Movies
First Stills & Exclusive Interview with ‘Wrong Turn 3’ Director Declan O’Brien!
This morning we were the first press to hop on the phone with the pleasurable Declan O’Brien, director of Fox Home Entertainment’s forthcoming Wrong Turn 3, which is expected to arrive on both DVD and Blu-ray this fall. Beyond the break you can chew on the first two official stills from the film, alongside our exclusive one-on-one chat with O’Brien about his prisoners vs. backwoods cannibal horror flick that stars Tom Frederic, Janet Montgomery, Tamer Hassan, Gil Kolirin, Mike Straub and Chucky Venice. Are you guys excited for tis? I know I am!
While Fox had journalists on set for the filming of WRONG TURN 2, this time filming went quietly underneath everyone’s noses. In fact, the third film in the franchise is 100% finished.
“I’m finished filming. I’m done. The movie is completely done,” O’Brien tells Bloody-Disgusting. “I finished [post production] up early last month.”
“There was a fair amount of post production in terms of CGI, but it wasn’t too heavy because I decided to do most of the effects practically,” he continues. “CYCLOPS was like 338 CG shots, which I did with motion capture, very heavily CG based. I wanted to do WRONG TURN 3 more old school. It was a luxury to do more practical effects…we had a bit more money and time to do it.”
O’Brien was highly aware of the fan base of the franchise and knew he had to spice it up a bit.
“I knew the fan base really enjoyed the first and second film and the sheer terror and gore to it. I had that in mind and decided to give the fans what they wanted,” he explains. “Plus, hopefully we took it up a notch by adding more action sequences to it. It’s a big film. I get to blow stuff up…the thing I liked about the first film was the car sequences and explosions, you know, giving it that theatrical feeling.”
We all know the WRONG TURN franchise revolves around a group of cannibals in the woods, but what differentiates this one from the previous two? This time we have an anti-hero.
“I helped shape and develop [the screenplay written by Connor James Delaney]. When I first talked to Fox about it, I said the first [WRONG TURN] was a bunch of beautiful people in the woods being hunted down by cannibal hillbillies, WRONG TURN 2 was the same, beautiful people in the woods, shooting a reality show while being hunted down by cannibal hillbillies – and we kind of came up with the idea that, what’s the sport in that?” (laughs) “We wanted some people to fight back, so we got some of the badass prisoners that escape, so it’s bad vs. worse – like a battle royal,” he explains. “There are some really cool fight sequences [and] a nice twist to the film [so] you don’t know who to root for. You’ve got some bad guys, a good guard guy you want to survive, but at some point you’re voting for Three Finger (Borislav Iliev) a little bit. It’s interesting that way.” He tells us that the film would likely be compared as “CON AIR meets WRONG TURN,” and that he likes no having a clear hero. “The thing I like about some of the classic films is that there is never a clear hero…there are many shades of grey. We decided to take that direction.”
Just like the second film, WRONG TURN 3 will arrive unrated, but this time it will also be on high def Blu-ray!
“[It will be] unrated and on Blu-ray I believe,” also noting some extras. “We had a full EPK crew there the entire shoot. We have all of the behind-the-scenes videos setting up these big complicated action sequences,” he continues talking about a moment he hopes the EPK crew caught on film. “At one point I’m shooting on a highway and – I don’t know if they got this on video or not – we have a port-a-potty in the way and I’m trying to get the shot off and the lights (the sun) are coming up…so I hop off the camera truck and am pushing this sh*tter off the highway! I really hope they got that on camera,” he jokes.
As for the gore, he had to keep everything under wraps, but he did give us a tease.
“I will tell you this, the movie opens with a nice action sporting sequence. Then, within the first 2-minutes of the film, you get a few kills. It grabs you by the throat and you run from there -there are some very inventive sort of kills. Three Fingers is up against 6 hardcore criminals,” he explains, “he has to be inventive in how he traps them and kills them.”
Just like with WRONG TURN 2, he didn’t have a time limited and could take the film wherever it needed to go. Still, he decided to trim it a bit and make it flow.
