Get ready for some deep-rooted, atmospheric dread, because the British countryside is about to get a whole lot meaner.
Genre powerhouse Black Mandala has officially unveiled The Shug, an award-winning, haunting new folk-horror film from director Martin J. Pickering (The Only One). Blending supernatural terror with grounded emotional realism, the movie plunges viewers into a chilling modern mythos set against the fractured, bleak landscape of post-Brexit Britain.
The most unsettling part? It’s not entirely fiction. The project draws its inspiration from alleged real-life sightings and a recorded interview with a woman who claims to have encountered the legendary “Shug Monkey”—a bizarre cryptid fixture of English folklore.
Cryptids, Coors, and Deeply Buried Trauma
The Shug delivers on the monster front. However, it uses its creature feature elements to dig into heavy thematic territory, exploring alcoholism, generational trauma, and family breakdown. The film stars Nicholas Clarke, Alice Henley, Mae Sutton, and Dean Kilby. Jack Armstrong, Jason Hall, and Funso Foluso-Henry round out the cast.
A wave of frantic reports about a dreaded, aggressive creature known as “The Shug” begins to surface across the rural English countryside. This immediately upends John’s fragile life. He’s a severe alcoholic who is still deeply haunted by a near-fatal run-in with the same beast.
John is forced to confront the literal and metaphorical nightmare he has spent decades trying to drown in a bottle. He reluctantly teams up with investigative journalist Alice Bowmer and a reckless paranormal YouTuber. As the trio follows the trail of sightings into the dense woods, they quickly discover that the truth behind the local legend is far darker—and far more intimately tied to John’s own fractured past—than any clickbait video could handle.
Check out the eerie first trailer below, and remember: some folklore refuses to stay buried in the dirt.
