Paul Hyett, who directed The Seasoning House, Howl and the festival horror Heretiks, is taking on the sci-fi genre with Peripheral, which is set to be digitally released in the UK courtesy of Blue Finch Films on August 3, 2020.

Ahead of the release, Hyett has been doing interview rounds where he’s revealed two of his forthcoming projects, one of which he described as a conspiracy-fueled “atmospheric [John] Carpenter-esque New England horror story.”

Unnatural Selection is a “very much a sleepy, New England horror set in Cape Cod,” he tells Starburst Magazine. “It’s basically about a late night, sort of trashy TV show about conspiracy theories, you know, flat-Earthers, anti-vaxxers come in and talk.

“There’s a host and they try to debunk stuff and one day, a mysterious man walks in and he claims to be a fallen angel,” he adds. “He’s deeply charismatic, manipulative, extremely intelligent, and he starts talking about stuff that only historians will know and more and more they thinking, you know, is this guy for real? Later on, is his agenda comes and it’s very dark and nihilistic…”

He describes his other project, The Black Site, as Zero Dark Thirty meets Jacob’s Ladder, and says it’s the second part of his war trilogy, which began with The Seasoning House.

“[It’s] about an intelligence officer who gets back from Iraq – it was a particularly brutal tour and she’s got a traumatic injury – and she’s at home trying to revert back to civilian life in the UK [where] she’s having these horrible, bizarre, and violent hallucinations.” Hyett explains, “She puts it down to her PTSD, but as they get worse and worse and she starts to worry about her own sanity and that she could hurt her own family. So she goes into regression hypnotherapy, and that opens up all these memories that she just doesn’t remember actually happening, and the deeper they go, the darker they go.

“Basically, she worked at a black ops interrogation site – a black site – and she goes on this journey to find out what really happened. And obviously, it doesn’t go well.”

Hyett’s “sinister and unsettling sci-fi horror fantasy” Peripheral will be available on iTunes, Amazon, Google, Sky and Virgin.