Romford Film Festival 2025: ‘Ed Kemper’ Review
Stars: Lew Temple, Cassandra Gava, Brinke Stevens, Brandon Kirk, Robert Miano, Susan Priver, Katie Silverman, Elina Madison, Joe Castro | Written by Chad Ferrin, Stephen Johnston | Directed by Chad Ferrin
Chad Ferrin’s Ed Kemper is a masterstroke in the ever-growing canon of true crime cinema—a haunting, mesmerising, and fiercely compelling dive into the mind of one of America’s most notorious serial killers. Ferrin, no stranger to the darker corners of the human psyche, elevates his signature grindhouse grit to a whole new level here. This isn’t just a horror film—it’s a chilling character study with a deeply disturbing heartbeat, and arguably his most nuanced work to date.
Fans of Ferrin’s previous films—Pig Killer, Scalper, and Unspeakable: Beyond the Wall of Sleep—will immediately recognise his fearless approach to taboo subject matter and his gift for merging horror with unflinching psychological depth. While Pig Killer revelled in the grotesque excess of Robert Pickton’s real-life crimes and Scalper blended slasher tropes with surreal existential dread, Ed Kemper takes a more grounded, restrained path – yet paradoxically, it feels even more unnerving. Ferrin resists sensationalism in favour of a cold, creeping realism that sticks with you long after the credits roll.
What truly sets Ed Kemper apart, not only from Ferrin’s own catalogue but from other entries in the serial killer subgenre like Ed Gein (2000) or Ted Bundy (2002), is the way it captures the chilling banality of evil. While those films lean into shock and schlock, often reducing their subjects to cartoonish caricatures, Ferrin and his lead actor Brandon Kirk (who delivers a stunning, eerie, and unnervingly subdued performance as Kemper) offer something far more insidious: the terrifying possibility that the monster next door is calm, articulate, and devastatingly ordinary. Yet brutally evil.
The cinematography is claustrophobic in the best way, trapping the viewer in Kemper’s increasingly fragmented world. The use of shadow, silence, and stillness conveys more dread than gallons of blood ever could. Yet Ferrin doesn’t hold back when the time is right—the film’s violence is sudden, jarring, and purposefully unsettling, with a sense of moral weight that never feels exploitative.
In the pantheon of true crime horror, Ed Kemper stands tall as a new benchmark. It’s both a culmination of Chad Ferrin’s uncompromising vision and a stark reinvention of the serial killer biopic. For genre fans, this is essential viewing: provocative, intelligent, and, above all, horrifying in the most human of ways. Ferrin has crafted a bleak, beautiful nightmare that confirms what his fans have always known—he’s one of the most daring voices working in horror today.
***** 5/5
Ed Kemper screened as part of this year’s Romford Film Festival.
