Just making its world premiere at Tubi FrightFest 2026, Dan Schaffer’s directorial debut Electric M eat will likely polarize viewers with its experimental minimalist form and its psychosexual and artistic themes. Jarring throughout, the film opens with its high contrast black & white image and relatively quick cuts on scenes of abstract expressionism that immediately convey violence, hysteria, and insanity. And after what might be considered a brief prologue, the film continues in the same fashion, without dialogue beyond ethereal whispers barely detectable and a soundtrack of industrial or discordant intrusions. The latter fit not just with the atmosphere of madness in Electric Meat, but also its urban setting amid smokestack-saturated industrial wasteland.
The film does have a skeletal plot, but one played out non-linearly and often hard to interpret, some details really only becoming canonically ‘true’ from reading official summaries in its publicity. The opening scene introduces a female model (Nina Carson) working for a photographer (Caspian Faye), a familiar stylized fashion session that quickly turns strange and horrific in tears, blood, and screaming. The camera reveals the setting of the shoot, a photographer’s sparse and dilapidated apartment/studio, one that more resembles the den of an obsessive serial killer: walls covered in polaroids and notes, papers strewn around. Despite the setup, it is the model who soon attacks and kills.
Things then open proper with an apparent jump-back in time, introducing the photographer in his actual job as a butcher, and his walk home, on which he discovers the murdered body of one of his models. Rather than reporting it, he takes her body up to his apartment and proceeds to pose and photograph his new muse. But as time passes, his hold on reality perhaps begins to slip, as the model begins to show signs of life, and the studio around him begins crumbling into chaos.
Even after its disjointed opening, the film continues in a similar fashion, not really advancing anything in terms of plot until its conclusions: an abstract expressionism of film designed to convey its unsettling themes. Within moments Schaffer does this effectively, shots and sequences even achieving a sort of dark beauty. The problem becomes in sustaining these momentary impacts for a full-length feature runtime. This would make an exceptional short film. As a feature, however, it rapidly becomes familiar and predictable. There are only so many shots of crumbling building or rooms, smokestacks, papers and polaroids, or hysteric acting before they become dull and lose their efficacy.
A literal reading of Electric Meat‘s plot, themes, and images skews the film as misogynistic, the butcher/photographer treating women as a piece of meat, a body alone; the artist objectifying the female, inspired solely by her physicality. Electric Meat clearly is built as critique of misogyny rather than something condoning or glorifying in it. However, the simplicity and familiarity of its message doesn’t really transcend a skewed reading into anything particularly profound or novel for feminism or the state of creation or art. To be fair, the minimalistic, expressionistic style of the film is really to simply represent or reflect the nature of misogyny, not provide further commentary or solutions on it. It’s a film tableau to portray the destructive emotions
that lie beneath it and arise from it.
Horror fans will likely recognize two names from among Electric Meat‘s small cast. British presenter and cult movie actress Emily Booth (Evil Aliens, Shed of the Dead) appears as the butcher/photographer’s landlady, and Canadian horror writer/director/producer Sylvia Soska (American Mary, Rabid) plays one of the muses (though her twin sister Jen Soska is not in this.)
Though I found it hard getting through Electric Meat with its runtime, it shows impressive technique and vision that would make me curious to see future directorial work from Dan Schaffer. (He has several prior writing credits including Dog House — that Emily Booth also was in — and The Scribbler.) It’s also at least worth it for experimental horror fans to check this out for its moments of dark, stark, visual beauty in contrasts.
