News

Dark Sky Films has released the first trailer for A Desert, director Joshua Erkman’s feature debut that blends hilistic neo-noir and horror.

A Desert releases in select theaters on May 2, 2025.

In the noir horror thriller, “A past his prime photographer heads out on a road trip across the American Southwest to recapture the magic and success of his previous work. Instead, he finds himself thrust into the dark and chaotic underbelly of America and unwittingly drags his wife and a shady private detective down into this nightmare world with him.”

David Yow, Kai Lennox (Green Room), Sarah Lind (A Wounded Fawn), Zachary Ray Sherman (“Under the Banner of Heaven”), Ashley B. Smith, Rob Zabrecky (A Ghost Story), and S.A. Griffin (Vegas Vacation) star.

I wrote in my review out of Tribeca Film Fest, “A Desert reaches a fitting conclusion, thematically and tonally, but the steadfast refusal for tidy answers may polarize.

The Dead Thing

Behind every film are a mass of filmmakers turning a script, maybe even a dream of an individual or handful of people, into reality. Elric Kane's The Dead Thing and Joshua Erkman's A Desert are distinctly different films. The Dead Thing follows a young woman, in a mesmerising performance from Blu Hunt, who begins a passionate affair with a man who hides a secret. In A Desert, Harold (David Yow), a private investigator, is hired by a distraught wife (Sarah Lind) to find her husband, Alex (Kai Lennox), who has disappeared while on a photography trip in California's Yucca Valley.

Rosencrans' previous credits include Dalila Droege's 2022 thriller No More Time, about a couple seeking sanctuary in a remote mountain town from a virus that turns people into murderers, and the 2020 documentary Feather And Pine, about the effects of The Great Recession on a logging community in.

Exclusive: Dark Sky Films has acquired all North American distribution rights to A Desert, the Tribeca and Sitges Film Festival debut from Joshua Erkman.

The neo-noir horror hybrid is due to be released in the first quarter of 2025. Pic had its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival this past summer and the film’s international premiere at Sitges Festival this past week, where it won Best Feature Film in the New Visions category.

The distribution agreement was negotiated by Greg Newman, Executive Vice President for Dark Sky Films, and Hugues Barbier, Justin Timms and Joe Yanick for Yellow Veil Pictures.

Erkman’s company Capes & Fog produced the film along with Yellow Veil Pictures. It is the latter’s first original production, marking a new phase for the genre sales company whose previous releases have included George A. Romero’s long-unreleased The Amusement Park and Gaspar Noe’s Luz AEterna...

John Lithgow, Geoffrey Rush and Kristine Froseth won top acting awards at Spain’s prominent Sitges Fantasy Film Festival, which wrapped its 57th edition on Oct. 13.

Making a sweep of the fest with three awards was Austrian Best International Feature Oscar entry “The Devil’s Bath” by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. Drawn from historical facts, the Austrian-German co-production is described by Variety critic Jessica Kiang as a “story so pitilessly bleak you may want to look away; the filmmaking craft is so compelling that you can’t.” The historical horror drama, which vied for the Berlinale Golden Bear in February, follows Agnes, a depressed newlywed, who instead of committing suicide, considered taboo by her Christian community, commits a crime that would lead to her execution. The “suicide by proxy” practice was said to be common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in German-speaking Central Europe and Scandinavia.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong...

Our friends at the Telluride Horror Show down in Colorado have revealed the lineup for this year's event. Celebrating it's fifteenth year it's the best weekend you can ever have during spooky season in the Centennial State.    This year, Steven Soderbergh's Presence will close out the weekend while festival faves like A Desert, Dark Match, Daddy's Head, Dead Talents Society, Parvulos, The Rule of Jenny Pen and The Soul Eater are among the list of feature films playing this year.    The weekend always includes an author's program and this year our friend Grady Hendrix will be joined by another author whose works I've read, Jeremy Robert Johnson.  Other books I'm going to have to read now come from other guest authors including Rachel...

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

Alex Clark is a renowned photographer embarking on a solitary journey through the bleak desert landscapes of the American Southwest. Well known for his striking photos capturing abandoned buildings taken over by nature, Alex hopes to recapture the fire of his early career and rekindle his passion for photography.

Now middle-aged with his creative spark feeling faded, he leaves behind technology to let his wanderings get lost in nature’s reclamation of what remains after civilization’s fleeting presence.

Directed and co-written by Joshua Erkman in his feature debut, A Desert blends elements of neo-noir and psychological horrorfilm to explore Alex’s literal and metaphorical voyage. Erkman deftly guides leading man Kai Lennox’s compelling performance as the isolated artist searching for meaning through his craft.

While calling wife Sarah Lind each night for comfort, Alex finds himself drawn into growing darkness amid the film’s decayed yet strangely beautiful Southwestern locations.

Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2024, the UK’s premier horror and fantasy film festival, has announced its thrilling lineup for this year’s event. Marking its 25th edition, the festival will run from Thursday, 22 August to Monday, 26 August, taking over the Odeon Luxe Leicester Square in London. For the first time, the festival will utilise all seven screens, including two Odeon Luxe West End screens, to showcase a diverse selection of horror films from around the globe.

The festival opens with the world premiere of Broken Bird, the highly anticipated directorial debut from actress-filmmaker Joanne Mitchell. Based on an original story by Tracey Sheals and Mitchell’s award-winning short Sybil, the film tells the disturbing tale of a mortician, played by Rebecca Calder, whose dark desires spiral out of control.

Closing the festival is the English premiere of The Substance, the latest film from French writer-director Coralie Fargeat, known for her previous hit Revenge.

