Walt Disney Studios Motion PicturesNobody does horror quite like Guillermo Del Toro, who has a way of getting under your skin in an indelible way.
The Mexican filmmaker has a vivid eye for the fantastical, with his distinctly dreamlike breed of monsters being all at once beautiful, grotesque and captivating.
Moreover, Del Toro, 55, has a gift for using the supernatural to convey real-world horror. The brutality of the Spanish Civil War brews beneath the mythology of Pan’s Labyrinth, while the pang of childhood trauma resonates within every scene of The Orphanage.
You can watch the official trailer for Del Toro’s new movie Antlers yourself below:
Now the trailer for new Del Toro-produced movie Antlers has dropped, and it’s already stirring up that familiar thrill of dread among long-time fans of his work.
Del Toro won’t be in the director’s chair for this one, but director Scott Cooper (Hostiles) very much appears to have taken a leaf out of Del Toro’s dark book of fairy tales.
Speaking with Collider in April, Cooper said:
[Guillermo] said I’ve obviously never seen you direct a horror film, but there’s a lot of horrific moments in your movies, so I’m more interested in someone who doesn’t work in that genre to step into it.
Which is I guess a bit like Friedkin in a sense, having not directing in that genre before he took on The Exorcist.
[Guillermo is] fantastic and so supportive and wildly imaginative, so it’s really been a great collaboration. I’m very fortunate that he asked me to do this.
Walt Disney Studios Motion PicturesThe trailer itself is gristly and gorgeous; full of the sort of feral, woodland imagery Del Toro typically revels in. We see children with haunted eyes and murky corridors trailed with blood; spilled guts and impossibly contorted bodies.
And – inevitably – there is a creature; a growling, gigantic being whose presence is felt with every nervous glance, every misty, ethereal frame.
The film hasn’t even been released yet, but those who’ve seen the trailer are already sharing a shudder at the bloodthirsty beast lurking at the heart of the story.
One Twitter user has described the trailer as being ‘so damn good’, while another said it had ‘awesome creepy vibes’. And I must say I share their enthusiasm.
Walt Disney Studios Motion PicturesMany have suggested the monster could well be a Wendigo, an man-eating creature from Algonquian Native American folklore with sharp claws, oversized eyes and – of course – antlers.
As written in Legends of the Nahanni Valley, Native author and ethnographer Basil H. Johnston once gave the following eerie description of the Wendigo:
The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tightly over its bones. With its bones pushing out over its skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into the sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave.
What lips it had were tattered and bloody… Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.
The Wendigo is said to be a ravenous beast, always on the look-out for its next human meal. And its appetite for flesh is never quite sated.
Walt Disney Studios Motion PicturesAccording to the IMDb page for Antlers:
A small-town Oregon teacher and her brother, the local sheriff, become entwined with a young student harboring a dangerous secret with frightening consequences.
The narrative draws from the short story The Quiet Boy by Nick Antosca, an American novelist and screenwriter who is working on the screenplay alongside Cooper and C. Henry Chaisson.
Starring Keri Russell, Jeremy T. Thomas and Jesse Plemons, Antlers looks set to be a strikingly atmospheric movie; full of secrets and folklore. If only it was out in time for Halloween…
Antlers is set to be released April 17, 2020.
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Jules studied English Literature with Creative Writing at Lancaster University before earning her masters in International Relations at Leiden University in The Netherlands (Hoi!). She then trained as a journalist through News Associates in Manchester. Jules has previously worked as a mental health blogger, copywriter and freelancer for various publications.