Movies
SXSW ’10: Incredible Festival Line-Up Revealed!
The South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Conference and Festival is thrilled to announce the complete features lineup for this year’s Festival, March 12 – 20, 2010 in Austin, Texas. Over the course of nine days, 119 features will screen at the festival, with 55 of those having their world premieres at SXSW 2010. These films were selected from a record 1,572 feature-length film submissions composed of 1,206 U.S. and 366 international feature-length films. Bloody Disgusting’s Tim Anderson and David Harley trek on down every year, so watch this spot for coverage in March! Beyond the break you’ll find a list of the most notable genre films playing including the Eli Roth produced Cotton!
MIDNIGHTERS: Scary, funny, sexy, controversial – provocative after-dark features for night owls and the terminally curious.
“Ana is confronted to Body and Desire at three key moments of her life.”
Directors: Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Screenwriter: Bruno Forzani
Cast: Bianca Maria D’Amato, Cassandra Forêt, Charlotte Eugène-Guibbaud, Marie Bos, Harry Cleven (U.S. Premiere)
“They do EXACTLY what you think they do! Second City TV regulars Eugene Levy and Andrea Martin star in Ivan Reitman’s Canuxploitation classic as a couple on a romantic holiday who settle into a quaint little bed-and-breakfast run by a trio of flesh-eating ladies who fancy them for tomorrow’s menu.”
Director: Ivan Reitman. Screenwriter: Robert Sandler
Cast: Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Ronald Ulrich, Randall Carpenter, Bonnie Neilson
“After a career spent helping the devout through prayer and trickery, Rev. Cotton Marcus invites a film crew to document his final fraudulent days as an exorcist. Soon his faith is truly tested when a desperate plea from the father of a possessed girl brings him face to face with the devil himself.”
Director: Daniel Stamm. Screenwriters: Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko
Cast: Patrick Fabian, Ashley Bell, Iris Bahr, Louis Herthum, Caleb Landry Jones (World Premiere)
“Jimmy Tupper is no one, he’s nothing, until one night he sees something in the woods that can’t be real. It becomes his mission to prove its existence and find his purpose.”
Director and Screenwriter: Andrew Bowser
Cast: Andrew Bowser, Pedro Gonzalez, Chris Jones, Michael Eller, Tim Kuczka (World Premiere)
“Brent, a 17-year-old student grieving after the recent loss of his father, politely declines an invitation to the school formal from Lola, the quietest girl in school. Devastated by the rejection, Lola and her overly protective father kidnap Brent and force him to endure a macabre Formal of their own creation…”
Director and Screenwriter: Sean Byrne
Cast: Xavier Samuel, Robin McLeavy, Victoria Thaine, Jessica McNamee, Richard Wilson
“Two West Virginian hillbillies go on vacation at their dilapidated mountain cabin, but their peaceful trip goes horribly awry.”
Director: Eli Craig. Screenwriters: Eli Craig and Morgan Jurgenson
Cast: Tyler Labine, Alan Tudyk, Katrina Bowden, Jesse Moss
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SX FANTASTIC: Mind-bending international Midnighters, hand-selected by our friends at Fantastic Fest.
“Two years after losing contact, Akira discovers that his long-lost brother may be found on Higanjima Island. He may also find on Higanjima an army of blood-sucking vampires.”
Director: Tae-Kyun Kim. Screenwriter: Tetsuya Ôishi
Cast: Koji Yamamoto, Hideo Ishiguro, Dai Watanabe, Asami Mizukawa (North American Premiere)
“Mary and Fergal live their lives on the run, using an ancient form of magic to hide from a terrifying hunter.”
Director Colm McCarthy. Screenwriters: Colm McCarthy and Tom McCarthy
Cast: James Nesbitt, Kate Dickie, Niall Bruton, Hannah Stanbridge (World Premiere)
“Six years after a NASA probe crashes, bringing alien life forms to Earth, a journalist agrees to escort a shaken tourist through an infected zone in Mexico to the safety of the US border.”
Director and Screenwriter: Gareth Edwards
Cast: Scoot McNairym, Whitney Able (World Premiere)
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EMERGING VISIONS: Innovation and creativity from new and emerging feature filmmakers, showcasing raw talent in documentary and narratives of varying premiere status.
“In Austin Texas, the lives of three young people “Erica, Franki and Nate” intertwine in a fateful, tragic way and head down a rocky and violent road to heart-rending oblivion.”
Director and Screenwriter: Simon Rumley
Cast: Noah Taylor, Amanda Fuller, Marc Senter (North American Premiere)
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LONE STAR STATES: Texas proud! Documentaries and Narratives with a special connection to the Lone Star State.
“Driving to a wedding in Los Angeles through the Mojave Desert, Paul and Adrienne pull off the highway and into Roy’s Motel and Café. This roadside artifact proves to be a strange and surreal place with an unsettling mix of travelers, who force our couple to discover the secret hidden between them and ultimately, the horrifying reality of their current situation.”
From the producer of All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, and Director/Screenwriter: Chad Feehan
Cast: Josh Stewart, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Chris Browning, Angela Featherstone, Afemo Omilami, Trevor Morgan (World Premiere)
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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