The Director of RELIC Will Next Helm a Folk Horror Film with the Vibe of ROSEMARY'S BABY and WICKER MAN
If you haven’t seen the horror film Relic yet, it’s a movie that you’ve got to check out! The movie was helmed by director Natalie Erika James, and she ended up delivering one hell of a crazy and terrifying movie that was inspired by the horror of dementia. As a fan of the horror genre, I was impressed with the movie and the story that it told.
Well, the filmmaker has got a few other projects in the works, and they all explore different types of horror. The next project that she will direct, though, is titled Drum Wave, and it’s said to have the same kind of vibe as horror classics like Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man.
During an interview with Collider’s The Witching Hour, James explains that it dives into the fears of motherhood and explains:
“The one that’s furthest along is the folklore that I mentioned earlier called Drum Wave, which is set in Japan. It’s got a very like, Rosemary’s Baby, Wicker Man vibe to it. It’s about a woman who’s kind of deeply afraid of motherhood on many levels, and who marries into a family on this remote island to worship a fertility goddess. So when she thwarts their ritual sacrifice, she has to escape being kind of offered up as like a surrogate sacrifice. And also she kind of inexplicably falls pregnant, so it’s dealing with a lot of body horror.”
Yep, that sounds like it’s going to be a great story to tell. The setting and subject matter and particularly interesting. Sounds like the kind of story that we might see from director Ari Aster, who made Hereditary and Midsommar.
When discussing the reason why James continues to explore this genre, she says:
“I don’t know how else to write a film because I just feel like you spend, you know, minimum two years of your life working on something; you have to care about it that much, surely. It’s more like personal questions or personal fears, and for me, filmmaking is a great way to just ask those big philosophical questions in your life.”
She went on to talk about playing with the folklore in her films, saying:
“I mean, obviously folklore has commonalities throughout so you can’t avoid those. There’s a massive hallucinogenic element in the script that we wrote and when we saw that we were like, ‘Aw, fuck.’ But, you know, maybe audiences will forgive us for the repetition.”
I think James proved her talents as a director with Relic, and as someone who enjoyed the movie, I’m looking forward to seeing what she does with Drum Wave.