A special effects makeup artist witnesses a murder and goes back to his workbench with better reference. That is the premise of Wounds, and the teaser arrived this week ahead of the film’s world premiere at Screamfest on October 8.
Ron Krauss directs from a screenplay he wrote with Ryan Leeder and Joshua Courtade. Jack Kilmer plays Caleb Castle, a horror-obsessed effects artist scraping by at a collapsing studio who lands work on a low-budget vampire picture. Paris Jackson is Ginny Brown, a fellow makeup artist he meets there. Eric Roberts plays Jefferson, with Lambert Houston, Renata Notni, Richie Radichi, Rufus Dorsey and Isaac Hughes filling out the cast.
Shot Entirely on 35mm
Wounds was shot on 35mm film from end to end, and for a movie about the texture of fake blood that is the correct instinct. A story arguing that handmade gore carries something digital gore cannot should not itself be photographed on a sensor. The film is billed as a love letter to indie horror in the spirit of Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, which is a heavy set of names to invite into the room, and the 35mm decision is the one piece of evidence so far that the invitation is serious.
Where You Know Jack Kilmer From
Kilmer, the son of Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley, has one significant horror credit behind him: Lords of Chaos in 2018, where he played Pelle “Dead” Ohlin, the Mayhem singer whose death and its aftermath remain the ugliest chapter in black metal’s history. He turned up in Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Woodshock the year before that. Casting him as a man who starts treating real violence as raw material is not a subtle move, and it does not need to be.
Jackson’s genre work runs through American Horror Stories, where she played Maya in the 2021 “Rubber(Wo)man” two-parter that opened the series. Roberts needs no introduction to anyone who has rented a horror movie in the last four decades.
Krauss Is Coming From a Long Way Off
Krauss is best known for Gimme Shelter, the 2013 drama with Vanessa Hudgens and Rosario Dawson about a pregnant teenager in a New Jersey shelter, and his work has generally run toward socially minded stories. The 2003 sci-fi picture Alien Hunter is the closest thing to genre on his résumé. That makes the De Palma and Cronenberg name-checks read as a statement of intent rather than a summary of what he has already done, and it is the most interesting line on the call sheet.
Screamfest Is the Right Room for It
The premiere is set for 7:30 p.m. PT on October 8 at the TCL Chinese Theatre, on Screen 4. Screamfest’s 26th edition opens on October 6 with The Night Driver, and the festival has spent a quarter century as the place where a certain kind of picture, practical and mean and made for very little money, goes looking for a buyer.
No distributor is attached to Wounds yet. That is what a Screamfest slot is for. One note for anyone searching the title later: this is not the 2019 Wounds, Babak Anvari’s Nathan Ballingrud adaptation with Armie Hammer and Dakota Johnson that landed on Hulu.
