Sister Darkness: The Crow’s Alex Proyas to direct horrific fever dream of revenge

The Hollywood Reporter has broken the news that Alex Proyas, director of The Crow and Dark City, is returning to his “mainstream independents roots” with the horror thriller Sister Darkness, a project described as a “macabre female-driven fever dream of revenge and gothic terror”. A 35 million dollar budget has been secured for Sister Darkness, which will be filming in Australia from late 2022 into mid-2023.

Scripted by Proyas, Sister Darkness is set in

the U.K. in the 1930s, a time when women were marginalized and exploited. It follows the newly wed but unhappy Alice who stumbles across her doppelganger Isla, whose existence is a mystery seeped in a tale of bloody retribution against her oppressors, the hellish supernatural nightscape and a dreaded uprising against the deceitful aristocracy.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Proyas is drawing inspiration from U.K. horror movies of the 1960s and 1970s for this one, “with deep reverence to legendary films, such as The Innocents and The Legend of Hell House.” To bring the story to the screen, Proyas will be using “a fully virtual production process specially developed and refined by his VFX studio Heretic Foundation”.

Sister Darkness is the first film project under a new co-production/financing partnership between Heretic Foundation, Proyas’s IP development company Mystery Clock Cinema, and 108 Media. Proyas had this to say about it:

We are excited to be embarking with 108 Media on what we genuinely believe will be the first step of a long and fruitful journey together. Sister Darkness will be a milestone in the use of virtual production at this scale, and Heretic’s talented team will allow us to establish production values at much higher levels in this budget range than ever before thought achievable. This is the future of filmmaking.”

With his feature debut The Crow and his follow-up Dark City, Proyas was one of the most interesting filmmakers of the ’90s. I haven’t been as fond of his other movies – Garage Days; I, Robot; Knowing; Gods of Egypt – but I look forward to seeing what he does with Sister Darkness.

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