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Review: Women in Horror Film Festival

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Filmmakers from around the globe converged on Peachtree City, Georgia this weekend to celebrate the second annual Women in Horror Film Festival.

After an opening night VIP party and their official “Dead Carpet” ceremonies, screenwriters, directors, and fans filled the auditorium at the Crowne Plaza hotel to settle into the first day’s festivities.

Co-founders Samantha Kolesnik and Vanessa Ionta Wright put together a fantastic roster of unforgettable films and panels designed to entertain, terrify, and in many cases, provide fodder for deeper discussions about gender, race, sexuality, and so much more.

In fact, one of the crowning achievements of the Women in Horror Film Festival was that discussion often spilled out of the theater and into the hallways, and it was fascinating to watch filmmakers become fans of other filmmakers and  the seeds of future partnerships and collaborations planted.

It would be impossible to review every single film and its effect, but certain moments stand out in my memory…

Young Farrah Martin, not yet a teenager, representing the film Blood Runs Down, with an effervescent grace and a wide-eyed untainted joy that people loved her work in the haunting film.

A room full of people laughed until tears ran down their faces at Brendan Pollecutt’s revenge-horror-comedy, Keloid, when his leading lady Libby (Taylor Cathcart) decided to take back everything she’d given her ex-fiance.

The laughter continued as Sarah K. Reimers showed us what could happen if a dog was bitten by a werewolf and the effects of that transformation.

That hysterical laughter turned to utterances of “hell yeah” and “damn right” as Laura Vail’s character, Jo, in What Metal Girls are Into tells a man “You are not entitled to our attention.”

An entire audience sat enraptured at the almost painful beauty of an entire block of science fictions films, a new addition at WIHFF this year, that challenged notions of what it meant to be a woman or man, what it means to fight even when you no longer feel you can, and how we must evolve and change in order to survive as a species.

A panel on diversity and visiblity spoke about the inherent need for equal representation in filmmaking to a crowded room where no eyes were rolled and no dismissive attitudes pervaded.

But even more palpable as the weekend grew was the feeling of belonging and acceptance that each and every participant felt. It was a privilege to feel completely safe to be one’s self in this carefully cultivated environment where women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, and straight male allies could share their stories with each other and find common ground.

It’s a feeling that can be sorely lacking at many festivals and conventions, and I hope that they’re paying attention to what Sam, Vanessa, and the entire crew at the Women in Horror Film Festival are doing..

Submissions are already open on FilmFreeway for next year’s Women in Horror Film Festival and I cannot encourage female genre filmmakers enough to enter their work so that you too can experience everything that this one of a kind festival has to offer.

The Winners of this year’s Lizzie Awards at the Women in Horror Film Festival

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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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