On Gallows Hill gets off to a bit of a rocky start.
The shorthand characterization of Matt (Rohan Maletira) as a college athlete is effective but feels very screenwriting 101, a specific thought I had because one of the first things we see is Matt picking up a post it with "Psych 102" written on it before studying for a bit.
When he goes out and meets his friends and girlfriend, their interactions convey an unnaturally overperformed comfort between the characters. And an extended bit of club bouncer Stuart (Tim Pollack) interrogating Matt about his address, birthday, and blood type misses the mark as an attempt at humor.
But then, after having been kicked out of the bar for starting a fight over his girlfriend (not the best way to endear a protagonist to the audience), Matt is attacked by Stuart as a vampire. The attack isn't depicted on screen; we only see the bouncer with his fangs out rushing at the camera, then see Matt fall. It's what happens after Matt falls that shifts On Gallows Hill from a likely just ok low budget genre movie, into something worth taking note of.
The world around Matt fades away and he becomes a rotoscoped outline filled with what look like crayon or colored pencil lines. As the film's opening credits begin to play, Matt gets up, picks up a lantern, and begins to explore an animated world of caverns, bats, and seemingly long-dead corpses in armor.
The entirety of this sequence is rendered in black, white, and red hand-drawn or rotoscoped images, pulling the audience in not only through its shift in medium, but through the distinct, simple style of the animation. This animation returns later in the film, offering an incredibly smooth transition of Matt as a rotoscoped outline falling through a black void from place to place without ever appearing to cut. And it's indicative of the creativity of filmmaker Ed Shimborske and his team.
The other great highlight of this creativity are the puppets used when Matt, having been turned by Stuart's bite, and other vampires transform into bats. Sometimes these creatures are puppeteered; the behind the scenes footage that accompanies the end credits shows crew members using fishing rods to "fly" the bats.
Other times they are stop-motion animated, as when Matt follows new vampire friend Joey (Sam Smiley) to a gathering place where a group of human-form vampires gamble on two bat-form vampires on the floor, shifting around a bit, and throwing punches at each other. It looks very silly but in the best kind of ingenuity on a budget way.
The story includes some new twists on vampire lore as well, even if the broader structure and narrative beats are all familiar. Most interestingly, On Gallows Hill proposes that vampires can only feed on those who have the same blood type they did when they were human. This becomes an issue for Matt, whose blood type was the rare O-negative and introduces a surprisingly dark world-building element into what is a mostly light film.
Joey's introduction adds to that lightness significantly. He's been a vampire for a century and at some point in that century travelled from Australia to the US, where he's been having a grand hedonistic time that he invites Matt to join him in. Smiley is wonderfully charming in the role and for a moment it seems like the movie will become a buddy comedy, and it may have been better served if it had.
Instead the narrative takes Matt deeper into the vampire world Joey introduces him to, while also developing a romance with his old middle school friend Annie (Jill Pierangeli); having apparently forgotten about the other girl he was dating before he was turned. Maletira and Pierangeli sell the romance with an awkward, sweet chemistry that works for characters in their early twenties. And inevitably the parallel plots come together in a finale that's a bit muddled.
On Gallows Hill has a lot of kinks and is far from perfect, but its characters are likable and its twist on vampire lore intriguing. More than that though, there's an infectious sense of the joy of filmmaking, of mixing media and using whatever tools available, that makes the film stand out, and makes Shimborske one to watch.
The film screened at the 2026 Chattanooga Film Festival.