Chances are high, if you’re here, that you’re familiar with the names Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, the filmmakers behind Spring and The Endless. Prepare to add one more name to that list: Benson & Moorhead’s longtime editor Michael Felker, set to make his feature debut with upcoming sci-fi thriller Things Will Be Different.

Things Will Be Different is world premiering at the SXSW Film Festival on March 11, and the film was produced by Benson & Moorhead.

Adam David Thompson and Riley Dandy star in Things Will Be Different. They play siblings Joseph and Sidney, who are on the run from the law at the start of the film. Then, the mysterious farmhouse they are staying in inexplicably transports them through time. A cryptic force emerges and traps them on the strange plot of land, giving them a lethal ultimatum in order to escape.

Ahead of the film’s premiere, Bloody Disgusting spoke with writer/director/co-editor Michael Felker about parlaying his editing work into a heady sci-fi feature that nestles seamlessly into the cinematic universe that Benson and Moorhead have created.

The idea for Things Will Be Different came organically to Felker, who drew inspiration from his family. More specifically, Felker made this movie for his family.

“I am the son of a very nerdy engineer film lover,” Felker explains of his sci-fi origins. “My dad raised me on a bunch of movies growing up, mainly sci-fi because he’s an avid sci-fi reader. He’s an avid sci-fi movie lover. Anytime I’d see him or hang out, since I was 10 years old, we’d go see a sci-fi movie. Then if it’s one that’s got a lot of world-building or a lot of sci-fi, puzzly questions, we’d just go get coffee afterwards and just pick it apart and have our own theories and everything.

“So, I think it was about two years ago, we just got out of Everything Everywhere All at Once, and we both loved it, and we went and got coffee afterwards. I was in the middle of trying to conceive a movie that I want to do at our abandoned family farm in Michigan. I was like, ‘Dad, I want to do a cool sci-fi movie at the farm. I’ve got some ideas.’ I started pitching him some stuff, and that’s how Things Will Be Different became born, I guess. That’s a bad way of saying it, ‘was born.’ It was mainly a movie for him. I just wanted a movie that he would enjoy and pick apart with me or with anyone he wanted to over coffee afterwards.”

While the film originated from talking with his dad, it revolves around the relationship between a brother and sister. That, too, was informed by Felker’s family.

He shared, “I do have an older sister. In fact, not to go into too much spoiler territory, but me and my sister have matching Triforce tattoos on our arms. There’s a tattoo thing that happens in the movie that is very specific to me and my sister. Because we don’t see each other very much. She has a whole other career and lives back in our hometown in Alabama. And I live in California. We don’t talk very much, but when we do, we text each other. If we’re having a bad day, we just take a picture of our tattoos and say, ‘Hey, miss you, love you,’ and then we text it right back. So definitely, this movie was also a deep way of saying and finding connection and missed time with my sister through this movie as well.”

Family extends beyond blood relatives, too, with his long-time collaborators Benson and Moorhead not only encouraging Felker to make this movie, but they also jumped on board to executive produce and offer any help needed.

“We’re all very close. I’ve been with them since working on their first movie, Resolution. I’ve edited all their movies since then. I talk to them all the time. I mean, hell, I’m shooting them texts now, and they’re shooting on a show. The biggest thing is I always wrote a lot of scripts during my downtime in between editing, and I would always send it to them because I would just be like, ‘Hey, let me know your thoughts or whatever.’ And they would always get back to me right away with like, ‘Here’s what we think. This is cool. Eh, this is not our thing, blah, blah, blah.’ We did that for years. Then finally, when I wrote this script, I sent it to them, and I was like, ‘Hey, I’m going to go make this thing. Give me your blessing,’ is basically how I said it. They always give me great advice. They read it, and they immediately got back to me, [producer] Dave Lawson and they were just like, ‘Not only do we think it’s a really great script, but it actually feels like a Rustic Films movie. We want to be on board immediately.’

“So, they came on board as EPs right away, and they basically were like, ‘Whatever you need. You know us. We know you. We trust you. Just let us know what you need, and we’ll drop it from wherever we are.’ They’ve been the best partners still. They’re the best creative partners still because they’ve just been so supportive even to this day on the movie, and the movie wouldn’t be where it is if it weren’t for them.”

