Movies
AFM ’11: Sara Paxton Reteams With ‘Shark Night’ Director to Solve ‘The Briar Lake Murders’
Back in January we broke the news that David R. Ellis (Shark Night 3D, Cellular, Snakes on a Plane, The Final Destination, Final Destination 2) would be heading back to the water with The Briar Lake Murders, working with cinematographer Daniel Pearl, who is known for his DP work on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2003, Friday the 13th and Warners forthcoming The Apparition.
With the American Film Market kicking off tomorrow, the film’s temp website has the first official casting. Ellis is to reteam with Shark Night 3D starlette Sara Paxton, who can also be seen in Ti West’s supernatural The Innkeepers and The Last House on the Left remake.
Penned by Walter Jakubowski, Neal Fischer and David Nevarez, the film follows a group of reckless and self-involved “twenty somethings” who quickly discover that disrespecting the locals can have disastrous circumstances… “A group of rude and insensitive city kids take a weekend vacation to Briar Lake, a picturesque town overlooking a beautiful lake, which to most outsiders would appear to be a peaceful small town. Having zero respect for anyone outside of their group, they are confronted by the hostile and eccentric residents. Following a bizarre experience in the town’s diner, they quickly retreat to the protection of their borrowed vacation lake house, where they plan to let loose and celebrate their weekend out of the city.
After an unexpected visit from the local police, the long weekend is cut short. Two of the locals have been brutally murdered, and this group of “outsiders” become the prime suspects. When the string of murders spins out of control, the group must come together to unravel Briar Lake’s sordid past and uncover the hidden secrets.
A vacation is always fun until you die!”
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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