The trailer has arrived for Damon Lindelof and Blumhouse’s action-horror movie, The Hunt. In the ten years since Jason Blum’s production company, Blumhouse, transitioned to a low-budget filmmaking model in 2009, they’ve launched several popular franchises and even won some Oscars for movies like Whiplash, Get Out, and BlacKkKlansman. As a result, they’re currently one of the premier destinations for storytellers wanting to make high-concept films, especially those of the horror and/or thriller variety.
Case in point: the studio’s latest offering, The Hunt, is a thriller written by Damon Lindelof and Nick Cuse and directed by Craig Zobel (Compliance, Z for Zachariah), following their previous collaboration on HBO’s The Leftovers. The movie follows a group of twelve people who wake up in a clearing - with no idea where they are or how they got there - only to find themselves being hunted by a collection of wealthy “elites”… that is, until one of them (GLOW’s Betty Gilpin) turns the tables on her would-be killers. Now, the film’s marketing is stepping things up a notch.
Universal and Blumhouse released The Hunt trailer online today, following its premiere in theaters with Crawl a couple weeks back. You can check it out in the space below, followed by the movie’s teaser poster (which dropped around the same time that the trailer started playing on the big screen).
Both the premise and trailer for The Hunt have shades of Adam Wingard’s You’re Next (a thriller that similarly subverts genre expectations by making its female lead an active threat to the villains), as well as more recent politically charged action-horror movies like Blumhouse’s own The Purge and its various sequels. Of course, the idea of cruel, rich people hunting working-class types for sport has been around in Hollywood for a long time already, going back to 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game. Still, The Hunt appears to be tapping into distinctly modern concerns about class tensions and economic disparity in the U.S. today. Its setup also brings Lindelof and Zobel’s previous work to mind, in the sense that it touches upon darker aspects of both human psychology and behavior.
Gilpin is joined here by a cast that includes Emma Roberts (American Horror Story), Ike Barinholtz (The Mindy Project), Glenn Howerton (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia), and Oscar-winner Hilary Swank as the woman responsible for organizing “The Hunt”. While the trailer spoils a few deaths that - presumably - take place early on in the film, it otherwise does a good job of maintaining the mystery around Swank’s character and her reasons for staging this grotesque “game” in the first place. Altogether, The Hunt seems like an interesting social horror-thriller and one to watch out for this fall.
Source: Universal Pictures
- The Hunt Release Date: 2020-03-13
