Movies
Shudder Picks Up UK Ghost Story ‘Martyrs Lane’; Being Compared to ‘The Devil’s Backbone’
Add another one to Shudder‘s impressive roster of original and exclusive movies, as Deadline reports today that the streaming service has acquired UK ghost story Martyrs Lane.
“Martyrs Lane centers on Leah, a young girl who lives in a large vicarage with her parents and older sister. During the day the house is bustling with people; at night it is dark, empty and a space for Leah’s nightmares to creep into. Leah can’t quite work out why something feels missing in her relationship with her mother, however hard she tries.
“When a small, nightly visitor appears, Leah feels duty bound to receive them with kindness – and a little game between them begins in which Leah is set a nightly task. With each task, Leah’s knowledge grows – knowledge that unpicks the broken relationship she has with her mother, and threatens to destabilise the world as she knows it.”
Denise Gough (Colette), Steven Cree (Outlaw King), Kiera Thompson and Sienna Sayer star.
Ruth Platt (The Lesson) wrote and directed Martyrs Lane.
“Martyrs Lane is a terrifically scary and emotionally captivating ghost story; a haunting tale of a mother and daughter – reminiscent of the elegance and melancholy of The Devil’s Backbone – and we’re thrilled to bring it to subscribers later this year as part of Shudder’s premium, curated slate of the best in horror film,” Shudder’s Emily Gotto said in a statement.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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