Movies
Gierasch’s Twisted ‘Fertile Ground’ has Atmosphere, Breasts and Blood
Bloody Disgusting’s Jeff Otto caught up with Night of the Demons and Autopsy director Adam Gierasch to chat about his latest horror endeavor, Fertile Ground, which will play in this coming October’s “After Dark Originals”. Inside you can read the interview where Gierasch promises that Ground carries atmosphere, breasts and blood!
In the film, Emily and Nate Weaver leave the city for the rural comfort of Nate’s ancestral home in New Hampshire. There, isolated and haunted by inexplicable noises and horrifying visions, Emily discovers she’s pregnant while Nate is possessed by the homicidal spirit of his forbearers. In a house haunted by past victims, Emily learns that she’s the latest target in a murderous tradition.
“If Roman Polanski made a movie for Lifetime Channel, it would be FERTILE GROUND,” is writer/director Adam Gierasch’s uniquely vivid description of his new film for After Dark, part of their 8-part ORIGINALS series.
“It’s old school [and] weird,” Gierasch tells BD during our exclusive interview. “Is it a ghost story or is it not? [It’s a] psychological drama. It’s very different than the other After Dark films. We don’t have monsters in it. It’s got breasts, and that’s a good thing. We have an amazing cast with Gale Harold, who starred in the show QUEER AS FOLK and Leisha Hailey, who starred in THE L WORD.”
Gierasch says GROUND builds to its scares and big moments rather than being in-your-face with them. “It’s a gorgeous movie. It takes place all in this beautiful mansion in this giant cornfield. It just looks very Americana. It’s something I’ve never done before because it relies so much more on the drama than the big scares. It’s a very adult movie. It’s one of those things where, at the end, you’re supposed to be tense and almost sick to your stomach. It’s very emotionally harrowing with some good horror jumps in it.”
With that being said, the director also promises GROUND will feature plenty of moments design to make your skin crawl. “A woman has a terrible miscarriage in the first five minutes of the movie, so there’s just blood pouring between her legs and all over the floor. It’s really hard to watch. There’s also a ghost who looks like she’s had a miscarriage too. And you see pretty much everything. Wait until the end. There’s ghosts. It gets bloody. I’ll leave it at that.“
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!
You must be logged in to post a comment.