Olivia Wilde had a rather quiet 2014 at the movies thanks to the fact that she recentlyhad a baby with fiance Jason Sudekis - though It looks like she got back to work rather quickly at the tail end of the year. From the looks of this first photo from The Lazarus Effect, however, she might have wanted to take a little more time off. She's a mess!
Ok, so we're obviously messing with you, as we know this pic from Entertainment Weekly has Wilde looking a bit scarier with the help of make-up and contact lenses, but it's still a pretty creepy photo. The reason Wilde looks worse for the wear is that she's part of an experiment to bring the dead back to life in The Lazarus Effect... and, as you can see in the photo, it works. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of the procedure is that she's not exactly the same as she was before crossing over.
Originally titled Reawakening, The Lazarus Effect also stars Mark Duplass and Donald Glover, and really none of the three stars are names that you think of when it comes to low budget horror. But due credit must be given to producer Jason Blum, who has spent the last few years producing and releasing these highly experimental/low cost projects that have found success in the off-months of the Hollywood calendar year. At this point, Blum's name has become synonymous with these kinds of projects – and he has a perfectly good reason as to why he casts actors who don't usually find themselves planning to do horrible things with surgical tools. He explained to EW in an interview,
"The most important thing to make a movie scary is that the you forget you’re watching actors, and you think you’re watching real people. So I think if the audience sees someone they don’t necessarily associate with that genre, it make it feel more real."
It's always interesting to see someone you're used to seeing on the big screen in a genre you wouldn't expect them in, and horror has proven to be the most effective genre to deploy that strategy. Consider this: you were likely lured into this article with a perfectly normal photo of Olivia Wilde in her usual, beautiful form - only to be smacked with The Lazarus Effect's first image where she looks like a monster. Wilde's casting is reminiscent of how Jason Blum made a similar genre star out of Ethan Hawke, as he starred in both Sinister and The Purge under Blum's watchful eye. If this film does the trick, Wilde and her co-stars just might be the next big things in the horror world.
The Lazarus Effect is now set to hit theaters on February 27th, about a month later than the original January 30th release date.
