Liz Adam's Side Effect (read our review) is the only female-directed horror film at the 2008 Chicago Horror Film Festival. Side Effect is a culturally savvy horror movie, and dark tale of science gone wrong in a pill-popping society. Lauren is an attractive, overachieving young woman, and the new babysitter for the upper-middle class couple, Mr. and Mrs. Allen. Set in a world where the pressure to perform is at an all time high and the demand for coping strategies has given rise to a pharmaceutical industry that stakes it's existence upon the sale of expensive chemical relief for our self-inflicted modern symptoms, Side Effect poses the question, 'Who bears responsibility when teenagers demand, doctors recommend and parents consent to the use of powerful psychotropic drugs to give kids an edge in an increasingly competitive and toxic culture?'