Felker also teases some of that extended family in quick cameos here, and that tease comes with the surprising reveal that we’ve likely spotted Felker before on screen.

“Dave Lawson and Aaron Moorhead’s also in the movie as well. They have a very small cameo because we almost had them on the shoot, and then schedules be what they may. So we found a way to get them in. But for us, I was an extra in Resolution. I was an extra, that may have been kind of cut, in The Endless. I don’t know if I was in Synchronic. I was in Something in the Dirt as myself at one point in that movie, not to spoil that part too much. We are always using each other as resources.”

Felker also drew surprising inspiration from a very different genre when charting the course for this time-bender.

“A big reference movie for me was Blood Simple, which has a very similar engine trajectory, where it’s like a character makes this decision, whether it’s the smartest decision or it’s the most passionate decision, and all chaos breaks out to the point where you don’t know where that movie goes either. I love that movie. The best sci-fi are the ones that discover the unknown, and it’s not so much what you take back with you, but what you reach out for and maybe discover or maybe find some new theory. That really leaned to the storytelling techniques, to the point where every time I watch it, I’m just like, ‘Man, I can’t believe we went there.’ If I charted this out and knew knew too much, this wouldn’t have been where I would’ve gone, and it would’ve been safe. And safe is where you find the tropes, where you find time-travel stuff that you’ve seen all the time. I wanted to steer away from that, and that means sometimes being blind to the tropes during my process.”

The biggest question heading into SXSW’s world premiere is, has dad seen it yet?

“He has seen a very early rough cut because I wanted his notes, and he was over the moon. He was so over the moon. We talked about it for hours after, and he gave me very small, little tweaks that we did. It’s funny because he’s seen my shorts, and he goes like, ‘Yeah, that was fine.’ But this one, he watched it and went, he was like, ‘Holy cow!’ He sent me a ton of emails that were just one-liners all over the place. When that happened, I was like, ‘Oh, the rest of this is just playing with house money. Whatever happens, the movie’s a success.’”

Expect to hear more about Things Will Be Different soon.

The post ‘Things Will Be Different’ – Director Michael Felker on the Surprising Family Origins for His Twisty Sci-Fi Thriller appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

The video game Watch Dogs is headed to the big screen, and Deadline reports today that Sophie Wilde, the breakout star of last year’s Talk to Me, is attached to lead the film’s cast.

New Regency is adapting the video game from Ubisoft. Mathieu Turi (The Deep Dark) is directing the Watch Dogs movie, written by Christie LeBlanc (Oxygen).

Deadline notes in their report today, “The film is set within the universe of Ubisoft’s blockbuster video game franchise of the same name, with over 50 million players.”

The site goes on to report, “The popular game is set in fictionalized versions of real-life cities, at various points in time, and follow different hacker protagonists who, while having different goals to achieve, find themselves involved with the criminal underworlds of their respective cities. The antagonists are usually corrupt companies, crime bosses, and rival hackers who take advantage of ctOS (central Operating System), a fictional computing network that connects every electronic device in a city together into a single system and stores personal information on most citizens. The player also has access to ctOS, which can be used to control various devices to assist them in combat, stealth, or solving puzzles.”

Yariv Milchan and Natalie Lehmann will produce the upcoming film adaptation for New Regency Pictures, alongside Margaret Boykin for Ubisoft Film & Television.

Ubisoft launched the first Watch Dogs video game in 2014, with three subsequent games coming along in its wake. The most recent was released in 2020, titled Watch Dogs: Legion.

Sophie Wilde got a whole bunch of awards notice for her incredible work in Talk to Me, and we can expect we’ll be seeing a lot more from the rising star in the coming years.

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The early days of the pandemic were like living in some unholy vortex. Stores were indefinitely shuttered. The streets were eerily abandoned. And the threat of COVID lurked around every corner. While it has been four years since those rudimentary times, and we’ve returned to some normalcy, the danger still exists in hushed whispers and the shadows that line our periphery. When I recently reflected back upon 2020, I couldn’t help but recall a pair of apocalyptic-style films that perfectly capture the paranoia and the fear that an outbreak breeds – Barry Levinson’s The Bay and John Erick Dowdle’s Quarantine. 

