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A Young Woman Becomes a Modern Knight in Shining Armor in This Dark and Tragic Fantasy Horror

June 6, 2025

Horror has always been a genre that’s keenly aware of social issues, from the themes of paranoia and conformity in the numerous iterations of Invasion of the Body Snatchersto vampires being used as a metaphor for “othering” in movies like Sinners. Recently, filmmakers have been representing mental health struggles more and more in horror, and generational trauma has seen a lot of success in particular. The competition in this subgenre is stiff, but Wild Eyed and Wicked stands out for adding a fantasy bent to its family-based horror. Molly Kunz stars as a young woman whose mother gave her a love of Arthurian legends and, tragically, a deep emotional scar from witnessing her death as a young girl. These two sides of Kunz’s character collide as she discovers that some legends are true, and she’ll have to pull from her family’s knowledge of medieval history to face off against her demons—the figurative and literal ones.

‘Wild Eyed and Wicked’ Combines Arthurian Legends and Horrific Family Tragedy

Image via Gravitas Ventures

Wild Eyed and Wicked opens with a harrowing scene of a young girl, Lily, witnessing her mother end her own life in the woods near their home. Now an adult, Lily (Kunz) relives that night in her dreams over and over; she’s in therapy and taking medication to help cope with her childhood trauma, but she still has a bitter resentment towards her estranged father, Gregory (Matthew X. Sommers). On the bright side, she has a new girlfriend, Willow (Claire Saunders), who is both supportive and able and willing to call Lily out for negative behavior, which is really refreshing to see in a horror movie. Willow encourages Lily to accept Greg’s invitation to visit the house and help clear out the last of her mother’s possessions, but the tension remains thick; the father is trying to make amends, but Lily quickly calls out the extent of his emotional abandonment of her, revealing to the audience that her long-standing anger towards him is pretty justified.

A black and white picture of a young man, with a red hand bursting from the top of his head, while surrounded by fire.

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To add to her emotional stress, Lily’s nightmares are starting to bleed into reality, and she begins seeing a menacing, shadowy figure lurking around corners—and in photos of Willow, implying she’s in danger. But Lily’s mother left her with a knowledge and passion for medieval history and Arthurian legends, and while looking through her mother’s papers, she learns that her visions are not only real but also the source of her mother’s own struggles as well. She sets out to find a way to destroy the entity alongside her hesitant father, leading Wild Eyed and Wicked to a literal battle between Lily as a modern-day knight and an evil demon hellbent on feeding off her and her family’s pain.

Wild Eyed and Wicked is a movie made for high-fantasy lovers, as Lily ends up in an authentic full set of steel-plate armor to finish off the movie. In addition, she gets to literally face her problems and fight them to the death; there’s something very cathartic about the idea of being able to kick our mental health struggles in the teeth as they take on an undeniable physical form. The fact that she’s also taking on a traditionally male role just adds another layer of awesome to the whole movie. At the same time, however, Wild Eyed doesn’t downplay the reality of mental health or the importance of tackling it through non-fantastical means. Both Lily and her father are in therapy and are seemingly getting better for it. Although it takes hashing out their baggage together for their relationship to truly heal, Greg is at least trying to make amends even before learning of the literal demon attached to his daughter.

Lily, for her part, is willing to accept his invitation due to the encouragement of Willow, bolstered by her time in therapy. She isn’t presented as an unstable loner, which is all too common in mainstream movies regarding mental health; she’s actively making attempts to branch out socially, and the movie shows that, aside from a few hiccups, it’s actually going well. Wild Eye and Wicked successfully uses metaphor to address mental health, much the same way that films like The Babadook have done, without dismissing the importance of realistic treatment like therapy.