These vampires do not drink blood. They feed on despair, and a traveling carnival is the door into the world where they do it. The trailer for Vampire Carnival arrived Thursday from Aura Entertainment ahead of a theatrical release on October 7, with Jason Isaacs and Nell Verlaque at the front of it.
Verlaque plays a grieving young woman pulled toward the carnival after it turns up in her small town, and getting back out of it means going through the thing she is grieving. The MPA rated the film R for strong bloody violent content, sexual content and nudity, drug use and language. Paulina Chávez, Kieron Moore, Eoin Macken, Alicia Sanz and Cedrick Cooper fill out the cast. Verlaque carried Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving three years ago; Isaacs has been in this neighborhood since 1997, when he played D.J., the medical officer aboard the Event Horizon.
The Filardis Have Been to This Town Before
The script comes from brothers Jason Filardi and Peter Filardi, and their credits are the most interesting thing on the call sheet. Peter wrote Flatliners in 1990 and The Craft in 1996, then adapted Salem’s Lot for the 2004 miniseries with Rob Lowe and Donald Sutherland. Both brothers ran Chapelwaite, built out of Stephen King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot,” the short story that sits on the same map as the novel. That is two passes at King’s vampire town already, and now a third vampire picture that is deliberately not about biting.
Charbonier and Powell Do Not Pad
David Charbonier and Justin Powell direct, and their two features are the leanest small-scale horror of the last several years. The Boy Behind the Door put two abducted kids in one house and refused to leave it. The Djinn gave a mute boy an apartment, a grimoire and an hour. Both were made small on purpose. A traveling carnival with a full cast and an R rating is a considerably bigger sandbox than either, which is the real question hanging over Vampire Carnival: whether the discipline survives the scale.
The premise is the best thing they have to work with. Despair as food is a cleaner idea than blood, because it gives a vampire a reason to build something and wait rather than chase somebody down an alley, and a carnival is the correct building. Aura Entertainment puts it in theaters October 7, which leaves a small vampire movie most of the month to find its audience.
