The holiday season brings fresh spooks this year, and we’ve got tons to chat about, including Netflix’s scary new Danish series Elves, casting news for the new Renfield series, a trailer for the much-anticipated followup to Wyrmwood, and much more!
Netflix’s Elves is now live on the streaming service and the six-part Danish horror looks to bring a little bit of an extra chill to this year’s holiday season. The series by Danish writer Stefan Jaworski and director Roni Ezra follows a teenager and her family as they are terrorized by, well, you can probably figure it out from the title. Check out the trailer if you want a taste of Elves (ew!) before you fire it up on Netflix!
Found-footage horror comedy Mean-Spirited from Jeff Ryan (Mass Hysteria) is on the way and has just completed shooting. Will Madden (BEAST BEAST) heads up the project as “Andy, an up-and-coming Vlogger whose attempts to reconnect with his estranged friend, Bryce (Ryan) fall apart while a demonic presence begins tormenting the vacationing group.” Alongside Madden and Ryan are Michelle Veintimilla (Gotham), Neville Archambault (The Block Island Sound), Daniel Rashid (BEAST BEAST), Will Martin (Youthmin), Maria DeCotis (Euphonia), and Charlie Pollock (The Good Wife). Check out the first image from Mean-Spirited ahead of a festival run for the film in 2022!
Bloody Disgusting reports that John Landis’ An American Werewolf in London is set for a 4K Ultra HD release from Arrow Video that comes packed with features, but also includes a resin model of the iconic practical ‘hand transformation’ effect from Rick Baker. The set ain’t cheap at $179.99 USD, but if you have a werewolf megafan on your holiday shopping list, this would certainly be up their alley.
Check out this monster list of features for the release, and you can preorder the set from Zavvi right here. There’s only 1000 of these things being made, as the Arrow team were only able to find 500 mid-transformation werewolves from which to extract their hands, so act fast!
- Brand new 4K restoration by Arrow Films from the original camera negative
- 4K (2160p) UHD Blu-rayTM presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible)
- Original uncompressed 1.0 mono and optional 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio
- Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- Audio commentary by Beware the Moon filmmaker Paul Davis
- Audio commentary by actors David Naughton and Griffin Dunne
- Mark of The Beast: The Legacy of the Universal Werewolf, a feature-length documentary by filmmaker Daniel Griffith, featuring interviews with John Landis, David Naughton, Joe Dante and more
- An American Filmmaker in London, an interview with John Landis in which he reflects on British cinema and his time working in Britain
- I Think He’s a Jew: The Werewolf’s Secret, a video essay by filmmaker Jon Spira (Elstree 1976) about how Landis’ film explores Jewish identity
- The Werewolf’s Call, Corin Hardy, director of The Hallow and The Nun, chats with writer Simon Ward about their formative experiences with Landis’ film
- Wares of the Wolf, a featurette in which SFX artist Dan Martin and Tim Lawes of Prop Store look at some of the original costumes and special effects artefacts from the film
- Beware the Moon, Paul Davis’ acclaimed, feature-length exploration of Landis’ film which boasts extensive cast and crew interviews
- An American Werewolf in Bob’s Basement and Causing a Disturbance: Piccadilly Revisited, two 2008 featurettes filmed by Paul Davis
- Making An American Werewolf in London, a short archival featurette on the film’s production
- An Interview with John Landis, a lengthy archival interview with the director about the film
- Make-up Artist Rick Baker on An American Werewolf in London, the legendary make-up artist discusses his work on the film
- I Walked with a Werewolf, an archival interview with Rick Baker about Universal horror and its legacy of Wolfman films
- Casting of the Hand, archival footage from Rick Baker’s workshop showing the casting of David Naughton’s hand
- Outtakes
- Storyboards featurette
- Original trailer and teaser plus TV and radio spots
- Extensive image gallery featuring over 200 stills, posters and other ephemera
- Double-sided fold-out poster
- Six double-sided, postcard-sized lobby card reproductions
- Limited edition 60-page, perfect-bound book featuring new writing by Craig Ian Mann and Simon Ward, archival articles and original reviews
Kiah Roache-Turner’s 2014 cult hit Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead is a bloody mashup of Mad Max and zombies, and fans of the film have been waiting for a followup for the last seven years. Roache-Turner doesn’t disappoint with the new trailer for Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, in which a soldier (Luke McKenzie) has to traverse a zombie-plagued Australia in search of survivors to round up in order to find a cure for the undead. Also starring in the film are Shantae Barnes-Cowan, Nicholas Boshier, Bianca Bradey, and Jay Gallagher.
The trailer looks to continue all of the original’s influences and aesthetic. Check it out ahead of Wyrmwood: Apocalypse‘s release on February 10, 2022 from XYZ Films!
In massive news, Universal’s Renfield movie from Chris McKay (The Lego Batman Movie), starring Nicholas Hoult as Count Dracula’s henchman, has found it’s Dracula in fellow Nic, Nicolas Cage. Variety reports that the film will take place in the present day but is expected to broadly adhere to Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula novel, in which asylum inmate Renfield comes under the influence of the famous vampire. Let’s hope that this attempt to build a cinematic universe around the Universal catalog of monsters is more Invisible Man than The Mummy.
Going back to restorations for a moment, Pedro Almodovar’s favourite horror film, Arrebato (1979), which the filmmaker calls “a modern classic”, is getting a 4K coat of fresh paint this month. Iván Zulueta’s arthouse dive into sex, heroin, and Super-8 filmmaking is a deep cut but is one of the most criminally-underseen horrors out there.
In Arrebato (Rapture), “Horror movie director José is adrift in a sea of doubt and drugs. As his belated second feature nears completion, his reclusive bubble is popped by two events: a sudden reappearance from an ex-girlfriend and a package from past acquaintance Pedro: a reel of Super-8 film, an audiotape, and a door key. From there, the boundaries of time, space, and sexuality are erased as José is once more sucked into Pedro’s vampiric orbit. Together, they attempt the ultimate hallucinogenic catharsis through a moebius strip of filming and being filmed.”
The film will be released digitally on iTunes, Amazon, Vimeo, and Google Play on December 21, 2021, with a DVD/BluRay release on January 25, 2022.
Finally, a trio of new Scream posters just dropped, with the legacy characters – Sidney (Neve Campbell), Dewey (David Arquette), and Gail (Courtenay Cox) – from the horror series giving the Ghostface mask a try. The campaign reinforces the film’s theme that “it’s always someone you know” and perhaps hints at a familiar face behind the killings this time around. We’ll be more than ready to devour this one when it hits theatres on January 14, 2022.
