Dark Hollow

SOMETHING CAME OUT OF THE MINE

Coal mines are already frightening places.

Miles of earth overhead.

Narrow passages.

Darkness beyond the reach of a headlamp.

Then Daniel Byers puts a monster down there.

In Dark Hollow, something nightmarish emerges from the depths of an Appalachian coal mine, forcing a young mother to hunt the creature in order to protect her home and save her family. 

Her name is KC Scarbro.

She's played by June Schreiner, who leads an ensemble that includes David Garelik, J. Stephen Brantley, Brennon Weese, Ian Deighan, Jonathan Spivey, Sean Michael Wilkinson, Sharon Murray, Harvey Roberts, Brian O'Neill, Annie Cook and Radu Spinghel. 

And the mine isn't just scenery.

The trailer establishes an Appalachian community built around coal and a threat originating beneath it. After trouble underground, the danger doesn't remain confined to the mine. 

That gives Dark Hollow one of horror's oldest structures:

Something was buried.

Something disturbed it.

Now it's above ground.

Byers both wrote and directed the film, following his earlier feature Eradication. 

For Schreiner, the character appears to have been one of the project's major attractions. In a September 1 appearance on Back to One, she discussed falling in love with Byers's screenplay and strongly relating to the character she was being asked to play. 

That matters in a creature feature.

A monster can provide the teeth.

But the person being chased has to provide the reason to care.

And Dark Hollow places that burden on a mother whose objective is brutally uncomplicated:

Get her family through this alive.

The Appalachian setting also gives the movie a landscape already rich with horror possibilities. Deep woods, isolated communities, caves and old stories have long made the region fertile ground for genre filmmakers.

But Dark Hollow doesn't need to import its danger from somewhere else.

It digs straight down.

The coal mine is both workplace and threshold—a familiar piece of the community opening into something that shouldn't be there.

And once the creature crosses that threshold, the geography changes.

The mine isn't the scary place anymore.

Home is.

Brainstorm Media released Dark Hollow in select U.S. theaters and on demand on September 4, 2026. The distributor's initial theatrical engagements included Los Angeles' Lumiere Cinema, where opening night featured a Q&A with Byers, Schreiner, J. Stephen Brantley and producers Ryan Scaringe and George Horton. 

As of September 12, Brainstorm continues to categorize the film as Now Playing. 

It's a modest theatrical footprint for a modestly scaled monster movie.

Which somehow feels right.

No global apocalypse.

No cinematic universe.

No army descending from the sky.

Just a family.

A coal mine.

And something that should have stayed beneath the mountain.

Something came out of the mine.

Now somebody has to put it back.