Connect with us

News

Corey Mayne’s ‘Willa’ is a Haunting, Atmospheric Stephen King Adaptation

Published

on

Willa short film

Willa, a short film based on a Stephen King story by the same name, is preparing to make its way onto the festival circuit, and it’s a chilling, romantic ghost story, you definitely need to see.

Originally published in Playboy in 2006, Willa was later included in King’s Just After Sunset collection. In the story, a young man and his friends are stuck in a train station waiting on a train to take them home. The man can’t find his fiance, Willa, and so he sets out to look for her, only to discover that everyone at the station including himself and his fiance all died in a train crash decades before.

Mayne’s adaptation moves the action to the moment where everything went wrong, changing a few elements to create a haunting ghost story that is both beautiful to look at and heartbreaking to experience.

“I love the classic ghost-story feel of it paired with an emotional component that you don’t see very often in horror,” Mayne told iHorror. “It was a story that focused on character and relationships, and the horror comes from a more existential fear of random chaos in the world that can happen to any of us at any time that’s beyond our control. It was believable to me that something really terrible and sudden could happen to this train full of people without them ever even realizing.”

In the film, Kelsi Mayne (Sin City ER) stars as Willa opposite Adrian Jaworski (The Cult) as David. The couple, along with two friends/bandmates Tiffany (Madison Seguin) and Henry (Nick Szeman), are headed to their first televised gig. As they celebrate on the train, an ring box falls out of David’s bag and a shocked Willa excuses herself to go to the bathroom.

The mood suddenly changes throughout the entire train car. For some reason, they are not moving and while the service attendant tries to keep everyone calm, there is a foreboding feeling that something is not quite right.

Adrian Jaworski as David in Willa (Photo via Formido Films, Inc.)

Mayne and his co-screenwriter Barbara Szeman give the story just the right amount of details, coating the entire production with a layer of suspense just thick enough to keep the audience guessing what might happen next.

It also doesn’t hurt that Mayne is a VFX artist as well as a director. He, along with Greg Zdunek and Michael Innanen, use just the right amount of practical and digital effects to make the world believable without becoming heavy-handed in the process.

This is especially well-done in the contrast between the vibrant, sun-filled train car as the band celebrates their upcoming gig and the shadowy, foggy night filled with shadowy creatures that David steps out into when looking for Willa.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the film’s score, as well. Composer Ho Ling Tang created a musical soundscape that is rich, romantic, with a couple of pointed edges that lends itself well to the storytelling of Willa without ever becoming obtrusive.

Even if you’ve read the story, you don’t know the ending to Willa.

Mayne and his crew are currently waiting for responses from festivals. To keep up with all the latest news you can visit their official website, and follow them on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter @WillaMovie!

Check out the trailer below and look for Willa at a festival near you!

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Click to comment

You must be logged in to post a comment Login

Leave a Reply

Movies

‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

Published

on

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

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Continue Reading

Movies

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

Published

on

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.

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Continue Reading

News

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

Published

on

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.

'Civil War' Review: Is It Worth Watching?

Continue Reading