Mutilated bodies, shared delusions, and guttural terror. I shudder to think about the last four years of living. What could have lasted only a few weeks – remember when the lockdowns were expected to last just a fortnight? – turned into four years lost. The mere notion that the pandemic shaved literal years from our lives boggles my mind as much as it strikes fear in my body. 

The frenzy of shopping for toilet paper and wearing the most absurd masks is what I remember most about those early days when we knew so little and were scared of so much. We were in a panic and didn’t know how to cope with any of it. That distress and misery permeate both The Bay and Quarantine, two strands to the same thread.

Told through reporting intern Donna Thompson’s (Kether Donohue) eyes, in addition to a collage of handheld cameras, cellphone static, and Skype calls, The Bay exposes an outbreak in real-time. From the moment the first woman is seen covered in disgusting boils and lesions, the film unravels the tragedy of Claridge, Maryland, a sleepy, idyllic seaside town. The residents are celebrating the 4th of July, as everyone makes their way downtown to join in on festivities, from dunking tanks to crab-eating challenges. 

The sun blisters overhead, and nothing appears to be amiss. Well, except for two researchers who turned up dead weeks prior. Mayer John Stockman (Frank Deal), who clearly took a page from the Jaws mayor’s playbook, brushes off all concerns about the water supply. He even raises a plastic cup to the new filtration system that has allowed local chicken farming to thrive and boost tourism. Despite loads of chicken feces, which is full of hormones and steroids, being dumped into the lake every year, no one shows concern for what that could mean for organisms and creatures growing below the water’s surface.

Downtown, one woman shows signs of being eaten alive from the inside out, but the outbreak is happening all over town. Several women are found with similar boils and lesions and are believed to be victims of domestic violence – at least at first. Before long, however, it becomes clear that what the town is dealing with is something unknown, insidious, and altogether catastrophic.

Once the panic sets in, the town devolves into chaos. Fear courses in the residents’ veins, as they flock to the local hospital in the hopes of being treated. Soon enough, it’s overrun, with too many patients for the medical staff to handle.

‘The Bay’

Covid struck similarly. Countless hospitals all over the country quickly became overwhelmed with patients seeking care. People were scared and frantic, hiding behind heightened emotions as a way to mask their deepest insecurities and fears of the unknown. In the early days, that fear invaded every part of our collective existence. We were so afraid of catching such an infectious disease we even used sanitation wipes to clean off our groceries and other household items – remember those days?! Films like Sick and Host capture this time in our society best; both films bottle up the fear and paranoia of navigating truly unprecedented times.

Barry Levinson engages with primal human instinct, as well. As the world as they know it crumbles around them, on the verge of a full-blown apocalypse, The Bay’s townsfolk enter into beast mode, resorting to the most grotesque behaviors. But what other options do they have? Many beg to be killed, as a group of victims scream to local police, who are then infested themselves. As society crumbles, so does one’s clear-headed understanding of what it means to fight for survival, as the afflicted melt into a pile of bloodcurdling screams and dripping, oozing fleshy bits. 

Masked behind a vicious outbreak, The Bay expresses what happens when humankind loses a grip on compassion and consideration. The townspeople become so consumed by their own selfishness that the flesh-eating organism – as we come to learn, a seaborn isopod is responsible for the pandemic – has very few roadblocks to spread freely and easily. Fueled by emotion rather than logic, the residents of Claridge, Maryland contribute to the problem unwittingly. 

It’s only after quarantine, and the dumping of gallons of chlorine into the bay, that the threat is extinguished. But the survivors will never be the same. Their souls are scarred beyond recognition, even Donna as she emotionally recalls the experiences in great detail. Over a video call, she’s clearly still rattled by the whole ordeal, forever damaged and broken. With an ongoing pandemic (this is what they call normal these days, huh), it’s hard not to see oneself mirrored in The Bay’s terrifying story: innocent people driven to madness by a contagion that mutilates everything in its path. But that’s not the most horrifying part. It’s what happens to mankind when placed within such volatile conditions.

It’s the fear that breeds the worst in humanity… The fear that you hold everyone else’s lives in your hands… The fear that your end may be coming soon… After all, we’re all scared of death underneath it all. Even as a pandemic slowly fades away, nothing is as it was. You see yourself in a different light, bound by the ideals you adopted during near-apocalyptic times. You see the world through a drastically blurry and contrasting lens. And you’ll likely never look at your neighbor the same way again…

‘Quarantine’

In John Erick Dowdle’s Quarantine, a remake of the 2007 film [REC], similar themes and ideas can be extracted from the brutally harrowing tale. Upon a recent revisit, Quarantine is far better than its reputation would have you believe. It’s a suffocating indictment of humankind, finding the characters clawing their way through the depths of existence as they not only struggle to make sense of their new reality but to find a way out.

