Writer/director Sean Ellis‘s 1800s-set horror film Eight for Silver had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival (where our own Chris Bumbray gave it a 7/10 review) and is expected to receive a U.S. theatrical release in the spring or summer of 2022, but in the meantime it’s continuing to make the festival rounds, with a screening scheduled to take place at the Camerimage Film Festival in Poland later this month. Here’s hoping we’ll be hearing a specific release date soon, because Eight for Silver sounds to be quite interesting.
Here’s the synopsis, according to Wikipedia:
In the late nineteenth century, brutal land baron Seamus Laurent slaughters a Roma clan, unleashing a curse on his family and village. In the days that follow, the townspeople are plagued by nightmares, Seamus’s son Edward goes missing, and a boy is found murdered. The locals suspect a wild animal, but visiting pathologist John McBride warns of a more sinister presence lurking in the woods.
Boyd Holbrook (The Predator), Kelly Reilly (Eden Lake), Alistair Petrie (Victor Frankenstein), Roxane Duran (The Way to Happiness), and Áine Rose Daly (the Amazon series Hanna) star.
Speaking with Variety, Ellis said Eight for Silver was “inspired by a love for horror classics”:
I wanted to go back to a genre piece. I’m a big fan of horror films. Films like Alien and The Thing had a big influence on me. … I felt it needed to be a period film – they’re more cinematic. When you do a period piece you’re creating a world. I think cinema is about visiting other worlds.”
Ellis also revealed that his film features “a kind of werewolf that audiences haven’t seen before” because
I kind of love the werewolf mythology but I hadn’t loved where it had gone. It felt like zombies had been updated and we could do many different things with that. There was just this cliché of what the werewolf was.”
In bringing the monsters to the screen, the filmmaker found “old school special effects and animatronics more powerful than CGI” and tried to do as much of the creature action in camera as possible – and he has even cut down the amount of CGI effects since the Sundance screening. This all sounds very promising to me.
Sean Ellis has previously directed Cashback, The Broken, Metro Manila, and Anthropoid.