{Fantastic Fest 2025} The Cramps: A Period Piece A Bloody Delight

Every year at Fantastic Fest there’s at least one movie that makes you wonder if you’re losing your mind in the best possible way. This year, that honor goes to The Cramps: A Period Piece, Brooke H. Cellars’ Technicolor monster mash of menstrual horror, drag theater, and melodramatic camp.

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The whole thing looks like it was shot inside a Sears photo studio circa 1993, which is a compliment in this context. It’s not just an aesthetic flex either. The decision to shoot on 35mm is the glue that keeps this messy, glittery bloodbath from completely slipping into parody. Without it, the film’s kaleidoscopic, drag-inspired world would collapse under the weight of its own absurdity.

The story follows Agnes Applewhite, a sweetly awkward young woman suffocating under her sanctimonious mother and uptight sister. Agnes finds a sliver of freedom working as a shampoo girl at a local salon. It is about as fabulous and loud as you’d expect. It’s also where her cramps begin to manifest as a literal monster—a bloblike blood clot that slips and slides into reality every month. By the time the blob turns into a grabby hand in the third act, the movie has gone from weird to positively deranged.

Horror By Way of Melodrama

Make no mistake, this is not a horror movie in the conventional sense. The first act is closer to a 60s melodrama by way of Dr. Seuss. The horror creeps in later, and even then it’s filtered through absurdist comedy and a purposeful acting style that will either make you want to gouge your eyes out or clap with joy. There’s very little middle ground. A line like “like a queef in the wind” tells you exactly what frequency the movie is operating on.

Cellars is drawing from the John Waters playbook here. The mise en scène is crammed with wild little details: families gathering around the radio on Friday nights, wigs piled high, shadows falling at impossible angles. It’s camp turned up to eleven. Sometimes it feels like the script doesn’t have quite enough substance to keep the runtime afloat. The 89 minutes sag in the middle. Regardless, the sheer audacity of the absurdist comedy keeps things snapping along. Honestly, it might have worked better as a short film, but then again, you’d lose the cumulative punch of its growing weirdness. And yes, the weirdness pays off. By the time the blob-monster fully emerges, The Cramps delivers one of the most bonkers creature homages in recent memory. It’s half alien, half metaphorical blood clot, and all gooey brilliance.

A Technocolor Love Letter

Cellars has been open about drawing from her personal experience with endometriosis, and that raw honesty cuts through the camp. Beneath the wigs and technicolor gloss, the film is a loud, messy, defiant attempt to turn very real pain into something communal and cathartic. It’s not subtle. It’s not polite. I am not not going lie this may not be for everyone. As a straight hetero dude it is certainly of my lived experience. But it is bold, brash, and completely itself.

The Cramps: A Period Piece may not hit every note cleanly (there is a lot of period blood), but it’s a fearless debut and a neon-smeared love-hate letter to uterine life. At Fantastic Fest, where genre gets to be as strange and specific as possible, that feels exactly right.