A young reporter named Angela Vidal (Jennifer Carpenter) is tasked with shadowing a local fire department for the night. Over the moon for a potentially exciting story, she and her cameraman Scott Percival (Steve Harris) spend the evening getting to know the firemen of a local fire department – getting an inside glimpse into their routine, from sleeping arrangements to even what the shower layout looks like. As the night drags on, Angela grows weary and bored, hoping that a call will come in to whisk her out into the feverish night.

A call eventually comes in, an apparent violent encounter with an older woman. Residents of her building heard bloodcurdling screams coming from somewhere high above. Once the firemen and police arrive, Angela and Scott enter the building–and it’s the last time they’ll ever feel the cool night air on their skin. Once inside, the police attempt to understand what went down, and what they discover is something beyond their worst nightmares.

As we come to learn, a vicious strain of rabies has begun spreading among the residents. Many show symptoms within minutes of being bitten or coming into contact with blood and other bodily fluids. One resident, a veterinarian named Lawrence (Greg Germann), spots the signs after two men succumb to gnarly bites. He’s never seen anything like it. It’s a monstrous case of rabies that humanity is simply ill-equipped to handle.

Looking back now, Covid saw society practically eat itself alive. Despite previous outbreaks, such as the Spanish Flu, we just didn’t know how to cope and deal with such a massive contagion. Government officials bungled the whole thing, which allowed it to drag on now into its fourth year. Four years of fear and paranoia wrapped up in masks, hand sanitizer, and staying six feet apart. Life might be back to “normal” but the threat of catching the disease remains a constant reminder that things will never be “normal” ever again.

The “normal,” as we see in Quarantine, manifests itself in the entire building being sealed off, as ground zero of a savage, could-be worldwide pandemic. The only way to stop it from spreading is to quarantine everyone in the building until brain tissue samples can be taken from everyone inside; easier said than done, as the residents, much like those in The Bay, degenerate and lose themselves in a flurry of panic, misinformation, and uncertainty.

‘Quarantine’

Angela and Scott continue filming everything so the world knows the truth, giving a reason for Scott to be carrying around a giant newsroom camera despite the rabies-infested pouncing on him from the shadows. The night seems to unravel terribly slowly, as one-by-one, the residents succumb to their heightened emotional states and turn on one another. The chaos propagates more fear. When all communication is cut off in the building, in addition to the power, the darkness consumes them. It’s within such claustrophobic darkness that their worst anxieties about life, death, and the disease of unknown origin grow exponentially until no one can avoid the inevitable. No one is getting out of the building alive; that’s made clear when several residents attempt to climb out of windows and are gunned down by snipers on neighboring rooftops.

Once a determined and capable thinker, even Angela crumples into a puddle of whimpers and tears as the truth of the situation sets into her bones. Leave it to Jennifer Carpenter to spend the second half of the film screaming until her lungs burst. Even those as well-meaning and strong-willed as Angela can’t handle this new reality, one riddled with flesh-tearing tormentors whose sole purpose is to sew discord and foam-mouthed death.

Quarantine gets little credit for the chilling scares it fuses into its startling real story about the deterioration of humanity and how we, as human beings, navigate the end of the world. As with the real-life pandemic, which none of us could possibly have predicted, the devolution of mankind is not a farfetched conceit. It’s very real. While the specific details of the film might have been made up for theatrical effect, something harrowing remains beneath the smoke and mirrors. When all the flash is stripped away, Quarantine might just as well be a visual representation of the Covid pandemic: fear and paranoia propelling humanity to careen over the cliff.

In tackling very different pandemics, The Bay and Quarantine manage to successfully and brilliantly capture humanity on the verge of collapse. In both circumstances, humanity reacts the same way – pushed to the edge, we turn to rash emotions rather than any levelheaded logic. We become entangled in our own narrow-sighted needs that we fail to see how those actually contribute to the problem, rather than offer a viable solution. 

