Thanks to last week's Chronicle we can forget about The Devil Inside and remember that some found footage films are not terrible. The Last Exorcism, a found footage horror from a few years back, was definitely one of the better recent examples of the genre because they didn't rely on it solely as a gimmick, but instead as a method of storytelling. After all, storytelling is what cinema is all about, and so it's nice to see that director Daniel Stamm has finally got his next project off the ground and with the lovely Mary Elizabeth Winstead attached to star.
Loosely based on the Henry James' classic "Turn of the Screw," The Darkness follows an American student looking after a group of children at an old English manor. Of course, not all is well within the manor (ghosts love manors), and Winstead's character starts to suspect that she and her wards are being haunted. That doesn't sound very original and yet I'm still excited to watch Mary Elizabeth Winstead deal with the haunted house horror tropes. Winstead's more recent effort in the genre, The Thing, didn't do too well, but she was great regardless of the film's performance. We'll get another taste of her dealings with the supernatural soon, in the upcoming Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.
Screen Daily reports that Stamm has found funding from multiple sources in order to go ahead with the haunted house horror. Thorsten Schumacher, the managing director of HanWay, one of the production companies footing the bill, said, “We were blown away by The Last Exorcism. Given the recent box office success of the ghost movie genre in attracting the sought after younger audience, the timing is perfect to bring this haunting thriller to the marketplace” Well, he is right about one thing: there are a lot of ghost stories and haunted house films constantly hitting the screen, but what makes this tale any different?
