The Holy Boy (2025): Shudder Release Date, and Is It Scary?

Shudder acquired The Holy Boy for North America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland on September 30, 2025, following its award-winning run at Fantastic Fest, and said the film will debut on the service in 2026. No specific month or streaming date has been announced yet. This page gets updated the day one is.

Before the US streaming release, the film had already opened abroad. It premiered out of competition at the 82nd Venice Film Festival on August 30, 2025, opened in Italian theaters on September 17, 2025, and played festivals including Fantastic Fest, the BFI London Film Festival, and Valladolid. In the US there is no legal way to watch it yet, which is why the studio and festival attention has run months ahead of the release. A free account lets you save it now and be notified when Shudder sets a date.

Sergio, a PE teacher and former national judo champion, moves to Remis, a remote mountain village where everyone seems to live in a strange, unbroken serenity. Grieving and adrift, he soon finds the reason for the calm. Once a week the villagers gather around Matteo, a lonely teenage boy born with the power to take away a person's emotional pain simply by embracing them.

Sergio is drawn to Matteo and tries to pull him out of the role the town has built around him. That choice unsettles the village and the boy's guardian, and the film turns on what the community is willing to do to keep its comfort. The Italian title, La valle dei sorrisi, translates as "the valley of smiles," which is how the town presents itself before Sergio starts asking questions.

Reviews from its festival run describe a slow-building folk-horror fable built on dread and atmosphere, with a few well-timed scares rather than a steady run of them. Critics called it unsettling and menacing and singled out Giulio Feltri's performance as the boy. It is arthouse horror, and that register is part of why Shudder picked it up.

We have not seen it ourselves yet, so there are no Darkly scores to give you. Once we watch it at the US release, its Fear, Gore, Atmosphere, Intensity, and Overall scores go up on the film page, and this preview becomes a review.

The film had its world premiere in the out-of-competition lineup at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on August 30, 2025. It then traveled to Fantastic Fest in Austin, the largest genre festival in the US, where it won the Audience Award and the Next Wave Best Director Award. That combination, a jury prize for the direction and the audience vote at the same festival, led to the Shudder deal, which was announced days after the festival.

For a first-time viewer, the festival record is the useful signal. The Audience Award means a room of horror fans responded to it, and the directing prize speaks to the filmmaking itself.

Paolo Strippoli is an Italian director, born in 1993, who trained at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. The Holy Boy is his third feature. He co-directed A Classic Horror Story, a 2021 Netflix film, with Roberto De Feo, and then directed the 2022 psychological horror Piove on his own. The Holy Boy is his first solo feature to win awards at international festivals.