Movies
‘The Door’ Becomes ‘Shadow People,’ First Stills
With two other films carrying the same title, I’m not exactly sure how smart it was to change Matthew Arnold’s The Door to Shadow People.
Announced last December, Shadow People is inspired by true events concerning a radio talkshow host (played by Dallas Roberts) who’s drawn to exploring paranormal activity by a caller and an unexplained death. Alison Eastwood will play a CDC investigator.
Out of Cannes we scored the first three official stills, dig on ’em inside.
“SHADOW PEOPLE is a psychological-thriller that explores the rare medical phenomenon known as SUNDS (Sudden Unexplained Nocturnal Death Syndrome). Millions of people across the globe have had encounters with what they describe as dark, shadowy creatures that visit them at night. Sometimes horrifying, sometimes deadly, these nocturnal intruders have been described as early as man’s first recorded writings. But what are they? And what do they want?
Small town radio personality CHARLIE CROWE (Dallas Roberts) is thrust into the mystery when a strange caller relates a terrifying experience during Crowe’s late night call-in show. At the same time, CDC Public Health Agent, SOPHIE LANCOMBE (Alison Eastwood), is hot on the trail of the cause of the rare medical condition known as SUNDS. Her investigations entwine her with Charlie’s own discoveries and take them both into a dark world and a decades old cover-up about the phenomenon we now call, The Shadow People. Once you open the door to the mystery…you’ll never sleep soundly again.”
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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