Jennifer Jason Leigh almost quit acting before she accepted her Oscar nominated role of Daisy Domergue in Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, and yet thanks to that film, her whole career has been on a very sweet revival high. Part of that new found zest can be seen in the trailer for her latest role in Amityville: The Awakening, and you can see it below.
Released through The Weinstein Company's YouTube channel, the first look at Amityville: The Awakening promises some familiar action in the one of the most infamous haunted houses of all time. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Joan – a single mother with three kids and a new house under her belt. Unfortunately, one of those children is incapacitated and on life support, and the new house isn't going to do him any wonders, as that house is the site of the infamous Amityville haunting. While he may find himself awake and mobile once more, it seems to come with a rather sinister cost. Cue the pre-requisite amounts of body horror and jump scares.
While Jennifer Jason Leigh is the star at the head of the cast for Amityville: The Awakening, she does have some notable co-stars that should help her draw in a crowd for this new take on The Amityville Horror franchise. In fact, two of her three kids should be easy to pick out, as her older daughter, Belle, is played by Bella Thorne – whom we last saw in Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip. In fact, this casting, as well as the fact that Thorne is shown off in the trailer more than Leigh, seems like a good indication that this film will be graced with a PG-13 rating. Should this turn out to be true, expect more than a few Amityville fans, as well as horror fans in general, to become very upset.
But not all is lost for getting a couple of good scares into Amityville: The Awakening, as the disable son in Jennifer Jason Leigh's on-screen family is played by Gotham's Cameron Monahan. If you're a fan of his creepy smile and psychotic antics on the small screen, it looks like he's breaking them out in force as the disabled son of the family, James. While he arrives in the house bedridden, but looking healthy, the spirits in the house start to waste him away slowly but surely, as well as drive the rest of the house mad with its presence. If there's anything that's going to send you to sleep with tons of nightmares, it's Monahan's trademark grin in that last frame at the dinner table.
Amityville: The Awakening looks like the type of horror movie that gets released in the dumping grounds between blockbuster releases, especially when you realize that this film has been taking its sweet time getting to our eyeballs. The scares aren't really that effective, and even the scene involving the swarming insects is a re-vamp of a sequence in more than one entry in the series' canon. But if they're hiding the prime cut Cameron Monahan scares for opening night, as well as some of Jennifer Jason Leigh's more harrowing moments, then we might just see something worth watching this spring.
Amityville: The Awakening haunts a theater near you on April 1st.
