A montage of beautiful women, followed by a montage of bloody, screaming faces. That’s how Neon introduced the latest “dark trip” from The Monkey and Longlegs director Osgood Perkins.
A carefully edited 20-minute preview of his upcoming horror movie, Keeper, revealed a surprising amount about the plot (much more than you can glean from the film’s creepy new trailer). We’ve been sworn to secrecy about anything resembling spoilers, but what we can share right now left us surprisingly hyped.
Keeper stars Tatiana Maslany (She-Hulk) as a woman named Liz who travels to an isolated cabin in the woods with her partner Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland). What begins as a romantic weekend quickly becomes something much darker as an ancient, eldritch evil is revealed. Unlike Perkins’ The Monkey, which mixed dark comedy with violent, Rube Goldberg-esque kills, Keeper feels like a calmer (and scarier) exploration of the folk-horror subgenre (think The Wicker Man, or, more recently The Witch and Midsommar).
The extended look at the movie was followed by a discussion with Maslany, who revealed that Keeper was actually filmed before The Monkey during a quick, low-budget shoot in Canada.
“We shot this one very cheap and cheerfully before The Monkey,” Maslany said. “We shot it for very limited money in terms of what most movies are made for.”
Maslany, who also had a supporting role in The Monkey, noted that when she first met Perkins over Zoom, they bonded over their shared love of female horror performances like Shelly Duvall in The Shining and Gena Rowlands in Opening Night.
“Oz likes the oddness of those performers and really imbues his sets with the freedom to go there as well.” (Clearly Perkins considers Maslany at their tier; the actor confirms the two will collaborate again in his Keeper follow-up The Young People.)
Finally, Maslany praised the film’s emphasis on practical effects. “A lot of Keeper we did with practical,” she said.
While we can’t say much about the movie’s monster, which relies on a mix of practical and special effects, just yet, there are some genuinely terrifying visuals that go far beyond anything Perkins has achieved before. The audience’s terrified gasps during one scene, in particular, suggests that Keeper’s big bad may just enter the pantheon of great horror movie creatures.
