Welcome, gobblers of all things horror, to a new weekly feature we’ll be running here at Cinema Blend that will bind together five of the more interesting genre news stories of the week. We’ll be giving you trailers, posters, stills and big announcements for all your soon-to-be favorite horrors and thrillers coming out in the near future, plus some that you probably couldn’t give a shit less about.
By no means is this an exhaustive list of everything the genre has to offer, but rather a meaty slice of what’s bubbling up to the surface. If you walk away from this with an erratic heartbeat and the feeling that someone is watching you through your windows, don’t blame us. We’re just the messengers.
Chucky Will Be Back For Round 7
One of the hardest working dolls in show business, the Good Guy doll Chucky has been murdering people since 1988, in a film series that has gone from legitimately frightfest to tongue-in-cheek horror comedy back to tense slasher, all while barely hanging onto any central canon. This year’s Curse of Chucky proved that director/creator Don Mancini could still pull off some real scares, and those who wondered what happened after that film will be pleased to know Chucky’s reign of terror still isn’t over. Mancini took to Twitter to announce there will indeed be a seventh film.
This is a truly polarizing franchise, and the strong words of fans and naysayers will no doubt keep it in the cultural zeitgeist for decades to come. And if the actual creator thinks that there are more stories to come from this killer doll, I’m on board for it. But I’ll need those stories to be a little smarter if at all possible. I’m saying this loudly just in case there’s a certain someone hiding behind the chair I’m sitting in, waiting to slash my ankles.
Take a peek at the Curse of Chucky trailer below.
Nazi Zombies Return In Stills From Dead Snow: Red Vs Dead
You’ve seen Martin Starr play Dungeons & Dragons in Freaks and Geeks, get stoned in Knocked Up, and wax science fiction and catering in Party Down. You can soon see him facing Nazi zombies in Tommy Wirkola’s Dead Snow: Red vs. Dead, the sequel to his surprise 2009 hit, which wasn’t revolutionary but mixed a decent amount of humor in with the awesome effects work. I can only imagine things will get even bloodier and Nazi-er, although these images, via BloodyDisgusting, don’t really do my prediction justice.
Well, I guess a guy with blood on his face and another guy with an axe sticking out of his eye do count as "bloodier." The film follows the one survivor from the original film who teams up with a group of American zombie killers to try and take down the German undead. It will premiere at next year’s Sundance Film Festival, where the snowy setting should feel right at home for some of these characters. Assuming that there is actually snow in this movie.
This Trailer For The Strange Color Of Your Body's Tears Is Colorfully Hypnotic
The directing duo Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani first made waves with 2009’s haunting quasi-giallo film Amer, and their feature follow-up The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears doesn’t look to be a markedly different take on storytelling, marrying intense visuals with a story steeped in murder. A man returns home to find that his wife is missing, and his investigation into her disappearance reveals that the creepster people in his apartment complex may be hiding more than they’re letting on.
As with Amer, I see the story taking a backseat to the cinematography and keen eyes for striking images that Cattet and Forzani have already likened themselves with. Having premiered in the U.S. for AFI Fest, the film doesn’t yet have any official release dates set. Or maybe it does and those neighbors are hiding it from us.
Hop Into The Corpse Pit For This Open Grave Poster
While director Gonzalo López-Gallego’s last film, Apollo 18, made waiting around the DMV seem like a roller coaster of excitement, his next effort looks to do the exact opposite, retaining the mystery while keeping everything else in constant motion. And the poster seen above via Horror Asylum isn’t really all that attractive without context, but I still like the creepy aesthetic. In Open Grave, Sharlto Copley plays a man named John who wakes up inside a pit of dead bodies, unable to remember who he is or how he got there. He is rescued by a group of strangers suffering from the same memory loss. After the normal round of skeptical suspiciousness, the strangers slowly recover their identities just as an even bigger mystery sets in involving the group of bloodthirsty zombie-looking things that are hunting them down.
Also starring Thomas Kretschmann and Joseph Morgan, Open Grave actually looks like it’ll be a solid high-concept thriller that should please Copley fans who consider the actor at his best when he’s maniacally antagonizing others. Plus there’s enough blood and gore and mysterious beasts around to keep everyone else happy. Check out the trailer below, and get ready to bury yourself when the film opens on January 3, 2014.
Adaptation Of Ira Levin's Play Veronica's Room Coming From TWC
Best known for writing the novel Rosemary’s Baby, which was adapted into one of the first modern horror masterpieces by Roman Polanski, novelist and playwright Ira Levin wrote the thriller stage play Veronica’s Room back in 1973, and 40 years later it’s being turned into a feature from the Weinstein brothers’ TWC-Dimension in collaboration with The Allegiance Theater, according to Deadline. Too bad Levin, who died in 2007, couldn’t be around to see them trample it, er, I mean honor his work properly.
The narrative follows a young girl named Susan and her date who are invited into the home of an aging couple so that Susan can possibly pose as the elderly woman’s long-dead sister Veronica, to whom she bears a striking resemblance. As you can imagine, shit goes haywire and everyone’s sense of reality takes a shift. All this one needs is a good director, a talented writer and a great cast and it’ll be set. That shouldn’t be hard, right?
