Julek: Fifteen thousand people disappear in Poland each year, a third of them in the woods.
Daniel: We'll beat the statistics.
Julek: That's not funny.
Daniel: We'll beat the statistics.
Julek: That's not funny.
Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight (Polish: W lesie dzis nie zasnie nikt) is a Polish Horror Film by Bartosz M. Kowalski.
A whole bunch of teenagers have come to camp for some good old-fashioned (technology-free) camp fun. The kids are all split into groups and are each sent on a different activity. One such group is made up of Zosia Wolska (Julia Wieniawa-Narkiewicz), Julek Rosiejka (Michal Lupa), Aniela Turek (Wiktoria Gasiewska), Daniel Czajka (Sebastian Dela), and Bartek Sokolowski (Stanislaw Cywka) under Ms. Iza (Gabriela Muskala), and they're going to be taking a brisk three-day nature hike in the Polish woods.
What none of them realize, however, is that there are a couple of people in the woods. People who have a very selective diet. People that these campers would be very smart to stay away from.
Naturally, what started out as a simple hike in the woods becomes a nightmarish struggle for survival against people with murderous intent.
The film was released on Netflix on October 28th, 2020. The movie has a sequel, Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight II.
Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight contains examples of:
- Armoured Closet Gay: Bartek acts this way towards Daniel, constantly implying the latter is gay. Only the former actually is one, of course.
- Artificial Limbs: The old man that Julek and Zosia meet has metal legs, which he got after a previous encounter with the killer twins.
- Asshole Victim: The priest who tied Bartek to a chair gets his eyes gouged out by one of the twins and shoved headfirst into a woodchipper.
- Bittersweet Ending: Zosia survives, kills the killers, and then escapes. However, the group she was part of are all dead, she'll probably be scarred by this for life, and the twin killers are revealed to be able to come back to life.
- Blood from the Mouth: Julek.
- Body Horror: The twins have their bodies covered in lumps and boils as a result of the black slime possessing their bodies.
- Bound and Gagged: When Bartek is knocked unconscious by the pastor, he wakes up tied to a chair with a gag tied around his mouth.
- Car Fu: Zosia kills the surviving twin by running him over with a police car twice.
- Cat Scare: While the hikers have set up camp for the night, some kind of creature runs by and startles them all. Ms. Iza takes a stick and sneaks toward the bush the creature ran into. She parts the branches to look... and sees a fox.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The priest. His first appearance looks like an utter
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. (Upon the second appearance... well, it kind of still is. Unless you live in Poland, because then you might have grown used to that sort of stuff.) - Dark and Troubled Past: Zosia; her family died in a car crash, ostensibly because her parents drove into a truck while taking a selfie. The half-burnt figurine she's carrying on her neck is a Tragic Keepsake. If there were any necessary steps to go through between there and getting sent to a camp for Internet addicts, we aren't shown them.
- Discussed Trope: Julek does it all the time, to the dismay of other characters. Whether they'd do better by having listened to him is possible, but not explicit.
- Don't Go in the Woods: Because in the Polish woods, there be two murderous twins possessed by some kind of black alien sludge.
- Drama-Preserving Handicap: The teenagers-in-the-woods dynamic of a Slasher Movie is preserved by the fact they are all on a tech-detox marching camp and have to leave all electronic items at the base. Sure, they're also stated to be somewhere two days of march away from the nearest settlement, but that alone wouldn't negate the cell phones.
- Dwindling Party: Starting with Daniel, the hikers are all killed one-by-one until only Zosia is alive.
- Eye Scream: One of the killer twins shoves his thumb's into the priest's eye sockets until blood starts flowing out of them.
- Facial Horror: Most of the above-mentioned black alien slime-induced boils all over the twins' bodies seem to have the highest concentration of them on their faces and feet.
- Fat Bastard: The twins are a pair of fat, murderous psychopaths who are both hosts being controlled by some black alien slime.
- Final Girl: Zosia.
- Geek Physiques: Julek wears glasses and appears to be overweight, he's also the group's resident nerd.
- Gender-Equal Ensemble: The group of campers that the movie follows consists of three girls (Zosia, Aniela, and Ms. Iza) and three boys (Julek, Daniel, and Bartek).
