Dances With Films: ITCH! (2024)

“ITCH!” scratches the urge for something new in zombie horror, with psychological depth and heart that transcend its gore-filled origins.

With its world premiere at this year’s Dances With Films Festival in NYC, Writer/Director Bari Kang has delivered a film with ITCH! that’s an unfamiliar take on a familiar sub-genre: zombies.

Filmed on location in NYC, mostly at his family’s store, the film takes a measured and psychological approach to a genre usually filled with heavy gore, body horror, and a constant forward-pressing threat. It’s a refreshing take on a genre that, at times recently, has felt stale and rarely gone to places new or unfamiliar.

What Kang manages to do with ITCH! is build a sense of dread and tension from the very start, allowing it to ramp up as the threat looms over the uninfected, who are barricaded in the store.

It’s very reminiscent of a similar independent zombie horror film, The Battery, which focuses on two people living through the zombie apocalypse. Like that film, ITCH! centers the narrative around the living trying to make a life among the hordes rather than the zombies themselves. This approach is intelligent and can often produce a much more frightening film.

That said, I don’t want you to think the film lacks any of the bloodshed or carnage we’ve come to expect from the zombie genre. Skin gets ripped, people get bit, wounds ooze, and people turn to the undead. That’s just not the core focus. Instead, the focus is on the threat of those afflicted by the uncontrollable itch moving in on the people barricaded in a location.

This shifts the spotlight to the human side, exploring the instinct to survive at all costs alongside our humanitarian urge to help who we can.

Make no mistake, this is absolutely a horror film at its core, but it’s one with psychological depth.

It’s the kind of film that makes us think about how we would navigate a similar situation.

The cast is small and contained, for the most part. The majority of our journey is shared with Kang, playing a grieving father who has lost his wife and is caring for his daughter (played by his real-life daughter, Olivia), who doesn’t speak. Barricaded in the family store with an employee, he’s joined by two people who attempt to rob the store (one being a former employee of his father) and a regular customer. The rest of the cast is mostly seen on TV screens as they show us glimpses of “The Itch” taking over NYC.

What I loved the most about the film was the human connection at the heart.

Amongst the gore, you see people banding together to survive and protect one another regardless of the reasons they’ve come together. It shows compassion in the face of dread. It shows selflessness in the face of peril. And it ultimately shows what a father will do to protect who he loves most, even in the face of a terrifying threat.

We must remember that this is an independent film, though, and the low budget does occasionally show itself in ways that likely wouldn’t have existed with more money/opportunity. Not all of the acting is great; some of the shots are off, and the pacing suffers even for a film clocking in at 82 minutes.

Luckily, those things don’t affect it enough to make it a less enjoyable experience; it remains one hell of a good film.

When you get the chance to see it, ITCH! deserves your attention and praise for being an indie triumph from a talented cast and crew composed entirely of minorities.