No Clothes Allowed: Bone Lake Director’s One Rule for 2025’s Boldest Horror

Mercedes Bryce Morgan is not shy about swinging for the fences. After 2025 served up her chillier Sinners and the body-horror detour Together, she is back with Bone Lake — pitched as the raunchiest horror movie of the year — and there is a blunt, very specific house rule behind it.

The one rule: equal-opportunity nudity

Talking to PGN, Morgan laid out the ground rule everyone on set followed: if one character is naked, then everybody is naked. No exceptions. It is her way of bulldozing the usual horror-movie dynamic where women get sexualized while men skate by untouched. Bone Lake goes the other way — or rather, it levels the field — so nobody escapes the gaze or the vulnerability.

"If you sexualize one gender, you have to sexualize everybody. You can’t have one woman nude; everyone has to be nude."

That lens — her word for it is queer — is the backbone of the movie’s tone: shocking, funny, and happy to push buttons.

Sex, violence, and making the audience squirm

Morgan is very up front about why this cocktail works for her. Desire and fear are the two engines she wants running at the same time. Is a moment leading to intimacy or to danger? Ideally both. She even jokes that her dream epitaph would read like a mission statement.

"I want 'slow-burn romance and inject violence' on my tombstone."

Her approach is not coy: open big, go extreme, then dial it back and tease the audience until it is time to go big again. In other words, make the crowd question whether a naked character sprinting through the woods is meant to be sexy or terrifying, and keep them off balance as the movie shifts gears.

The opening scene you were not supposed to see (but absolutely will)

Here is the inside baseball: that wild opening was not in the original script. Morgan told Eye For Film’s Paul Risker the movie used to start with Sage and Diego talking in a car — a perfectly fine scene for a different film. For this one? Too polite. So she and her team built a new opener to set the tone immediately.

The result is a forest-set sequence that slams vulnerability into violence — up to and including an arrow straight through a testicle. Yes, really. It is there to announce what kind of ride this is. Morgan even frames the structure as a split personality by design: European erotic thriller energy in the first half, then a hard pivot into horror on the back end.

The essentials

• Title: Bone Lake
• Director: Mercedes Bryce Morgan
• Cast: Alex Roe, Maddie Hasson, Marco Pigossi, Andra Nechita
• Runtime: 1h 34m
• Rotten Tomatoes score: 95%
• Release date: October 3, 2025

So, what is Bone Lake aiming for?

A horror movie that refuses to separate kink from carnage. A story that treats objectification as a shared burden, not a one-way street. And a tone that tells you exactly what you are in for in minute one, then yanks the safety net away and dares you to guess whether the next beat is a kiss or a kill.

Curious? Skeptical? Both is the point. Tell me where you land after that opening hits.