The latest creepy child thriller from Dark Castle
As the Warner Bros. presentation at the New York Comic-Con came to an end, those who stuck around got a special preview of Dark Castle’s summer horror flick Orphan, starring Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard. Directed by Jaume Collet-Sera who helmed Joel Silver’s remake of House of Wax a few years ago, it’s apparently based on a Japanese manga comic, though it has a very familiar look and feel that horror fans should be able to appreciate and embrace, being in the “creepy kid” horror subgenre.
The trailer shown at the presentation opens with parents Kate and John (Farmiga and Sarsgaard) adopting a nine-year-old girl named Esther from an orphanage, after which we see this strange girl–who looks and dresses like Wednesday Adamsâ¦not that there’s anything wrong with that–being picked on by classmates once she’s put into school. This doesn’t go well with her and we see her in the bathroom stall throwing a huge tantrum, screaming, pounding against the walls and carrying on, as Kate starts to think there’s something wrong with the girl they adopted. (Ya think?) We then start seeing various classmates of Esther meeting horrible fates–falling from tall heights, being hit by cars–all of which seem to point out to the creepy girl. (The title cards seem to confirm that “there’s something wrong with Esther” in case the viewer isn’t sure.) Throughout the trailer, her foster parents are talking about the girl’s problems, and they learn from the head of the orphanage that there might be more to this girl than they were informed. Apparently, she just showed up one night at the orphanage and the discussion alludes to her possibly being the subject of scientific experiments. That would certainly be an interesting twist on the creepy child thriller if so, because normally these things tend to veer more towards the supernatural for explanation. The trailer ends with Sarsgaard approaching a bed with a figure under the sheets, him asking, “Esther? Esther?” and it ends with him pulling away the sheet as something jumps out for the big end scare.
Interestingly, this will be Farmiga’s second creepy kid thriller after 2007’s Joshua–third if you include that creepy Nazi kid from The Boy in the Striped Pajamas–though this one looks to be more in the mode of The Omen remake with a similar body count. One can probably expect this trailer to debut with Friday the 13th next week, and here’s hoping Dark Castle and Warner Bros. will go for the R-rating, so we don’t have a lot of watered-down kills. (The fact that a lot of the victims seem to be children might necessitate an R-rating regardless.)
Orphan is scheduled to open July 24.
Source: Edward Douglas
