Keri Russell plays a teacher who discovers one of her students is hiding a terrifying secret in the trailer for Scott Cooper's horror movie Antlers. This is the first time the acclaimed storyteller has tried his hand at the horror genre, having previously worked on films like the musician drama Crazy Heart and crime biography Black Mass. However, he's joined behind the camera by a pair of experts in the field here - namely, Channel Zero creator Nick Antosca and Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, who served as a cowriter and producer, respectively.
The Antlers teaser trailer dropped back in August and provided a taste of the film's creepy atmosphere and dark fairy tale elements, but without spoiling too much (or anything, really) about the plot in the process. Fortunately, with some months to go before the movie hits theaters, its marketing campaign continues to play things close to the chest and keep a fairly tight lid on the story's biggest twists.
Today, Fox Searchlight released a full-length trailer for Antlers, ahead of its premiere in theaters this weekend (where it will presumably screen with STX's new horror film, Countdown). You can check it out in the space below.
Story-wise, Antlers revolves around Julia Meadows (Keri Russell), a small-town Oregon elementary school teacher who comes to realize that one of her students, Lucas Weaver (Jeremy T. Thomas), is harboring a pretty horrifying secret - namely, his "dad" is a monster, as the movie's new trailer reveals. It remains to be seen if the monster glimpsed here (a creature that Lucas keeps fed and chained up, until it escapes) is the boy's literal father transformed or something else, but the teaser has already provided a few hints in that regard. Specifically, the preview included voiceover of Lucas reading a story about a family of three bears in which, one day, the "little bear" comes home and finds his parents are "different". So, unless the marketing is deliberately misleading everyone, it seems Lucas' father wasn't always like this.
By now, del Toro's projects are well-known for being sympathetic in their way they portray literal monsters (see The Shape of Water or last August's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, which he cowrote), so there's a reasonable chance that Lucas' "dad" will be more than just a mindless killing machine in Antlers. Cooper is similarly known for exploring themes about family and the violent side of human nature in his films, which means he's working comfortably in his wheelhouse here, despite his lack of experience with the horror genre. All in all, Antlers continues to intrigue with its marketing and seems like one to keep an eye out for next year.
Antlers doesn't have a firm release date yet, but is expected to arrive in early 2020.
Source: Fox Searchlight