Movies
New Look at Zac Efron’s Ted Bundy in ‘Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile’ [Sundance]
Included with the announcement that the film will World Premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival was a new look at Zac Efron, Macie Carmosino and Lily Collins in Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, directed by Joe Berlinger. Celebrating the invitation to the prestigious fest, Efron shared a brand new photo as real-life serial killer Ted Bundy.
“It’s very interesting. I think the movie itself is really deep,” said Efron to ET last March. “It doesn’t really glorify Ted Bundy. He wasn’t a person to be glorified. It simply tells a story and sort of how the world was able to be charmed over by this guy who was notoriously evil and the vexing position that so many people were put in, the world was put in.”
He added, “It was fun to go and experiment in that realm of reality. I didn’t go full method and I didn’t have to like do any weird stuff to anybody to get into character.”
The film is told from the point of view of Bundy’s former girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer (Lily Collins), set during the multi-year period that Bundy hid his murder spree from her.
John Malkovich, Jim Parsons, Haley Joel Osment, James Hetfield, Grace Victoria Cox, Kaya Scodelario, Angela Sarafyan, Jeffrey Donovan, Terry Kinney and Dylan Baker also star.
Bundy was executed in 1989. Shortly before his execution, he confessed to 30 homicides committed in seven states between 1974 and 1978.
The original screenplay, written by Michael Werwie, won the Nicholl Fellowship first prize and was featured on the Black List.
Ready for Sundance! #extremelywickedshockinglyevilandvile pic.twitter.com/u4ENciUST4
— Zac Efron (@ZacEfron) November 29, 2018
It’s been eight years since Ari Aster came onto the scene and helped usher in a new wave of horror with Hereditary, one of the rare horror movies from the past ten years that still seems to come up in conversation every single week. And it’s back in the conversation this week, with Ari Aster revealing at an event that he’s already written a prequel to Hereditary!
Ari Aster was on hand at the American Cinematheque for Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair last week, a Los Angeles festival that screened all of Aster’s movies to date. The website Gold Derby reports that Aster revealed the Hereditary prequel script during a Q&A at the event, and you can watch the full Q&A conversation below for confirmation on the website’s report.
“I wrote a prequel to this,” Aster told the crowd, referring to Hereditary. “It never feels like the right time to do it. It’s a prequel, not a sequel so I don’t know where this goes.”
Would a potential Hereditary prequel dig deeper into the mythology of demon king Paimon? Unfortunately, Aster provides no further details on his prequel approach at this time.
Aster said of Hereditary during the same Q&A, “I was just trying to make a really good horror movie.” I think most horror fans would agree that he more than accomplished that goal, and the past eight years have proven that Hereditary is an enduring classic of its generation.
We celebrated the fifth anniversary of Hereditary here on BD back in 2023.
Ron Breton wrote, “Hereditary offers a similar emotional resonance to this new generation of horror – my generation of horror– as movie-goers in the seventies when they first saw Exorcist. Much like Aster’s film, we see the incomprehensible evil wear the face of a young girl; the victim of a raw deal she had no say in, as it tears a family to its core. Sure, both films offer so many terrifying visuals that can make the hair stand up on anyone’s neck – but it also depicts intense relationships and emotions that are tangible. Real. Familiar.”
“In that familiarity lies the uncanny, ready to rear its ugly head and force us to confront thoughts and horrors laying dormant and clawing at our psyche,” Breton continued his 5th anniversary celebration of Hereditary. “And it doesn’t matter if it’s been five or fifty years. These horrors are always there, as we become pawns in its horrible, hopeless machine.”
Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd, and Milly Shapiro star in Hereditary. In the film, “A grieving family is haunted by tragic and disturbing occurrences.”
That’s putting it mildly, eh?!
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