Krisha, Trey Edward Shults’ blistering directorial debut about one family reunion gone horribly wrong, effectively turned heads and raised eyebrows in 2015 among horror aficionados and moviegoers at large, so it’s small wonder why there’s a hushed excitement swirling around his next creative venture, It Comes At Night.
A psychological thriller by name and nature, Shults’ starry horror pic takes the likes of Joel Edgerton, Riley Keough (The Girlfriend Experience) and Carmen Ejogo and places them in an old, backwoods house in the middle of nowhere. It’s the ideal setting for a retirement home, what with the quaint woodland and its relaxing ambiance, but there’s a dark, primordial horror simmering beneath this natural beauty. Soon after Edgerton and Co. swing their doors open to welcome a stranger (Christopher Abbott) into the house, strange, inexplicable events begin to occur under its patchwork roof, and the original trailer below gives you some indication of the supernatural (?) thrills and spills lying in wait.
Per EW, Joel Edgerton offered up some context on It Comes At Night, including why he believes horror films “can be incredibly intelligent” when handled correctly.
Let’s be honest, horror movies have a bad rap. It’s up to movies like Get Out and It Follows — and this movie, I hope — to [remove] the stigma of what I refer to as the ‘blood porn’ nature of horror. Horror films can be incredibly intelligent.
Get Out, with its stellar box office haul of $182 million, is a difficult act to follow, but it’s exciting to hear Trey Edward Shults’ flick be compared to one of 2017’s early sleeper hits. Here, the director traces the genesis of It Comes At Night back to a deeply personal experience: The cancer-related death of his father.
It was a hugely traumatic, life-changing moment in my life. I started writing the opening scene and then this whole fictional story burst out of that.
It Comes At Night, apparently, so batten down the hatches in preparation for a spooky ride. Trey Edward Shults’ low-key thriller will be with us on June 9th.
