A young student in Brussels moonlighting as a locksmith finds himself in a desperate bid to survive the night when a routine job puts him in the crosshairs of a vicious mobster in writer/director Michiel Blanchart’s adrenaline-fueled feature debut Night Call. Blanchart’s stylized action-thriller maintains a propulsive pace, rendering a bad work day into a harrowing bid to evade death, with a few overt nods to horror along the white knuckle journey. While it adheres to a familiar formula and its tumultuous Black Lives Matter protests backdrop feels more of a narrative crutch than meaningful, its winsome lead, kinetic staging, and palpable stakes ensure a gripping watch.

It’s clear from the moment he’s introduced that Mady (Jonathan Feltre) is a pure-hearted, trusting soul just trying to make it through his shift. He’s also exhausted. It’s why Mady doesn’t suspect that the woman, Claire (Natacha Krief), who’s been locked out of her apartment, might be lying about whether she actually lives there. He overlooks the signs that something is deeply amiss, including Claire’s promises to run to the ATM so she can pay him for his work while he waits there. It’s while Mady waits for her that the apartment’s true tenant arrives. A fight to the death ensues, but Mady’s bad night will only get worse as he’s captured by ruthless crime boss Yannick (Romain Duris) and tasked with retrieving what Claire took from him under the supervision of right-hand man Theo (The Nun‘s Jonas Bloquet). That Mady only has until sunrise to complete this mission or face death kickstarts a ticking time bomb.

Despite a nonstop barrage of thrilling set pieces and bone-crunching action sequences, Blanchart reels in viewers with morally complex yet relatable characters. Feltre’s Mady makes for a charming underdog whose simple miscalculation opens up a world of hurt. Mady isn’t your conventional action hero; this is a young student with a kind disposition but zero combat skills. That fish-out-of-water aspect primes Mady as the perfect audience proxy into this seedy underworld, but Night Call‘s magic is in the way it muddies his once pure sense of morality. Mady is consistently forced to weigh his options and decide how much of his captor’s amoral behavior he should match if he hopes to live, and Feltre is more than capable of conveying the nuanced complexity of this conundrum.

Feltre’s frequent scene partner, Bloquet, also helps. Much like Bloquet’s affable Frenchie in The Nun films, Theo is the rough-around-the-edges type with a gooey soft center. Well, to an extent. Theo has personal stakes in Mady’s quest, and the push-and-pull between Theo and Mady drives the narrative forward at a steady clip.

Blanchart drew inspiration from a real-life Black Lives Matter protest turned violent for his feature debut, yet the filmmaker shies away from getting too political or using this backdrop to make a statement. Instead, it feels more like a crutch for plotting’s sake and heightening tension. Mady, a black man trying to evade his white captors, for example, chooses not to phone the police at a critical moment. The film’s climax also features a moment that speaks directly to the period, though fails to achieve the intended impact. Mady’s too removed from the world at large, isolated by his plight, to integrate a brisk, entertaining action-thriller with disconnected real-world themes. 

Even still, Blanchart’s high-octane debut makes for a dazzling and entertaining ride. There’s enough violence and bloodshed to appeal to genre fans, including The Evil Dead playing on TV in a scene featuring almost a cartoonish amount of violence amidst thug ineptitude. While it’s likely a nod to Sam Raimi, who is producing a feature-length version of Blachart’s short film You’re Dead Hélène, there is a sense of playful mischief to Blanchart’s brand of violence that earns that reference. More importantly, it marks him as a filmmaker to watch.

Night Call is out in theaters now.

The post ‘Night Call’ Review – High-Octane Action Thriller Delivers Propulsive Fun appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Director Leigh Whannell is back with Wolf Man, a new interpretation of Universal’s classic monster that’s out in theaters today. The horror filmmaker takes a vastly different approach to the werewolf mythos, treating lycanthropy as a disease that yields no shortage of body horror.

Wolf Man doesn’t feature one transformation sequence; instead, it plays out over the course of the film and is handled completely via practical effects. Bloody Disgusting spoke with Whannell about the challenges of making a werewolf movie, tracking the multiple stages of transformation, and the film’s unexpected sources of inspiration.

In Wolf Man, the trouble starts when Blake (Christopher Abbott) travels back to his childhood home with his wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) and daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth), with a strange creature driving them off the road and leaving them vulnerable to attack. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot “Pierce” and “1941” plastered across Blake’s moving rental truck, an Easter egg referencing the original Universal Monsters film and its legendary makeup effects designer, Jack Pierce.

“You want to do it but not to a degree where you’re suddenly making a pastiche, an homage to something. There’s a place for that type of movie,” Whannell told Bloody Disgusting about his conservative use of Easter eggs in his latest horror movie. Instead, this hat tip is employed as an acknowledgment of the past and Whannell’s intentional lore departure.

He explains, “Like in Invisible Man, I felt like that one little scene where you see the guy covered in the bandages, it’s just a little nod to be like, ‘This existed, and I’m aware that I’m standing on the shoulders of these giants.’”

Due to Blake’s horrific affliction, this take on the Wolf Man bears more in common with The Fly than a traditional werewolf movie, but the unexpected reference points don’t end there. The animalistic nature of the beast and the isolated Pacific Northwest setting also evoke cryptozoology. It turns out that legendary cryptids like Bigfoot did influence Whannell’s interpretation of the classic character, at least in terms of the setting and Blake’s upbringing.

Whannell explains, “Actually, I did think about that. The thing about Bigfoot that I was drawn to with this is these isolated communities that have a story they tell, and they really believe in that story, these rituals. We, as humans, develop our own rituals within communities. You do that everywhere, it doesn’t have to be supernatural. But I love the idea of this isolated mountain community with their own set of rules that they keep from the outside world. That was very much part of this, trying to establish that.”

