The trailer for writer/director Trey Edward Shults' upcoming psychological horror film IT COMES AT NIGHT managed to reveal nothing about the story, and even the official synopsis plays things close to the vest:
A man learns that the evil stalking his family home may be only a prelude to horrors that come from within.
Secure within a desolate home as an unnatural threat terrorizes the world, the tenuous domestic order he has established with his wife and son is put to the ultimate test with the arrival of a desperate young family seeking refuge.
Despite the best intentions of both families, paranoia and mistrust boil over as the horrors outside creep ever-closer, awakening something hidden and monstrous within him as he learns that the protection of his family comes at the cost of his soul.
A new article on the Entertainment Weekly website includes not only a pair of exclusive new images, which can be seen below, but also provides a synopsis with a few extra details:
A father (Joel Edgerton), mother (Selma’s Carmen Ejogo), and their teenage son (The Birth of a Nation’s Kelvin Harrison Jr.) are attempting to survive a civilization-destroying pandemic in a remote house in the woods. So when an intruder (Christopher Abbott) arrives, pleading for help, they are forced to choose between kindness and potential infection. And this is one killer sickness.
The article goes on to delve a little further into the pandemic side of the story, revealing that an early scene deals with the deteriorating condition of Ejogo's character's father, who has caught the mysterious virus. The effect this virus has on the man can be seen in one of the new images – boils, blackened veins, demon-like solid black eyes. Makeup department head Sasha Grossman and special effects makeup artist Jessie Eden studied pictures of real plague victims while deciding what to make the film's plague victims look like, and those black eyes were added in to make things extra scary.
Shults also reveals that the making of IT COMES AT NIGHT is rooted in real tragedy, as the early scenes were written in the aftermath of his own father's death.
Anyone reading this article likely already loves the horror genre, but star Joel Edgerton provides a quote in the EW write-up in which he says that he hopes IT COMES AT NIGHT will play not just to horror fans but also to viewers who might look down on horror:
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."
We'll find out what sort of reception IT COMES AT NIGHT will get, and whether or not it will help improve the genre's reputation, when the film is released on June 9th.