Movies
‘[REC]’ Co-Director’s ‘Muse’ Brings Him Nightmares (AFM)
Variety reports that [REC] co-director Jaume Balagueró will direct Muse, a supernatural thriller that marks his return to English-language genre 12 years after his Miramax/Dimension breakout Darkness, co-starring a young Anna Paquin, grossed $22.2 million at the U.S. box office.
Also written by Balaguero and Spanish scribe Fernando Navarro, “Muse turns on Salomon, who has been off work since the tragic death off his girlfriend. Now, anxious to return to some semblance of normality, he goes back to his job as a police officer. But he hasn’t slept for months and has been suffering a recurring nightmare in which a woman is brutally murdered.
Back at work, the nightmare becomes a reality: the same woman who appears every night in his dreams is found dead in exactly the same circumstances. Now, Salomon will do whatever he can to solve this case and to discover the identity of the mystery woman.”
“This is just the kind of story that has always fascinated me, as a movie-goer and as a director. The combination of the supernatural, seduction, macabre rituals and love is an explosive one and has all the elements required to make a truly terrifying movie,” Balagueró said.
Muse is set up at Julio Fernandez’s Barcelona-based Filmax Ent., which has produced all of Balagueró’s movies since feature debut The Nameless, including Sleep Tight and the four-pic [REC] franchise. Filmax International will present it to buyers at the American Film Market. Julio Fernandez is producing.
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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