‘It Ends’: Is Alexander Ullom the Next Great Horror Director?

Alexander Ullom is dog-tired.

The reason why the 28-year-old filmmaker looks “like a fuckin’ mess,” as he puts it, is because he wrapped principal photography on his sophomore movie, “4 x 4: The Event” — which he describes as “balls-to-the-wall gore and violence” — two days ago, jetted to Los Angeles and was parachuted into a press day for his debut feature, “It Ends.” And what a stunning debut it is.

“It Ends,” out in theaters Aug. 21, follows three recent college graduates — James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson) and Fisher (Noah Toth) — who reunite with their buddy Tyler (Mitchell Cole), a military man, and embark on a late-night drive in his Jeep in search of grub. When the road is suddenly blocked by a copse of trees, the group believes they may have taken a wrong turn, prompting Tyler to exit the vehicle and investigate, thereby attracting a ferocious mob of people who attack the car, mangling Fisher’s arm in the process. The quartet manages to escape by the skin of their teeth only to realize that they may be, in true Talking Heads fashion, on a road to nowhere. Have they entered another realm? Or are they dead and this is some cruel form of purgatory? Ullom, exhibiting directorial prowess far beyond his years, keeps audiences on the edge of their seat as these youngsters barrel down a seemingly endless road.

And Ullom’s film’s journey to theaters was a labyrinthine one as well. After receiving critical raves following its SXSW premiere in March of 2025, the film failed to attract any distributors and was, according to Ullom, “dead in the water.” He was ready to throw in the towel and upload it to YouTube when a chance encounter with filmmaker and movie influencer Nicolas Curcio led to him discussing it online, which was seen by the CEO of Letterboxd, who swooped in and agreed to showcase it as one of the first releases in their Letterboxd Video Store for undistributed movies, which…