Two actors who have spent most of their working lives running from something just spent a whole movie deciding where the camera goes. Danielle Harris and Scout Taylor-Compton co-directed Last Chance Motel, produced it through their own company, share the story credit, and play the newlyweds at the center of it. The Horror Collective has released the trailer ahead of a Digital release on October 6.
The reunion is the part horror people will clock first. Harris and Taylor-Compton both carry Halloween on their permanent record, and they shared a screen there. Getting them behind the camera together on a slasher is a different proposition than getting them in front of one. Harris has said the genre is missing a tight, mean, character-driven slasher that does not apologize for being horror, and Taylor-Compton has framed the project as everything the two of them had to give as producers, directors and performers. That is the sort of thing everyone says. The difference here is that both of them have watched slashers get built from inside the frame since they were kids, which tends to teach you what the form actually needs.
What the trailer is selling
A couple books a secluded motel in the Nevada desert for their wedding. The family running the place has secrets, and none of them are the kind you survive politely. The footage is all neon, empty highway and practical gore, and it plays less like the psychological thriller the marketing invokes and more like a straight old-school body-count picture that likes its villains theatrical. Brandon Slagle wrote the screenplay from a story by the two directors. It runs 87 minutes and it is rated R, which is a promising ratio.
The cast is the real argument
Heather Langenkamp plays the motel’s unsettlingly cheerful proprietor. Monica Keena and Robert Allen Mukes are in the family business. Sierra McCormick, Shane West and Zachary Roozen fill out the guest list. Line them up and you have Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy vs. Jason and House of 1000 Corpses sharing one motel parking lot, which is either a gimmick or a genuine handoff between generations depending on how the movie treats them.
It already played Panic Fest this spring, so it exists and people have seen it. Everyone else gets it October 6 on Digital from The Horror Collective.
So: are you interested in watching Harris and Taylor-Compton run a slasher from the other side of the camera?