- Genre Savvy: Julek. When the group splits into two, he points out that in Horror Films, splitting up gets characters killed. They just dismiss him.
- Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: After running through the woods for some time after Ms. Iza's death, Julek starts freaking out that they won't survive or be found. Zosia tells him to get a hold of himself and slaps him in the face to calm him down.
- Gory Discretion Shot: Before the twins kill their mother, the camera cuts to a shot of the basement stairs and the wall behind them. Then we see her blood splatter on the wall.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: The policeman who gives Zosia a lift gets sliced in half down the middle by one of the killer twins.
- Hidden Depths: While waiting for Daniel to return by the lake, Aniela and Bartek confide in each other.
- Aniela knows that most people see her as just an easy lay, and actually pines for true love. (Or so she claims.)
- Bartek is Closet Gay to his father, who seems oblivious to things like him inviting male "friends" home, and patting their bottoms.
- Julek is not just a nerd, he's the kind of nerd who has almost a million subs on his Youtube channel. (Unfortunately, his parents weren't as impressed as his fellow campers.)
- Hillbilly Horrors: Specifically the variety where most locals are all fine folks, except for the Stock Slasher who really isn't their fault.
- I'm a Humanitarian: At one point, one of the twins chops an arm off of Daniel's corpse and eats one of the fingers.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Aniela gets a long thin object impaled through her head and out her mouth by one of the twins.
- Machete Mayhem: Zosia grabs a machete from the twins' basement and uses it to stab one of them to death.
- Made of Plasticine: Aniela. You know, if judged by being pierced through with a wooden branch.
- Male Gaze: While hiking early in the movie, Daniel is staring at Aniela's butt.
- Messy Maggots: These are seen on the deer corpse Julek finds, and can be seen crawling among the corpses in the basement of the twins' home.
- Murder by Mistake: The old man hears a noise outside his door, and assumes it's one of the twins. He grabs his shotgun and aims it at the door. It opens, he shoots, and then he goes outside to see who it is. It's Bartek.
- My Car Hates Me: After the surviving twin kills the police officer, Zosia climbs into the driver's seat of the police car and tries to start it. It takes several tries before it finally starts up.
- Off with His Head!: When Ms. Iza stays in the basement to get Daniel's cellphone, and takes on one of the twins with a long piece of wood, the next time Julek and Zosia see her is when her severed head is thrown out the small door by the front steps of the house.
- Ominous Obsidian Ooze: From Space, to boot. The real culprit behind all of this!
- Sex Signals Death: It's a teen slasher movie, what did you expect but that the characters shown engaging in sex will be among the first to die? (Well, one of them is definitely the first.) With bonus Death by Irony points as the first to die is also the only who had managed to successfully smuggle in a cell phone.
- Shout-Out:
- Zosia is compared to Sarah Connor of Terminator fame.
- The Sinister Minister's rant at Bartek is taken almost word-for-word from an infamous public speech by a Polish archbishop.
- Sinister Minister: The priest at the church Bartek sought refuge in knocks him unconscious when Bartek finds out that he lied about there not being a working phone in the church.
- Slain in Their Sleep: Zosia kills one of the twins by stabbing him to death while he's sleeping in his bed. Sadly, it didn't stick.
- Small Role, Big Impact: The mother, who kick-starts the plot by stumbling and falling. And, therefore, failing to keep her boys locked in the basement.
- Stock Slasher: Very much so. Of the four points, only the one about a distinctive weapon is missed; they seem to go for the "whatever is at hand" approach.
- Suddenly Always Knew That: Zosia proves to be a crack driver. Where the skill came from is left unexplained, as it's not typical for the average Polish teenager.
- Time Skip: The movie starts with a mailman whose curiosity gets him dragged into a house by some unseen creature... then it jumps ahead 30 years.
- Tongue Trauma: Julek ends up on the receiving end courtesy of one of the twins, leading to subsequent death of bloodloss.
- Trail of Blood: The twins' mother follows one into the basement where she sees her sons after the alien sludge possessed their bodies.
- Wood Chipper of Doom: The priest ends up in one once one of the twins get around to him.
