Here’s the trailer for independent Irish horror movie Banshee Blacktop, An Irish Ghost Story, which looks very promising indeed.
“Dublin, Ireland. A seemingly aimless drifter is picked up by police in connection with the disappearance of a young couple on a remote, windswept island months before. But the drifter, a disgraced monk, turns the table on their investigation and relates a tale of madness, murder and the supernatural. ”
Writer-director Sean Garland describes the film as follows in a statement:
“The best mysteries unsettle. They do not scare. They concern stories that intrigue and characters we care about. Their tone haunts you long afterward precisely for that reason. That was always my intention with Banshee Blacktop, An Irish Ghost Story. I wanted to tell a supernatural folk tale, full of that magic and mystery, but in the guise of a gutsy, hard-nosed thriller, a police procedural where the teller of our tale is literally interrogated for his story. Banshee Blacktop owes as much to the literary works of MR James, and Sheridan Le Fanu as it does to films as diverse as The Innocents, Picnic At Hanging Rock, BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas, Whistle Down The Wind and Night of the Hunter.
It’s a love letter to those timeless voices of the genre mixed with the grit and brawn of movies such as Friedkin’s The French Connection and Lumet’s The Offence. And through it all, woven into our terrible confession, runs an innate vein of tragedy and haunted melancholia, a love story about wayward, broken innocents, full of verve and spirited youth in the face of onrushing darkness. If Banshee had to work, and work well, it had to be profoundly moving and genuinely unsettling all at once. All things end in mystery. Or so the saying goes.
In terms of our production that’s a whole other story to tell, not very mysterious but no less intriguing, three years in the making. We shot in the wilds of North West Donegal, we posted in London, Dublin & Helsinki and Sound Designer Jim McKee, one of Francis Ford Coppola’s Oscar winning sound crew for Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been especially attentive to our vision of the film in the legendary offices of Zoetrope in San Francisco. It seems fitting for us to finish up there, in Coppola’s Columbus Tower, for there’s a real international flavour to Banshee Blacktop that we feel lends it a unique, poignant voice and will endear it to audiences worldwide.”
Banshee Blacktop, An Irish Ghost Story does not currently have a UK release date. We’ll be keeping an eye out for any developments.
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