News

The American Film Institute has named 25 alumnae of the AFI Conservatory and AFI Conservatory Directing Workshop for Women to participate in the next phase of the Fox Filmmakers Lab. A partnership between AFI and 20th Century Fox, the Lab aims to increase the number of women directing major studio films — which was even lower last year than it was in 2015 — by giving them the chance to direct short films based on Fox titles: “Alien,” “Die Hard,” “The Omen,” “The Fly,” etc.

Read More: Number of Female Directors Working in Hollywood Declines, New Study Shows

After developing their concepts in the coming months, the 25 directors will pitch their concepts to Fox executives; one or more of them will be chosen to make a short film based on their idea. Here are the 25 women who’ve advanced to the next phase of the Lab:

Read More: ‘Xx’ Trailer: Karyn Kusama, Roxanne Benjamin...

IFC Midnight Acquires Indie-Horror Dementia. Mike Testin‘s Dementia will be released in North America by IFC Midnight sometime this year. Dementia‘s plot synopsis: “After being diagnosed with Dementia, an elderly war veteran is forced by his estranged family to hire a live-in nurse, only to find she harbors a sinister secret.”

IFC Midnight is one of the great purveyors of our current theatrical horror environment. One need only look at the history of films they’ve chosen to support, such as Kill List, Anti-Christ, Byzantium, and Maniac, to respect the work they’ve done and their place in theatrical horror. I love going to their cinema in Manhattan to watch midnight movies with strangers and re-experience old classics on the big screen. Should you live in New York, regularly checking their programming is probably a good idea. I saw Alien and The Exorcist here – those are the kind...

IFC Midnight has acquired North American rights to Dementia, the horror pic from BoulderLight Pictures that stars The Sacrament‘s Gene Jones as an aging war veteran who suffers a stroke and is diagnosed with dementia. He is forced by his estranged family to hire a live-in nurse, only to find that she harbors a sinister secret. The pic came together in spring 2014 and was directed by Mike Testin from a script by Meredith Berg. Kristina Klebe (Halloween), Peter Cilella…...

Some familiar faces have joined the cast of upcoming indie Dementia with Twitch getting word of the complete cast on the latest from the producers of Contracted. All the details below:Peter Cilella (Resolution), Tony Denison (TNT's Major Crimes, The Closer), Steve Agee (Sarah Silverman Program), Morgan Peter Brown (Absentia), and Richard Riehle (Office Space) have been added to the cast of BoulderLight Pictures' "Dementia". They join Gene Jones, Kristina Klebe, Marc Senter, Hassie Harrison, Molly McQueen,and Graham Skipper. The plot is as follows: "After suffering a stroke, an elderly war veteran is forced by his estranged family to hire a live in nurse, only to find she harbors a sinister secret..."The film is directed by Mike Testin from a script by Meredith Berg. J.D. Lifshitz...

[Read the whole post on twitchfilm.com...]...

One of the horror films I’m most curious about this year is Ti West’s found footage thriller The Sacrament, set for release in May. Aj Bowen (pictured at top), who broke out in last summer’s You’re Next as Crispian, is set to star as one of several photographers who uncovers a sinister presence at play inside the seemingly idyllic commune of Eden Parish. Bowen will face off with Gene Jones (pictured at bottom), playing the commune’s creepy but charismatic leader, known only as Father. Buzz on the project is very positive (with a lot of early praise going to those two performances), and evidently the two enjoyed working together so much that they’ve now found another film to star in: the psychological horror flick Dementia.

Courtesy of up-and-coming shingle BoulderLight Pictures, the film will find Jones playing a military veteran diagnosed with dementia, who...

Perfectly timed with this week's home video release of Contracted, word has come that the film's Dp is directing a horror flick of his own with some of the most impressive indie horror actors by his side. Read on for full details about Dementia, coming our way courtesy of BoulderLight Pictures!

From the Press Release

BoulderLight Pictures (Contracted, Weep) has tapped Contracted Dp Mike Testin to direct Dementia, a new horror thriller in the vein of Misery and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.

Set to begin production in Los Angeles next week, the film's cast includes: Gene Jones (The Sacrament), A.J. Bowen (You're Next), Kristina Klebe (Proxy), Marc Senter (Red, White, and Blue), and newcomer Hassie Harrison, amongst others. The script was penned by Blood List writer Meredith Berg (Faceless).

Dementia is about an elderly war veteran who is forced by his estranged family to hire a live-in nurse...

BoulderLight Pictures has hired Mike Testin to direct Dementia. Xyz Films represents North American rights and BoulderLight will handle international sales.

The horror-thriller is said to be in the vein of Misery and What Ever Happened To Baby Jane? and is set to begin production in Los Angeles next week.

Gene Jones and Aj Bowen from The Sacrament (pictured) will star with Kristina Klebe, Marc Senter and newcomer Hassie Harrison.n

Blood List writer Meredith Berg wrote the screenplay about an elderly war veteran who takes on a live-in nurse with a sinister agenda.

“We couldn’t be more excited to be partnering with Mike on this,” said producer Raphael Margules. “We’ve been looking to collaborate with him since Contracted and can’t think of a better project in which to showcase his unique and fresh voice to the global marketplace and audiences worldwide.”

Margules and Jd Lifshitz are producing for BoulderLight Pictures and are represented...

Kailey Marsh is a co-founder and literary manager/producer at Faction M with her business partner Nima Maleki. Kailey graduated from the Art Institute of California-Los Angeles and interned for Ozla Pictures (the company behind The Grudge movies, among others) and then worked as an assistant for Steven Jay Schneider, producer of Paranormal Activity. She was an assistant at the management/production company Circle of Confusion before becoming a manager in her own right.

Faction M has most recently been involved in producing the feature film The Day, currently in post-production. Check out the Facebook page for all the details about the film and the teaser.

With the advent of The Black List, a collection of the top unproduced screenplays making the rounds in Hollywood, Kailey invented The Blood List, which compiles the best unproduced horror scripts. She was recently included in a Hollywood Reporter article examining this listing phenomena.

Like, what's the deal, Neil?

Neil isn't a real person.

In the past 5 years I've seen women horror, sci-fi, and fantasy directors representing at least one third of all genre film festival screenings in the United States and in Europe. This year, not so. While there are a few features making the rounds, the same ones appear in all the fests and often they're the Only film directed by a woman in the entire lineup.

Check it out:

Horror/drama After.life, directed Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo, already made a theatrical release in the USA and was recently screened in the United Kingdom at London Frightfest alongside only one other horror film by a woman (Hélène Cattet co-directed the awful giallo Amer with Bruno Forzani) and the violent action flick Isle of Dogs by Tammi Sutton and is now in the official lineup for Sitges, Spain. Unless there are films Sitges has not announced yet,...

Dark Matter DVD, a new distribution company putting out short independent sc-fi films, is distributing Lamia, directed by Katerina Slantcheva, and Void, directed by Meredith Berg, on the first edition of the Dark Matter DVD collection!

These two short sci-/fi horror films haven't been seen much, either in the festival circuit or anywhere else, so we're super-stoked to see them getting distribution! Dark Matter's films all have a very Twilight Zone/Outer Limits kind-of-feel, so we're looking forward to all the content they put out on their compilations. Their next collection will include Tanja Mairitsch's short Fueling the Fire...

An artist obsessively painting over his portraits and his apartment's walls with white paint has his reality peeled apart when a hauntingly beautiful model arrives for a sitting in Lamia.

Follow an FBI agent into the Void as she enters a small town where a mysterious killer roams and strange phenomena abound.