened in limited release.