“I didn’t have a set time, I ended up probably shooting more,” he tells us, “I know there are extra scenes you’ll get on the DVD that I shot – scare scenes, not gore scenes – I ended up trimming them out of the movie for pace, because this movie goes really quickly. It’s kind of relentless in that way, I wanted to give that feeling. The movie starts at like 3 in the afternoon and they’re transferring the prisoners, and it ends at dawn, so it all happens in real-time. ”
Have there been any rumblings of a fourth film? No, but Fox is happy once again.
“I haven’t [heard anything[, but I know Fox is really pleased with this film and have high expectations. Hopefully we’ll meet them…”
When it was all said and done, O’Brien had this to say: “I’m a big fan of your site, I really appreciate the fan base. Its fun making these movies and I hope they enjoy it as much I enjoyed making it!”
The Bloody-Disgusting readers are sure to chime in when the film streets later this fall.
There’s been a lot of talk about how Christopher Nolan snuck in some horror elements into his epic adaptation of The Odyssey. However, even before the Cyclops began to eat Ithican soldiers and Circe subjected them to magical body-horror, cinemagoers were already witnessing supernatural terror through a certain trailer that was attached to most IMAX screenings of Nolan’s film.
It turns out that this trailer was for Rob Savage’s Other Mommy, an adaptation of Bird Box author Josh Malerman’s horror novel, Incidents Around the House. With the teaser now available online and revealing that the award-winning Jessica Chastain is playing the titular antagonist (as well as her ill-fated human counterpart), not to mention the fact that the picture is being helmed by the director of hits like Host and The Boogeyman, genre fans are understandably hyped for this upcoming thriller.
That’s why I’ve decided to take a closer look at the trailer and share four things we learned from this sneak peek at Other Mommy!
4. Rob Savage is Going Back to His Supernatural Horror Roots
I know I’m in the minority when I admit that Dashcam is my favorite Rob Savage movie, but even I understand why the filmmakers’ fans have been waiting a while for the director to get back to telling more grounded paranormal stories as he did with 2020’s Host.
Other Mommy obviously isn’t a found footage movie, but moments like the poltergeist activity on the kitchen table combined with the nature of the source material, which actually features a full-on exorcism, indicate that this adaptation is more than a simple creature feature. That’s why I think Savage is once again going to borrow from the same ghostly narratives that made his debut film such a viral hit.
3. Other Mommy is a More Convincing Doppelganger in the Adaptation
Part of the horror from Malerman’s original novel came from the fact that the entity taking on the form of Bela’s (Arabella Olivia Clark) mother wasn’t very good at passing itself off as human. This resulted in several uncanny moments where other characters began to notice that there was something visibly wrong with the family and decided to keep their distance.
Savage’s film appears to be taking a different route, with the trailer showing a version of the entity that can, at least physically, imitate Chastain’s character perfectly. This change is likely the result of the filmmakers wanting to incorporate more paranoid scenes where Bela and her father, played by Jay Duplass, are confused about which Mommy is safe to interact with.
2. The Family is Also Better Off This Time Around
Incidents Around the House featured some interesting subtext about how poverty can negatively affect American family dynamics. After all, the main characters were already feeling scared and isolated before the entity emerged from Bela’s closet and began scratching at their emotional wounds. The trailer for the movie, however, depicts the family as being relatively well off before these incidents begin to occur.
I can only imagine that this part of the story was changed so that the family’s fall from grace can be even more dramatic as the mom and dad’s pasts are revealed and Bela falls further into the clutches of the demonic antagonist.
1. Jessica Chastain is Embodying Evil Dead Rise’s Alyssa Sutherland
Mothers turning against their children is one of the most disturbing horror tropes out there (just check out classics like Hereditary and Carrie if you need proof), but it takes a remarkably skilled actress to pull off such a monstrous transformation. This is especially true when both a regular, loving mother and the Other share the screen in the same film.
That’s why I appreciate how Chastain appears to be channeling another evil redhead mother that recently traumatized audiences with her performance. It’s too early to be sure, but I’m fairly confident that Chastain’s character has at least some amount of Ellie in her cinematic DNA – Ellie being the iconic deadite brought to life by Australian actress Alyssa Sutherland in 2023’s Evil Dead Rise.
Let us know in the comments if you think we missed any important details from the trailer, and don’t forget to check out Other Mommy when it hits theaters on October 9!
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