As we’ve witnessed both in horror cinema and in real life, fear doesn’t adhere to any cultural or economic boundaries. When the dark pushes in from every angle, and we seemingly have no way out of the mess, fear punishes us all. Fear motivates. Fear inspires. And more importantly, fear can ravage the body if you let it. Hopefully, films like Quarantine and The Bay can serve as warnings about what happens when the telltale signs are ignored and the powers that be demonstrate a severe lack of morality or self-awareness.

Or, you know, we can just… look around.

Double Trouble is a recurring column that pairs up two horror films, past or present, based on theme, style, or story.

The post Living Through Pandemic Times: Fear and Paranoia in ‘The Bay’ & ‘Quarantine’ [Double Trouble] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Winnie the Pooh is back and he’s bringing his friends along for his latest slasher adventure in Rhys Frake-Waterfield’s Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey II, headed to theaters nationwide later this month. Fathom Events will bring the bloody slasher sequel Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey II to U.S. theaters beginning on March 26, 2024.

The catch? It’s playing for only three days: March 26, 27 and 28.

While you wait, Bloody Disgusting is exclusively debuting the film’s brand new official poster art, which comes courtesy of Mariano Mattos. Check it out in all its gory glory below!

This new poster features: Christopher Robin (Scott Chambers), Lexy (Tallulah Evans), Pooh (Ryan Oliva), Tigger (Lewis Santer), Owl (Marcus Massey), Piglet (Eddy Mckenzie), Avan (Tade Adebajo), Aaron (Sam Barrett), Young Christopher Robin (Mason Stanley Gold), Young Pooh (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney), and Mia (Kelly Rian Sanson).

Tickets can be purchased online at Fathom Events or at participating theater box offices. For a complete list of locations, visit the Fathom Events website (theaters are subject to change).

Here’s the official synopsis:

“Deep within the 100-Acre-Wood, a destructive rage grows as Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Owl, and Tigger find their home and their lives endangered after Christopher Robin revealed their existence. Not wanting to live in the shadows any longer, the group decides to take the fight to the town of Ashdown, home of Christopher Robin, leaving a bloody trail of death and mayhem in their wake. Winnie and his savage friends will show everyone that they are deadlier, stronger, and smarter than anyone could ever imagine and get their revenge on Christopher Robin, once and for all.”

The cast for Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 includes Tallulah Evans, Alina Desmond, Scott Chambers (Doctor Jekyll) as Christopher Robin, Ryan Oliva (Seasoning House) as Winnie-the-Pooh, and Peter DeSouza-Feighoney (The Pope’s Exorcist) as Young Pooh.

Matt Leslie (Summer of 84) wrote the screenplay for the slasher sequel.

We’ve also been told that the upcoming sequel will crack Jagged Edge’s public domain horror universe wide open, teasing upcoming Pinocchio, Bambi and Peter Pan-based horror movies.

The post ‘Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey II’ – New Poster Takes a Chainsaw to Your Happy Childhood Memories [Exclusive] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

One of the genre films we’re looking forward to checking out at SXSW this year is Dead Mail, written and directed by Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy and premiering on March 9.

A new teaser and key art has debuted ahead of the fest, giving a closer look at the ’80s analog aesthetic.

In the SXSW 2024 horror film…

“On a desolate, Midwestern county road, a bound man crawls towards a remote postal box, managing to slide a blood-stained plea-for-help message into the slot before a panicking figure closes in behind him. The note makes its way to the county post office and onto the desk of Jasper, a seasoned and skilled “dead letter” investigator, responsible for investigating lost mail and returning it to its sender. As he investigates further, Jasper meets Trent, a strange yet unassuming man who has taken up residence at the men’s home where Jasper lives.

“When Trent unexpectedly shows up at Jasper’s office, it becomes clear he has a vested interest in the note, and will stop at nothing to retrieve it…”

Sterling Macer, Jr., John Fleck, Susan Priver, Micki Jackson, Tomas Boykin, and Nick Heyman star in Dead Mail. Preview the film with an exclusive image gallery below.

Dead Mail leans heavily into the ’80s analog aesthetic, delivering a unique crime thriller unafraid to get offbeat with its dark narrative. Expect its characters to be as atypical as Dead Mail‘s sense of style, and expect to hear more about the film soon.

In the meantime, check out the teaser and poster art below.

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