News

INTERVIEW: Keegan Connor Tracy on the Horrors of ‘Z’

Published

4 years ago

August 27, 2020

Keegan Connor Tracy found something irresistible in Z, a horror film co-written by Brandon Christensen (Still/Born) and Colin Minihan (Grave Encounters) with Christensen also directing, and she sat down this week to discuss the film with iHorror in advance of its release on DVD on September 1, 2020.

She was at home when she got the call from her agent about the film telling her there was no money involved, but she needed to read the script.

“Sometimes when I get things something will pique my interest and other things won’t that might appeal to something else,” she explained. “I have to see something in it, you know, if I was going to be away from my kids for a month and do it for no money. I saw some place that I could go as an actor that was really going to challenge me. I saw a psychological journey that this woman was going to go on and I wanted to challenge myself. So, I was in.”

That psychological journey was a natural fit for the actress who has a degree in psychology, and as she dug into the script, she had to set aside the more fantastical aspects of the film and look at the character she was playing and ground the role in something from the real world.

Z tells the story of a woman and her husband whose lives are turned upside down when their son’s imaginary friend is suddenly terrifyingly real. More than that, there is a real metaphor here not only for mental illness but also in generational, hereditary mental illness and how it affects entire families.

“While I’m the first person to call up magic in everything I write and the work that I’ve done as an actor, I have to have a basis for why she was doing the things that she did,” Tracy pointed out. “For me, I came up with schizophrenia based on the research that I’ve done. It is sometimes hereditary so it made a lot of sense to me. Sometimes I would say to Brandon, ‘Okay, wait, is Z real or not? Okay, it doesn’t matter.’ Even if he’s not real but she thinks he’s real, it might as well be real and how do I ground that?”

The realness of her performance in the film and the grounding she brings to it makes the scares all the more intense as Z becomes more and more a menace in the family’s lives, and Tracy said she had a wonderful time observing audiences watch the film and react to those elements when it was making its way through various festivals last year.

It was one of the first times she had experienced the festival circuit, and certainly the first time she had attended horror genre festivals despite her appearance in numerous genre films.

“Sitting in the audience and watching them experience that build up of tension and then the jump scare where they would laugh and scream,” she said. “The way that people would laugh afterward. I realized that’s what they were after, right? They want that release after. Kind of like when you get off the roller coaster and you’re like laughing and in a great mood even though you wanted to pee your pants while you were on it. It’s that part that makes you say, that was great.”

There are plenty of screams to be found in Z. The film has been available on Shudder previously but non-subscribers will have their chance to bring the terror home September 1, 2020 when the film hits VOD and physical media.

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Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

5 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

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.

“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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Movies

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

Published

7 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

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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News

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

Published

9 hours ago

April 26, 2024

Timothy Rawles

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.