News

Writer/Director William McGregor Takes Us Inside the World of ‘Gwen’

Published

5 years ago

August 14, 2019

For William McGregor, the story of Gwen, his new slow-burn thriller began with a student film he made called Who’s Afraid of the Water Sprite? ten years ago.

The writer and director had long been fascinated by folklore and fairy tales and he was encouraged by a colleague to explore the region of North Wales along with its folklore, mythology, and history.

When the time was right, that’s exactly what he did.

“I traveled up to North Wales and stayed in a little cottage there and just explored the landscape and read about the history of the space,” McGregor told iHorror in a recent interview. “The fairy tale that I made as a student film very much grew into this film that used the folklore as the inspiration behind it rather than being a fairy tale itself.”

That story became Gwen, a film about a young woman (Eleanor Worthington-Cox) who lives on an isolated farm with her mother Elen (Maxine Peake) and her younger sister Mari (Jodie Innes).

Life is difficult for the three, and becomes even more challenging as Elen falls ill and the mining company who wants their land begins to move against them, firing up their fellow villager’s suspicions.

It’s a film that uses dread as its underscoring emotion and McGregor navigates that perilous landscape beautifully.

“I think that’s been why horror has been most powerful to me and I think that’s why I’ve always liked folklore and horror stories about witchcraft,” he said. “Often it’s just that someone has a different belief than you and you’re afraid of them. I think that’s when horror is most interesting is when the horror is real. It can be visualized by something fantastic or supernatural but it’s representative of a true fear we all have.”

McGregor also recognizes the real boon he had in the cast that was assembled for the film.

Worthington-Cox at only 16 years old had already received a BAFTA nomination for her work in The Enfield Haunting which told the story of a girl possessed by a dark spirit in the home she shared with her mother and siblings. She’s an actress of surprising depth who really understood the who Gwen was and what the film was about.

“And Maxine is an actress that I was a huge fan of,” he explained. “She’s also someone who has an interest in folk tales and folk stories as well as having a slight anti-capitalist perspective and that really worked for the film. It was a lot of like-minded people working together really.”

In the film, the mining company is in control of everything in the village and it was important to McGregor to show how that kind of power can be abusive and corrupting to everything that it touches.

In fact, not even the church was beyond the company’s control and became another tool to use against Gwen and her family.

“If you’re outside of that system, you’re going to be abused,” McGregor pointed out. “We have these independent women who are living alone and maybe one of them has beliefs that are different and more reliant on the land and pagan beliefs. They’re going to be feared and the town was going to try to remove them.”

In truth, audiences are not entirely sure what is actually happening to this family until the final moments of the film, and by that time, McGregor firmly has you in his grasp.

“I think if you’re making a film about dread and a fear of what you don’t understand, it has to be about atmosphere and surviving in that world,” he said. “If you can be disciplined as a filmmaker, you can get inside people’s heads even more.”

McGregor obviously has that discipline, and Gwen is a testament to his dedication as a storyteller and filmmaker.

Gwen will be available in theaters and on demand this Friday, August 16, 2019. Check out the trailer below!

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Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

7 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

9 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

11 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.