Fox Searchlight has released a final trailer for its upcoming horror film, Antlers. The first movie developed under Guillermo del Toro’s 2018 deal with Fox, Antlers is based on a short story titled “The Quiet Boy”, as was written by Channel Zero creator and The Act showrunner Nick Antosca. Plot-wise, the film revolves around Julia, a small-town Oregon schoolteacher (Keri Russell) who discovers one of her students, Lucas (Jeremy T. Thomas), is hiding a terrible secret that endangers them all.
Although the Antlers teaser played coy about what, exactly, that secret is, the official trailer released in October let the cat out of the bag: Lucas’ father has transformed into a cannibalistic monster that his son keeps locked away and fed with animals. However, when the creature breaks loose and kills a local, it’s not long before Julia and her brother Paul (Jesse Plemmons), their town’s sheriff, realize it all leads back to Lucas. Now, the film has received a final trailer that further hints at its monster’s full form and mythical nature.
The final trailer for Antlers dropped online today and will almost certainly hit theaters with Black Christmas this weekend. You can check it out in the space below.
As the final trailer illustrates, Antlers deals with one of del Toro’s favorite topics: the stories we tell and how they shape out understanding of the world. It’s a theme he’s explored to great effect in his previous films, including the Oscar-winning Pan’s Labyrinth and this summer’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (which he co-wrote and produced only). Problem is, unlike those movies, del Toro neither wrote nor directed Antlers, and served solely as a producer. The film was instead co-written and overseen by Crazy Heart and Hostiles helmer Scott Cooper, which explains why its trailer footage doesn’t especially look or feel like a del Toro project (its thematic similarities aside).
All the same, Cooper (so far) appears to have done a nice job of bringing Antosca’s creepy story to life on the big screen. The final trailer similarly provides some exciting glimpses of the film’s monster and hints that it may end up being a literal Wendigo from Native American folklore, as Graham Greene’s character suggests during his brief appearance here. It remains to be seen if Antlers has the narrative depth of either del Toro or Antosca’s prior work to go with its bleak mood-setting, but it certainly has the potential to be an engaging and unsettling fantasy-horror allegory. With a little luck, then, it will live up to the hype generated by its marketing campaign when it opens next spring.
Source: Fox Searchlight
- Antlers Release Date: 2021-10-29
