Movies
James Wan Shares ‘Dead Silence’ Storyboards from Mary Shaw’s Chamber of Dolls!
Saw, Insidious, and The Conjuring director James Wan is one of several filmmakers doing some house cleaning, having come across several never-before-seen storyboards from his criminally underrated Dead Silence, which has since become somewhat of a cult classic.
Over the weekend, Wan dug up another handful of boards, drawn by Greg Chown for the filmmaker and Universal Pictures, which take us behind the scenes of the Gothic horror film in which a young widower (played by “True Blood’s” Ryan Kwanten) returns to his hometown to search for answers to his wife’s murder, which may be linked to the ghost of a murdered ventriloquist.
In the latest batch, Wan takes us to the sequences where Jamie (Kwanten) and Det. Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg) discover Mary Shaw’s (Judith Roberts) secret lair that’s hauntingly lined with 100 dolls and have to escape.
“[These were] pretty intricate, detailed set-pieces to put together,” explained Wan who also revealed that he “got vertigo every time I had to get up on that catwalk!”
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100 Dolls in Mary Shaw’s Chamber (2/4). DEAD SILENCE storyboards (by Greg Chown).
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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