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Writer/Director Preston DeFrancis and the Road to “Ruin Me”

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For Preston DeFrancis, the road to creating a fantastic horror film has been anything but conventional.  Oh sure, he was in the grad program at USC studying direction when his co-writer Trysta A. Bissett was studying screenwriting.  They wrote his thesis film together.  They wrote two feature films and a TV pilot together.  It just so happens that all four of those films were comedies or romantic comedies, however.  With that kind of background, audiences might be surprised that their first filmed feature, Ruin Me, is not only a horror film, but also one of the best of its kind I’ve seen in years.

“The thing is, with romantic comedies, unless you have huge stars in them no one cares,” DeFrancis explains.  “Trysta and I were both, independently, horror fans, and all of our friends kept telling us we should make a horror film.  We never had an idea that clicked and really worked for us, though.”

Then, they visited one of the most famous extreme haunts in the country.  I won’t name the event here, but needless to say, they were…underwhelmed.

“We had a cookout before we went and we were totally psyching ourselves out about it, coming up with scenarios,” he says.  “Don’t get me wrong, the production values were great, the sets were great, but the ideas we were pitching beforehand were much scarier.  It suddenly occurred to me that the reason was because there was always a sense of safety no matter how wild things were inside there.”

And with that, they were off to the races.

Ruin Me is a horror film with a classic feel.  DeFrancis and Bissett took some of their favorite tropes and turned them on their head creating a film that is familiar but still able to catch its audience off guard.  Not only is that a good thing, but necessary if you want your first film to stand apart and if we are to avoid the atrophy we’ve seen in our genre before.

Alex, played beautifully by the talented Marcienne Dwyer, reluctantly tags along with her boyfriend Nathan (Matt Dellapina) to a combo extreme haunt, escape room, and camping trip called “Slasher Sleep-Out”.  She doesn’t want to be there.  She doesn’t like her fellow campers, and she’s currently recovering from a serious drug problem.

Dwyer and Dellapina are surrounded by an impressive supporting cast of players including a stellar turn by John Odom as the living, breathing personification of every internet horror troll that you’ve ever seen comment online.  His name is Pitch and he walks a razor wire between eager contestant and dangerous wildcard.  Likewise, Chris Hill offers much needed comic relief as the bumbling Larry with brilliant comic timing.

And the ending?

Well, anyone who has read my work knows that I don’t do spoilers, but in DeFrancis’ own words, “We wanted to make sure our ending was 100% organic and necessary.  We wanted to craft an ending that when you see it, you realize this movie couldn’t end any other way.  We were collision course from the first moment of the film.”

Ruin Me has deservedly been picking up awards all over the country and was even the recipient of the iHorror Award for Excellence in Horror at the recent Nightmares Film Festival.  The film also picked up the Nightmare Award for Best Horror feature at that same festival.

The film is currently winding up its festival tour and seeking the right distributor to bring Ruin Me to an even broader audience.  Meanwhile DeFrancis and Bissett are already preparing to begin filming their next film which will take them back to Muskegon, MI which provided the beautiful settings for this film.

To keep up with the latest information on Ruin Me, you can follow them on Facebook and on Twitter @RuinMeMovie.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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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

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

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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.

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

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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.

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