Christopher Abbott as Blake in Wolf Man, directed by Leigh Whannell

Unlike most werewolf movies, the full moon doesn’t trigger lycanthropy at all. Instead of one memorable transformation under the moonlight, Wolf Man treats lycanthropy as a brutal disease that sets about rearranging Blake’s DNA, splicing it with something inhuman. In other words, Blake’s transformation is ongoing and happening in stages. Considering that Blake is constantly trying to battle against his gruesome illness and maintain his humanity, the transformation isn’t fluid or easy.

“Well it was twofold,” Whannell says of tracking the multiple stages of progression. “One was just the physical transformation, so we had that mapped out. On my office wall during pre-production we had this map of stage 1, stage 2, stage 3, and so you would see the physical changes. Then with Chris, he was really keeping track of the emotional stuff. He would slip in and out of certain things. He would slip in little movements that maybe people spot early on, little things he would do like just a movement of the head or a tic, and I love that. I love seeing that. I mean, mentioning The Fly, when you go back and watch that film, you see in Jeff Goldblum’s performance these little tics. It’s just the start of the journey, but that, to me, is the most fascinating part, the start of the journey. It’s also horrific. In real life, if someone is suffering from Parkinson’s disease, that first tremor, before it gets overwhelming, is nightmarish. So that’s what I was speaking to.”

Compared to his monster counterparts, the werewolf isn’t as prolific in horror as, say, vampires or zombies. While that’s likely owed a lot to the monster’s reliance on practical effects to sell its effectiveness, Whannell found the established lycan rules trickiest to maneuver around when it came to making his werewolf feature.

He tells us, “For me, it was dealing with the lore of this person turning into a wolf when the full moon comes out, and now they’re human again. The back and forth. I felt like I wanted my story to be more contained than that. Corbett [Tuck], my wife, and I co-wrote the film, and we both talked about wanting the film to feel more immediate than that. Some people may say, ‘Oh, there’s not enough meat on the bone; we’re not stretching it out enough,’ but we wrote the first draft during COVID. I felt very cut off from society, and everything felt very unsettled, and so, to write a hellish story that unfolds in one night felt right for that time.”

Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man is now playing in theaters nationwide.

(from left) Director of Photography Stefan Duscio and Director Leigh Whannell on the set of WOLF MAN.

The post Leigh Whannell on Shaking Up ‘Wolf Man’ Lore and Challenges of Making a Werewolf Movie [Interview] appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

A24 promises us this week that the trailer for their new horror movie Opus will be making its way online on Tuesday, January 21, and today they’re previewing the “event of the century” with a series of eight character posters that spotlight the main cast. Find them below.

Ayo Edebiri (The Bear) and John Malkovich (Billions) star alongside Amber Midthunder (Prey) and Juliette Lewis (“Yellowjackets”), Murray Bartlett (“The White Lotus”), Stephanie Suganami (Power Book II: Ghost), Young Mazino (Beef), and Tony Hale (Woman of the Hour). 

A24 will release Opus in theaters on March 14, 2025. From writer-director Mark Anthony Green, the upcoming film will be A24’s first new horror movie to release here in 2025.

The film has been described as “flashy pop horror” as well a “tense, psychosocial game of cat and mouse.”

In A24′s Opus, “A young writer is invited to the remote compound of a legendary pop star who mysteriously disappeared 30 years ago. Surrounded by the star’s cult of sycophants and intoxicated journalists, she finds herself in the middle of his twisted plan.”

The post ‘Opus’ Posters Spotlight the Star-Studded Cast of A24’s “Event of the Century” appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

SCREAMBOX has all sorts of goodies hitting the streaming service this month, including the newly-released Pet Sematary-inspired Lizzie Lazarus, not to mention several Giallo movies. They join last month’s release of the incredibly timely Street Trash remake and the nightmarish exorcism drama Deus Irae.

Gorehounds will eat well with SCREAMBOX’s double helping of Blood Feast. Herschell Gordon Lewis’s landmark splatter film drops on January 31 while Marcel Walz‘s recent remake starring stars Robert Rusler (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) and Caroline Williams (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) is now streaming!

The new take on 1963’s Blood Feast (read our review) is dripping with copious amounts of the red stuff; our own Chris Coffel called it “a delicious splatterfest that will have horror hounds going back for seconds.”

In the film…

“Fuad Ramses and his family have moved from the United States to France, where they run an American diner. Since business is not going too well, Fuad also works night shifts in a museum of ancient Egyptian culture. During these long, lonely nights he is repeatedly drawn to a statue representing the seductive ancient goddess Ishtar. He becomes more and more allured by the goddess as she speaks to him in visions. Eventually, he succumbs to her deadly charms.

“After this pivotal night, Fuad begins a new life, in which murder and cannibalism become his daily bread. He starts to prepare a ritual feast to honor his new mistress, a lavish affair dripping with blood, organs, and intestines of human victims. As butchered bodies are heaped upon the Altar of Ishtar, Fuad slowly slips further into madness until he is no more than the goddess’ puppet; and she thirsts for the blood of Fuad’s wife and daughter too…”

The official remake features an impressive cast – including an appearance by Herschell Gordon Lewis, filmed shortly before his death. Other cast members include Robert Rusler (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2) and Sophie Monk (The Hills Run Red).

Start screaming now with SCREAMBOX on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Prime Video, Roku, Fire TV, YouTube TV, Samsung, Comcast, Cox, and Screambox.com.

The post ‘Blood Feast’ – Ultra Nasty Remake of Herschell Gordon Lewis Classic Now on SCREAMBOX! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.