The Baby in the Basket 2025 brings vintage scares, haunting performances and atmospheric dread back from the crypt, writes TERRY SHERWOOD
TITLE: The Baby in the Basket
RELEASED: 2025
DIRECTORS: Andy Crane and Nathan Shepka
CAST: Amber Doig-Thorne, Michaela Longden, Elle O’Hara, Paul Barber, Lisa Riesner, Nathan Shepka, Maryam d’Abo
Review of The Baby in the Basket 2025
Just when you thought gothic horror had become teen angst or at least retired to a dusty crypt – along comes a sinister little Scottish screamer (not a metal singer) called The Baby in the Basket to rattle your stained-glass windows and make your votive candles flicker!
Set in the misty moors of 1942 Scotland (that’s right, boils and ghouls, wartime woe meets cradle-of-evil!), this devilish delight comes wrapped in fog, fear, and all the trimmings of the classic Hammer horror heyday. You’ll smell the mould, feel the cold stone floors, and swear you saw Marita Hunt drifting through the chapel shadows.
Directed with reverence by Nathan Shepka and Andy Crane, and penned by Tom Jolliffe, The Baby in the Basket brings us back to the good old days – when evil came bundled in wicker and the Devil wore a baby’s bonnet!
During a howling storm, the nuns of St Augustine’s Monastery (played with rosary-rattling resolve) take in an abandoned infant. But Sister Agnes (the haunting Amber Doig-Thorne) starts to hear things… and see things… some of them fleshly visions involving young handyman Daniel (Nathan Shepka again – double duty alert!).
This isn’t your run-of-the-mill Devil Baby yarn, creeps! While it shares sinister swaddling with recent hellspawn hits like Immaculate and The First Omen, it reaches further back into the cobwebbed corners of classic horror. Fans of Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970) will find much to savour.
Gore-hounds beware: this one’s all about mood, not mutilation. Though there is one avian atrocity (a poor injured bird meets a cruel fate), this is a story more about brooding dread than blood spatter. Imagine The Omen rewritten by Edward Gorey and shot through a Hammer horror lens.
The cast? First-tier talents shuffle and shiver across the abbey’s stone halls. Alongside Doig-Thorne are Michaela Longden, Elle O’Hara, Lisa Riesner, and Nathan Shepka, joined by seasoned scene-stealers Annabelle Lanyon and Paul Barber.
But it’s Maryam d’Abo who truly slays as the Mother Superior – her final scene evokes the spectral grace of Marita Hunt’s chilling demise in The Brides of Dracula (1960). Yes, Monster Kids, it’s that good.
Haunting strings by composer David Belsey, with cello soloist Joanna Wilson, summon the spirits with just the right whisper of dread. And when the music dies down? The silence is even louder.
So, light your candles (real or electric), clutch your crucifix, and take a vow of terror. The Baby in the Basket is proof that gothic cinema is neither dead nor undead – it just needed a proper baptism in blood and thunder.
Don’t trust babies left on abbey steps!
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