Electric Meat: Dan Schaffer’s Psychosexual Descent Premieres at Tubi FrightFest

VVomb Studio has unveiled a striking new trailer for Electric Meat, the psychosexual thriller set to make its World Premiere at Tubi FrightFest on 28 August. The feature is directed by comic book artist and writer Dan Schaffer (The Scribbler, Doghouse, Peripheral) and stars Caspian Faye (Cat Skin), Emily Booth (Doghouse, Evil Aliens), and Nina Courson.

From its first frames, Electric Meat signals a film that isn’t interested in comfort. It’s a descent into obsession, grief, and the uneasy space where desire and decay begin to resemble one another. At its centre is a photographer stuck in a day job as a butcher — a man already fluent in the language of flesh. When he discovers one of his models murdered in an alleyway, he does something unthinkable: he keeps her, preserving her as a muse in the hope of salvaging his failing career.

But the body refuses to remain an object. The butcher-photographer becomes convinced she is somehow both alive and dead — a private paradox he frames through the logic of Schrödinger’s cat. What begins as control mutates into terror as she shifts from a posable doll into something else entirely: a vengeful revenant, rebelling against the gaze that tried to freeze her.

As inspiration curdles into fear, the butcher turns to his landlady — an ex-model with her own history, her own anger, and her own appetite for revenge. She isn’t a saviour. She’s volatile, unhinged, and ready to drag his work into a new, psychotic direction where the line between collaboration and corruption disappears.

Schaffer has described Electric Meat as an examination of “the thin line between life and meat,” positioning the film as a confrontation with mortality — and with the ways art and love, often held up as our only defences against death, can become distorted when filtered through desperation and delusion. Told through the fractured perspective of a failed artist, the film leans into subjectivity rather than explanation, inviting viewers to inhabit a world warped by migraines, anxiety, and a mind slipping its tether.

That interior collapse is reflected in the film’s stark aesthetic. Schaffer has said the visual style “naturally became expressionist,” shaped by black-and-white cinematography and a soundscape designed to vibrate with unease. There is no dialogue — a bold choice that places the burden of meaning on atmosphere, rhythm, and sonic detail. According to the director, the sound design “does all the talking,” built through an intensely detailed soundtrack created with composer Jacob Ryman, alongside vocalist Katiejane Garside, whose contributions add what Schaffer calls a resonant vocal presence.

Visually and tonally, Schaffer points to a lineage that includes early David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman, Shinya Tsukamoto, and F.W. Murnau, blending silent-era German Expressionist influence with the deep-focus legacy of cinematographers like Gregg Toland. The result, by his account, is a film that aims to feel less like a narrative you follow and more like a psychological environment you survive.

Under the horror and surrealism, Electric Meat is also a critique — one that turns its gaze back on the culture that consumes bodies and art with equal hunger. Schaffer has framed the film as an exploration of how flesh and creativity are “objectified, commodified, consumed, and discarded,” with the butcher’s gaze serving as both the engine of creation and the instrument of destruction. He makes art from flesh, but in doing so reveals his complicity in a world that devours what it claims to love.

Electric Meat is the first feature-length release from VVomb Studio, founded by Schaffer in 2023. Beyond film, the studio also develops music videos, including the recent pro-LGBTQ+ “Son & Daughter” track from Healthy Junkies — a band fronted by Electric Meat star Nina Courson. Courson’s solo project Souer L’Enfer has also recently released the new single “Petite Mort,” continuing a creative thread that feels very much in conversation with the film’s themes of desire, transformation, and the body as both battleground and canvas.

With its festival premiere approaching, Electric Meat arrives as a provocative new entry in contemporary horror — one that doesn’t simply shock. Still, it interrogates what we do with the things we love, the things we fear, and the things we’re taught to consume.