Movies
‘The Vigil’ Gets a Chilling International Poster
While we wait for exact details on a US release, filmmaker Keith Thomas will see his festival hit The Vigil released internationally on August 5th after being acquired by Blumhouse earlier this year.
Joe Lipsett reviewed The Vigil out of its premiere in TIFF’s Midnight Madness program, a film in which a man providing overnight watch to a deceased member of his former Orthodox Jewish community finds himself opposite a malevolent entity.
In his review, Lipsett wrote that The Vigil is “a fresh take on the religious/demon possession horror film” that “feels like a breath of fresh air.“
The Toronto International Film Festival shared this lengthy write up:
“Set over the course of a single evening in Brooklyn’s Hassidic “Boro” Park neighborhood, The Vigil follows Yakov, a former Hassid, as he accepts a position as a shomer, hired to “sit the vigil” and watch over the body of a deceased community member. Having lost his faith, Yakov isn’t eager to go back to the insular religious community he only recently fled. But when Reb Shulem, a rabbi and confidante, approaches Yakov after a support group meeting and offers to pay Yakov to be the shomer for a recently deceased Holocaust survivor, he reluctantly accepts the job. Shortly after arriving at the dilapidated house, Yakov realizes that something is very, very wrong. This will not be a quiet vigil.”
The film stars Adam Margules, Dave Davis, Menashe Lustig, Malky Goldman, Lynn Cohen, and Fred Melamed. It was produced by JD Lifshitz and Raphael Margules at Boulderlight and Adam Margules of Angry Adam Productions.
Here’s the chilling international poster:
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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