This Indie Shocker Just Landed on Streaming Fans Call “An extreme horror classic”
I entered my teen years during the early aughts, so you could say I grew up with the extreme horror films of that era. The so-called “torture porn” titles like Saw and Hostel. France’s gruesome wave of New French Extremity films, such as Martyrs or Inside. Nihilistic genre movies that raged over a world that felt truly and utterly messed up. Well, it’s 2025, and we’re still raging, as audiences have discovered in the gory new Dutch film, Meat Kills.
The first Dutch horror film to ever be slapped with an NC-17 rating, director Martijn Smits’ new movie delivers on the brutal slaughtering of bodies while capturing the anger of a society at each other’s throats. If you’re someone like me who enjoys a little bloody nihilism from time to time, you’ll want to check out Meat Kills.
What’s Meat Kills About?
To prove her worth to an animal rights group, Mirthe (Caro Derkx) films the cruelty at a pig farm. The activists decide they cannot wait to take action and venture to the farm that night to free the animals. But upon arrival, they learn the pigs have already been slaughtered. Furious, the group’s leader, Nasha (Emma Josten), determines they must teach the farmers a lesson by any means necessary. One act of violence leads to another, pitting the group against the family that owns the farm in a bloody battle to the death.
What Critics Are Saying
In her review out of Fantastic Fest, Dread Central’s former Editor-in-Chief Mary Beth McAndrews wrote, “Smits’ Meat Kills is a European extreme horror classic in the making, joining the ranks of films like Calvaire, High Tension, and Frontier(s). This is the evolution of European horror, which continues to deliver gnarly societal indictments that are unafraid to make the viewer uncomfortable.”
Brutal Nihilism That Lives Up To the Title
Generally, a film like Meat Kills would follow the “psychotic rednecks” narrative. You know the type. City kids venture out into the wilderness and encounter bloodthirsty cannibals. That sort of thing. Yawn. Been there, done that many, many times. Smits’ film flips that all-too standard premise on its head. Here—at least as far as we know—the pig farmers are not murderous heathens intent on cooking up a human steak. In fact, Mirthe is even sweet on the youngest son, Jonathan (Sweder de Sitter), a shy, seemingly nice guy. It’s the activists who commit the first act of violence, suggesting that our lack of communication and understanding of others’ situations creates animosity. A controversial stance, perhaps for those like myself who side with the pigs, but a curious new twist for this sort of plot nonetheless.
As for the violence, Meat Kills takes the phrase “no guts, no glory” literally. Smits’ film has plenty of guts, and it is indeed glorious. The events all take place at the pig farm, where there are plenty of nasty tools at the disposal of the characters. What happens to those pigs happens to the people of Meat Kills. You can probably already imagine what that looks like. Now, I will say that Smits’ feature doesn’t quite reach the shocking heights of more extreme movies like Martyrs, so if you go in expecting that level of depravity, you may leave disappointed.
If I have you hooked on Meat Kills, stream the extreme horror film on Screambox. And for more recs like this, make sure to follow me on Bluesky at @werematt.
Categorized: Streaming News
