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Inside Blumhouse’s ‘Black Box’ with Phylicia Rashad and Mamoudou Athie

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Black Box

Welcome to the Blumhouse is slated to launch this week. The eight-film anthology tackles a variety of topics centered around family, relationships, and the terrifying positive and negative wielded by each. The first two films–Black Box and The Lie–are set to drop on Amazon Prime on October 6, 2020 with two more features the following week. The back four feature-length episodes will drop in 2021.

In advance of its opening this week, Black Box stars Phylicia Rashad and Mamoudou Athie sat down with iHorror to talk about the film and the particularly dark vision it presents.

Athie plays Nolan, a single father suffering from amnesia after surviving the terrible car accident that killed his wife. His life is falling apart and he is at his wits’ end when he is convinced by a doctor (Rashad) to take part in an experimental treatment in an attempt to recover his memories.

The experiment works, but with terrifying results revealing far more questions than answers with a mind-blowing conclusion you must see for yourself.

When I began watching this film, I couldn’t help note that this was exactly the kind of role I would expect Rashad to play, but the genre was surprising, and I had to know what what drew her to Black Box.

“I liked the story,” the legendary actress explained. “I like the way it’s told. I like the humanity of the story. Also, I really like the challenge and the opportunity to research a field that I haven’t researched before. I mean, not since college studying general psych and abnormal psych, but this was on another level. This was researching from a practitioner’s point of view. Not just learning about it. So that was quite nice.”

One of the particularly interesting points of the film was the growth and development of the relationship between doctor and patient. Athie and Rashad’s chemistry onscreen is incredible, especially considering there was very little time to rehearse.

“We were thrown in like peas and carrots in a pot of soup,” Rashad said with a laugh. “We didn’t have much rehearsal because we didn’t have much time.”

“Yeah we were just really just thrown right into it,” Athie–who you might remember for the recent deep sea horror film Underwater–agreed, “but you know with an actor like Ms. Rashad it’s like you’ve been there all your life.”

It’s not only their relationship that evolves throughout the film, however. Athie’s character has an incredible arc especially as he begins to feel a darkness in the memories that are coming back to him in the healing process.

It’s an intense transformation to watch, and offered its own challenges to the actor as he was preparing for the role.

“It’s one of those things where it looks kind of awful,” the actor said. “I had a teacher that once said you can use acting as a kind of therapy sometimes and get some things out of you. This was an opportunity to do that. I was like, this is the one. It was wonderful.”

“He’s very modest,” Rashad said of Athie. “He’s really phenomenal. Al Freeman, Jr., I don’t know if you remember him or not; he was a masterful actor and a master teacher, and he would say to his students that acting is movement of thought. Move to the center of thought and put yourself in the way of the reality. He never studied with this master, yet that’s what Mamoudou does.”

Black Box premieres on October 6, 2020 on Amazon Prime. Check out the trailer below and don’t miss this excellent film!

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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