Movies
‘Black Water: Abyss’ Artwork Descends into the Jaws of Death
As we reported last year, the team behind the 2007 survival thriller Black Water are reuniting to make a sequel, with Altitude Film Sales handling the film at the various markets. Now, we have a piece of sales art that shows the cast descending into the jaws of death.
Director and producer team Andrew Traucki (The Reef) and Michael Robertson are making Black Water: Abyss and hoping to repeat the success of the original 2007 feature, which was set in Australia’s mangrove swamps and inspired by a real-life crocodile attack.
“Black Water: Abyss follows an adventure-loving couple who convince their friends to explore a remote cave system in the forests of Northern Australia. With a storm approaching, they abseil into the mouth of the cave, which starts to flood, and find themselves threatened by a pack of crocodiles, setting up a tense survival drama.”
Mike Runagall from Altitude said the sequel will retain the feel of the original, which largely eschewed CGI and was shot with live crocodiles. “Black Water: Abyss employs the same ingenious approach on a much larger canvas to deliver a highly commercial high-concept thriller from a team with a proven track record in this arena,” he said.
Producer Robertson added: “Like all films in this genre, Black Water: Abyss is designed to terrify and scare, cause dread and alarm, to invoke our worst hidden fears – in this case, a fear heavily imprinted in our genes, the fear of being eaten alive by a vicious, unreasoning predator.”
Casting is still underway. It was written by Sarah Smith and Ian John Ridley.
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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