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It's about to screen during the After Dark Horrorfest, but before it does, a creepy trailer for Slaughter has hit the net and you can check it out above. Not to be confused with this Slaughter (which is, rumor has it, on hold), the film focuses on two girls who befriend each other. The one has an abusive ex, so she moves to her new friend's family farm. Unfortunately, one horror is traded for another.

The film is a mixture of the premise of how well we know our roommates and their families, and the modern-day interpretation of a true story that happened a century ago. What story that is, however, is under wraps -- supposedly to avoid spoiling the film. It looks pretty cool, and it's certainly a mystery to solve. Which true story is it!? Gah ... The curiosity! They took exactly the right angle to lure me in -- my obsession to read up on the true stories behind truth-based films. But what about you?

If you're itching to find out, the film premieres at the fest on January 9th.

Since they like to release eight indie-style or foreign horror films on one specific day each year, I'm always a little bit fascinated by the latest goings-on at After Dark. The fact that I don't actually like the majority of their films is sort of beside the point. Being a hardcore fan gives you the right to be critical, of course, but it also means you should always give a new flick a fair break. And the AD gang has given us access to some half-decent titles, and so I opt to focus on the good (Borderland, The Gravedancers, Frontier(s)) instead of the bad -- which is just about everything else. Although your mileage may vary.

And even though the next infusion of After Darkness won't arrive until January, I'm happy to note that they're putting together a rather solid slate. They'd already snagged a cool British chiller called The Broken (which I saw at Sundance ... and enjoyed) and a low-key occult thriller called From Within (which I saw at Tribeca ... and didn't), but now comes word on two new additions: The first one is also a Tribeca title, and it's an Aussie horror tale called Dying Breed. (Here's my review. I nagged Tim to play it at Fantastic Fest, but it ended up in the "very close but no cigar" bin.) The second is an American flick called Autopsy, which comes from screenwriter / first-time director Adam Gierasch (Toolbox Murders, Mother of Tears), and while I haven't seen this one yet, I've heard some quiet-yet-positive rumblings from my sources in the L.A. horror-geek scene.

The Broken, From Within, Dying Breed, and Autopsy will join Slaughter (aka Faithless), Perkins' 14, and The Butterfly Effect: Revelation when After Dark kick-starts on January 9. The eighth title has yet to be announced. Could it be this movie?

[Thanks to BD.com]

When the After Dark Horrorfest popped up in November of 2006, I caught about half of the offered 8 Films to Die For, despite a transparently sensationalized campaign of just how horrendously extreme these titles must've been to get such a specialized release. My experiences ranged from not bad (The Abandoned and The Gravedancers) to pretty dreadful (Penny Dreadful), but between the ratio of enjoyment that year and the yanking of actually-possibly-horrific Frontier(s) the next, I just passed entirely in 2007.

One might assume that, in an effort to meet me halfway, the Horrorfest has skipped out on itself this year, but while this is technically true, it's merely shuffled away into the doldrums of this coming January 2-9 instead. Scott Weinberg had already pointed out that The Broken and The Butterfly Effect 3 were among this year's (next year's?) selected batch of titles, and now The Hollywood Reporter reports that From Within -- about a rash of suicides in a small town -- and three After Dark productions: the aforementioned Effect, Slaughter, and Perkins' 14.

That leaves three more titles in the running. Any guesses? Just remember now: they can't be too scary.

It's time to give up your dreams of Dominique Swain and snuff films -- The Hollywood Reporter has posted the cast list of the upcoming horror film Slaughter, and Ms. Swain is no longer in the picture. They say she's having scheduling conflicts, which I presume is due to her role in another heart-warming tale called Trance. Instead, Erica Leerhsen (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) has taken over her role, and will be joined by Shawnee Smith (Amanda from the Saw series), AnnaLynne McCord (Day of the Dead), Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa (Elektra), Eugenia Yuan (The Eye 2), Karl Yune (Memoirs of a Geisha), and Jonathon Trent (Alone with Her).

Basically, these girls (Smith, Leerhsen, McCord) are aspiring actresses who land some Japanese work. Instead of traversing the ocean to get one step closer to superstardom, they find themselves cast in a snuff film. I wonder if they realize this from the get-go, or are running around, thinking that all of their dangerous props are fake until one of them slices and dices? Tagawa is playing the director, Yuan is playing the producer, Yune is the male co-star, and Trent is playing the boyfriend of McCord's character. The film is based on a Slamdance Horror Screenplay Competition script by Nathan Brookes and Bobby Lee Darby, with Víctor García taking up the directorial duties. IMDb says production has already started, and I would hope so, it they want to keep their January 20 release date. Talk about a quick turn-around!

Rogue

I don't care how many times they push it back, or how much potential for hackneyed disaster there is in a film about a killer crocodile -- I'm looking forward to Rogue, mostly because there was a lot that impressed me about Greg Mclean's debut film, 2005's Wolf Creek. For one thing, it was bold enough to defy several horror cliches, such as foreshadowing dread in the early scenes -- the first thirty minutes of Wolf Creek could be part of an Aussie road drip dramedy, with three aimless kids taking their rickety car way too far into unsafe areas of the Outback. It's also a film that's completely unrelenting in the psychic trauma it wants to inflict on the audience. By the time the slaughtering starts, we know these characters -- we care about them. Frankly, Mclean seems like he'd be completely bored with making a standard slasher/monster film with paper-thin characters. Therefore, I'm going to be first in line for his killer croc movie, and wait for my enthusiasm to blow up in my face.

Friday the 13th

I have no idea if this will get to theaters by late 2008, but I know that Platinum Dunes does have the gears grinding, so it's a possibility. In fact, a little birdie recently told me something hilarious -- Corey Feldman went in and pitched himself as the star of this thing. For those who don't remember, Feldman played Vorhees foe Tommy Jarvis in two installments of the original series, and he apparently had designs on making the Friday remake his newest comeback vehicle. There's really nothing you can do with Jason at this point other than remake him, but how? Word is that PD wants the remake to feature both Jason and his trademark mask -- two elements that didn't congeal until Part III of the original series, so I'm imagining a smelting together of the first three films, set in modern day and with a lot of in-jokes. I guess it will be a film about a little boy who drowns in a lake and immediately morphs into an overgrown, lumbering killer with a machete. Sounds intriguing.