Movies
Mega Budget Director Roland Emmerich Does $5m Alien Invasion Flick?!
Are the end of times coming… in Hollywood? Could this be evidence of a changing trend that’ll soon sweep the entire filmmaking world and infect other A-list directors like Steven Spielberg or Michael Bay? J.J. Abrams was one of the first to take a small budget and catapult it into the mega feature known as Cloverfield. The trend is hotter than I thought as Roland Emmerich pulled a shocker by getting behind the camera for a super secret $5m alien invasion indie only known as The Zone. The man hans’t worked with less than $100m in over 16 years — can he pull a rabbit out of his hat? Let’s hope so. I love this trend and think it’s great for the business…a business plagued by overspending.
The man who destroyed the White House and made one of the biggest alien invasion movies of all time, is secretly returning to the genre, this time in a decidedly small way.
Roland Emmerich, who directed Independence Day and is one of the masters of the modern tentpole, is gearing up to shoot The Zone, a stealth project that is joining the swelling ranks of the “found footage” genre, which purport to be genuine reels, tapes or files found after the person operating the camera expires.
Alien invasion flick Cloverfield kicked off the trend, which also encompasses the hugely successful Paranormal Activity movies.
No plot details are known but sources say Zone revolves around an alien invasion, will be improv-based and cast with relative unknowns.
In fact, word is that two leads were just cast, one playing a haggard journalist in his 40s or 50s, the other a black man in his early to mid 20’s, the cameraman.
Emmerich, who hasn’t worked on movie with budgets of less than $100 million since 1994’s Stargate, will be operating with only $5 million in the bank, less than what the upcoming alien invasion movie Skyline had to work with.
Sources say Sony will distribute the movie as a negative pick-up. The studio, a frequent home for Emmerich, had no comment.
French writer-director Guillaume Tunzini penned the script and Loucas George is a producer on the pic, which will begin shooting mid-November. Sources say Sony, which had no comment, will distribute the movie as a negative pick-up
Making Zone may signal a trend for Emmerich in that the disaster film maestro is embracing moviemaking with more modest budgets. The CAA-repped director is in post on Anonymous, a political thriller set in the time of Queen Elizabeth I.
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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