‘213 Bones’ FrightFest 2025 Review: An Impressive Take On The College Slasher
The college slasher is an underrated flavor of horror’s least sophisticated subgenre. The distinction may be slight, but a cast of undergrad co-eds gives the slasher story an edge of urgency and agency over their high-school and summer camp peers, as being a college student makes you slightly more integrated into the real, grown-up world. Of course, you’re not fully integrated into adult life, and this fluctuating state of independence and confinement in dorms and libraries makes potential victims still vulnerable to attack. How many students have been picked off while working late at the library, or walking home from a late shift, or hooking up with a secret beau they’ve kept private from all their friends?
The college slashers of the late 1970s and 1980s—Final Exam, The House on Sorority Row, Pieces—were par for the course for the genre. They weren’t without striking and atmospheric craft, but they were also prone to the lazy, cynical impulses of an industry turning lurid taboo into box office receipts. When the slasher got a postmodern coat of paint in the late 1990s, the college setting returned, especially in Scream 2 and Urban Legend. From a fashion point of view, Jeffrey Primm’s 213 Bones is stuck around the mid-90s (no complaints here), a period slasher movie about a class of forensic anthropologists who are targeted in quick succession by a masked killer, leaving real, human bones with their victims as calling cards.
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213 Bones was produced on a scale far closer to scrappy ‘70s flicks than a studio product like Scream 2. The pressures on today’s low-budget productions are evident in Primm’s brief genre throwback. The college is eerily empty, with very few students or background actors seen around the campus (213 Bones was shot on location at Eastern Washington University, in Spokane County, Washington), and the mystery plot suffers from only a few moments of intrigue and conspiracy in the second half. Ultimately, the film has a pervading sense of artifice and flimsiness as it approaches its shrug of a grand reveal.
But for its clear demerits, 213 Bones is not incompetent, thanks to a lively young cast who relish the opportunity to imbue the college slasher archetypes with pep and personality. Plus, the kill sequences summon a tension and energy that make this a resoundingly likeable revisit of the whodunnit slasher niche.
213 Bones begins like many slashers, with a cold open kill (here, an unfaithful husband having an adulterous rendezvous) before a jump in the timeline to introduce our main cast. There’s the bookish Brent (Hunter Nance) and Lisa (Luna Fujimoto), resident slacker Clyde (Mason Kennerly), and shy waitress Joanna (Simone Lockhart), who’s loyal to her stylish, confident friend Candice (Toni Weiss). Plus, there’s a handful of others who are broadly defined on the page, but feel warm and sparky on-screen thanks to the cohort of young talent.
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This spirited energy in the cast is welcome, but there’s little suspense to the story. Each of the older characters—including the professor Kelly (Colin Egglesfield), a creepy groundskeeper (Scott Peat), and the country coroner Laurie (Francesca Barker McCormick)—gets a couple moments to raise suspicion that they’re hiding a dark secret. The lack of true intrigue means that the film’s ultimate resolution is met with little satisfaction or surprise. Running at 85 minutes with credits, 213 Bones certainly doesn’t drag. But, you know a film isn’t gripping you like it should when you’re disappointed when characters get killed off. Not because you’re deeply invested in the characters, but because it’s one less charismatic performance in a film that sorely needs them.
Thankfully, the kills are staged with a commendable sense of dread and viciousness, and even though the mystery fails to excite or impress, the climactic showdown between the surviving co-eds and their bone-obsessed executor is peppered with dynamic camerawork, deep, dramatic colors, and an intense mood that will feel like a warm, familiar blanket to diehard slasher fans.
The restricted resources of 213 Bones (and the fact that it’s not a tired franchise revival) mean that it doesn’t get bogged down with distracting nostalgia bait. It’s an economic horror throwback that focuses on what’s appealing and oddly comforting about a simpler era of the slasher. 213 Bones is more impressive as a small-scale but smart attempt to excavate a shrugged-off genre rather than a complex or intricate thriller. The film is a collective effort to have fun in the mold of films that were classic but not refined, without making fun of the genre’s genuine appeal and pleasure.
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213 Bones
Summary
213 Bones is an impressive, low-budget attempt to reinvigorate the college-set slasher film.
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