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‘Primal Screen’ Horror Documentary Explores the Roots of Our Fear

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Rodney Ascher – acclaimed director of horror documentaries The Nightmare and Room 237 – has teamed up with Shudder to bring original programming to the horror-centric streaming service. His newest documentary, Primal Screen, examines our deepest fears and their roots in our childhood pop culture consumption.

I’m sure you can all remember the first time you saw an image that truly scared you. Something that you might have unwittingly caught on television that subsequently scarred you for life.

Primal Screen – which aired June 8th – focuses on the specific fear of ventriloquist dummies and porcelain dolls. Interviews with unseen subjects reveal the root of their anxious obsession – the televised trailer for 1978’s Magic – and how particular elements of the trailer created the perfect storm of terror in their young minds.

Here’s the official description:

Why are we simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the things that scare us the most? Primal Screen attempts to understand. In this first Shudder Original, acclaimed filmmaker Rodney Ascher (Room 327The Nightmare) explores the pop culture that left dark impressions on us as children. Ascher asks real people to look back at pop-culture artifacts that traumatized them in their youth and describe the effect they had on their lives. A singular hybrid of documentary and horror, it’s time to stare into the PRIMAL SCREEN.

The 28-minute documentary is listed as a series on IMDb, however, reports are mixed on if it’s actually a series or a single short documentary. I, for one, certainly hope there are more episodes to follow. It’s a fascinating topic and I imagine that there must be a lot of childhood fears that episodes could focus on. Clowns! Bugs! The crushing weight of our own mortality! You know, things like that.

You can watch Primal Screen on Shudder now and check out the poster and trailer below.

 

Unfamiliar with Rodney Ascher’s work? Check out this trailer for The Nightmare

 

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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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