The first images from Casket Girls, the New Orleans vampire movie, arrived out of the Toronto International Film Festival market this week, and Aura Entertainment has taken U.S. distribution rights. Deadline ran them first.
Gabrielle Union stars as Detective Shay Williams, who is investigating a child’s supernatural encounter alongside her partner Galpin (Mike Colter) when the two of them accidentally let something out from beneath a centuries-old French Quarter church. What comes up are the legendary Casket Girls. The rest of the picture is the survivors trying to outwit them before they are picked off one at a time.
Raúl Castillo, Matt Frewer and Thomas Lennon round out the cast.
The ‘Reno 911!’ Guys Wrote a Vampire Movie
Lennon did not just take a part in this one. He and Robert Ben Garant wrote the screenplay, with revisions by Keith Cooper and director Justin G. Dyck. Lennon and Garant have been a writing team since The State, and the run of credits behind them — Reno 911!, Night at the Museum, Balls of Fury — is a comedy résumé, not a horror one. The genre has a long history of rewarding that particular left turn.
Where You Know Justin G. Dyck From
Dyck directed Anything for Jackson, the 2020 Shudder picture about a pair of grieving grandparents attempting a reverse exorcism. It premiered at Fantasia and earned him a Best Director nomination at the 2021 Fangoria Chainsaw Awards, and he followed it with two episodes of Creepshow in 2023.
The interesting part is what came before that. Dyck spent most of the 2010s directing television Christmas movies. A Puppy for Christmas is a real credit on a real filmography, and the next thing he made was one of the nastiest possession films of the decade. Predicting what he does next is a losing game.
The ‘Get Out’ Company Is Behind It
Sean McKittrick and Raymond Mansfield produce through QC Entertainment, the outfit that backed Get Out, Us and BlacKkKlansman. Union executive produces alongside Edward H. Hamm Jr. and Jameson Parker.
One small note for anyone who has been tracking this since it was announced: the project went out in 2024 as The Casket Girls. It is Casket Girls now.
The Real Casket Girls
The folklore predates the movie by about three centuries. Filles à la cassette — casket girls, from the cassette, the small trunk each one carried — were young Frenchwomen recruited out of French convents and orphanages and shipped to the Louisiana colony to marry settlers. The New Orleans group landed in 1728 and was housed by the Ursuline nuns until marriages could be arranged.
The vampire version came later. The girls were said to have arrived unnaturally pale, burning in the subtropical sun. Their trunks were stored on the convent’s third floor, and when someone finally went back for them, the trunks were empty. The nuns, so the story goes, sealed those third-floor shutters with blessed nails. The shutters are still closed, and they are still on every French Quarter ghost tour.
It is one of the few genuinely American vampire legends, and the city has been handing it to visitors for three centuries. New Orleans has had its vampires on screen before, most famously through the Anne Rice adaptations, but the Casket Girls themselves have mostly stayed in the tour-guide patter. That is the gap this one is walking into.
When Can You See It
No release date has been announced. Aura holds the U.S. rights and international rights are being sold at the TIFF market, which has been busy for horror this week — the same market is where the slasher River just went to Universal and Blumhouse for north of $10 million.
