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INTERVIEW: William Ragsdale Talks ‘When We Dance the Music Dies’

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When We Dance the Music Dies is a bit of a departure for William Ragsdale. The actor first rose to fame in 1985 when he played Charley Brewster, a teenager who discovers his next door neighbor is a vampire, in Fright Night.

Since that time, the actor has worked steadily criss-crossing genre lines on stage, screen and television, but in all that time he’s never quite done anything like this film.

Based loosely on the mystery surrounding the disappearance of Elisa Lam mixed with a heavy dose of urban legend, When We Dance the Music Dies focuses on a father’s journey into a strange and unfamiliar landscape as he tries to discover what happened the night that his daughter disappeared.

The film was written and directed by Anthony de Lioncourt (The Protokon), and emerges laden with psychedelic imagery, kaleidoscopic twists and turns, and an ambiguous ending that will leaving you guessing.

In advance of the film’s release, William Ragsdale sat down with iHorror to chat about his experiences working on the film and what drew him to the material.

“My agent sent me a breakdown of the script and I thought, ‘Oh, well, this is interesting,'” Ragsdale explained. “It was such a weird, out-of-the-box kind of piece. I went in to read for it and really connected with them and we ended up being able to make it together. It’s so different from a lot of things that I’ve done but that was just another really good reason to do it.”

Ragsdale was familiar with the baffling disappearance of Lam and he was intrigued by the way that de Lioncourt used that story as a jumping off place to explore something that went beyond what could be explained.

He pointed to the fact that elevators were vulnerable places to begin with. We put ourselves in these tiny boxes suspended by cables and just assume that they will take us where we want to go. Adding a sinister layer on top of that set the actor’s imagination on fire and he was curious to work with de Lioncourt to bring the role to life.

“I suppose there were some similarities to Fright Night and some of the other things I’ve done,” Ragsdale admitted. “The thing that works about it is playing the role as such a real, average person who finds themselves thrust into this unimaginable experience. That’s where the energy for the piece comes from really.”

When it came time to see the finished product, Ragsdale says he was knocked out by the visuals. He had known that de Lioncourt was influenced by some of the pulpy moves from the 70s as well as the supernatural elements of Japanese horror, but seeing them play out was something different entirely.

“I was impressed by it,” the actor said. “I’m a Kubrick fan and there were elements that reminded me of 2001. So much of what goes on today [in film], you know what’s coming next. This, even though I had done the film, the visuals he came up with and these interlude visualizations kind of heightened it for me. It’s surrealism. There’s a bit of Dali in there. It sort of feels like you have to acknowledge letting go of it and see where it will take you.”

Having seen the film, I happen to agree. The visuals and the storytelling will keep you guessing right up to the film’s open ending which Ragsdale said also intrigued him.

“You’re left with all these questions,” he said. “What was this? Where did she go? How did this happen? It’s kind of a mystery. I enjoyed that. I don’t know that I know the answer to it.”

Check out the trailer for When We Dance the Music Dies below!

When We Dance The Music Dies (teaser trailer 1) from s73w1th on Vimeo.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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