After early success opposite Kirsten Dunst in Lifetime’s Fifteen and Pregnant, and as Jasper on the CW’s reboot of 90210, he’s gone on to build an impressive acting resume balancing television work (Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven) with edgy, transformative roles in independent films. On this episode, he talks about why it all starts with building trust with his collaborators early, the semi-mystical process of aligning his heart with the character’s heart, the importance of […]

The post “If We’re Gonna Live in This Story, We’ve Gotta Live with Each Other”: Zachary Ray Sherman, Back To One, Episode 299 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

After early success opposite Kirsten Dunst in Lifetime’s Fifteen and Pregnant, and as Jasper on the CW’s reboot of 90210, he’s gone on to build an impressive acting resume balancing television work (Hulu’s Under the Banner of Heaven) with edgy, transformative roles in independent films. On this episode, he talks about why it all starts with building trust with his collaborators early, the semi-mystical process of aligning his heart with the character’s heart, the importance of […]

The post “If We’re Gonna Live in This Story, We’ve Gotta Live with Each Other”: Zachary Ray Sherman, Back To One, Episode 299 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

New York City's annual Tribeca Festival always brings something for everyone: from its series of short films made by all the most promising up-and-coming talent to several documentaries about a wide range of topics to the buzzy narrative features both international and close to home, all vying for Tribeca's various top prizes. Co-founded by none other than acting legend Robert De Niro in the aftermath of 2001's 9/11 attacks in an effort to revitalize the Tribeca neighborhood located in Lower Manhattan, the film festival has carefully curated its own identity over the years. While its famous big brothers like Cannes, Sundance, and the Toronto International Film Festival will always receive the bulk of attention, Tribeca tends to feel like the scrappy, blue-collar breeding ground for all the most under-the-radar offerings that the indie system has to offer.

This year's event was no exception, providing all sorts of opportunities for the curious and open-minded moviegoer.

The latest edition of the Tribeca Film Festival draws to a close in New York City, leaving another strong year for new genre premieres, retrospectives, and events in its wake.

Tribeca 2024 unveiled the new premiere of Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala’s ultra-bleak The Devil’s Bath, raucous slasher Amfad: All My Friends Are Dead, goopy sci-fi horror comedy The A-Frame, and dusty neo-noir horror A Desert to name a few of the genre offerings this year. But the fest’s genre offerings don’t stop with Midnight programming, a section dedicated to horror and high-energy genre fare.

Here’s a round-up of brief thoughts and capsule reviews of Tribeca’s narrative features that either toe-dip or crash into horror in surprising ways.

The Damned

Director Thordur Palsson, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jamie Hannigan (“The Woman in the Wall”), combines 19th-century survival thrills with atmospheric supernatural chills set in an Icelandic fishing village.

Drive far enough down a deserted highway, and you’ll eventually find spots where the remnants of a civilized society met the unrelenting forces of death, entropy, and decay. Crumbling buildings give way to new ecosystems as Mother Nature takes back the spaces that humanity briefly leased. These abandoned spaces are reminders that there’s nothing we can do on this planet that the universe won’t ultimately undo. Our only choice in the matter is whether we see that as depressing or poetic.

Count Alex Clark (Kai Lennox) among the latter camp. The acclaimed photographer spent much of his youth ripping through the American Southwest in a car by himself, deliberately trying to get lost so that he’d eventually find cool pictures to snap. His photos of decaying buildings earned him his first brushes with fame, and a midlife crisis has now prompted him to try and recreate his original formula for success.

It’s easy to get lost in the desert, a fate that befalls Joshua Erkman’s debut feature. While his protagonists eventually get dangerously close to some lurid, lethal goings-on, this self-described “neo-noir horror” leaves a vague and rudderless final impression despite its intriguing-enough buildup. “A Desert” aims for the enigmatic, supernaturally-tinged mystery of something like Lynch’s “Lost Highway,” but in the end lacks the tension and atmosphere to pull that tricky gambit off. Nonetheless, its arty sojourn through backroads-thriller terrain is likely to gain some supporters as a Tribeca Fest midnight section premiere.

An opening sequence expanded upon much later introduces the idea that what we’re watching is some sort of purgatorial film loop that traps the unwary. But like several other conceits here, it’s never developed enough to take finite shape. Still, we first meet Alex Clark (Kai Lennox) as he’s exploring a dark,...

A road trip through the American Southwest opens a puzzle box of weirdness and nihilism in director Joshua Erkman’s feature debut, A Desert, a captivating and stylized blend of neo-noir and horror. There’s no handholding or easy answers in this genre-bender, but its richly textured world and morally complex characters ensure an unpredictable voyage worth taking.

Photographer Alex Clark (Green Room’s Kai Lennox) embarks on a solo road trip to capture abandoned roadside structures and buildings in desolate stretches of Southwestern desert, hoping to reinvigorate his stalled career. Alex smartly approaches his solo trip with caution, with frequent calls home to his wife Sam (A Wounded Fawn’s Sarah Lind) on updates. That’s disrupted when he overhears alarming sounds coming from next door during his stay at a seedy motel. It leads to his chance meeting with the rowdy Renny (Zachary Ray Sherman) and the woman he introduces as his sister,...

Just like the process of taking any good photograph, it takes a while for writer-director Joshua Erkmans feature debut A Desert to frame everything just right so that its full striking vision can be felt. This may take a bit of arranging, including moments where the often refreshingly patient horror film retraces its steps, but that only makes the images it creates all the more potent. While the film initially centers on a creator of such images in the roaming photographer Alex, played by Kai Lennox of recent series like Perry Mason and Fargo, it soon expands outwards. First, we get to know a couple of strangers that he encounters on his trip through the American Southwest, but they only represent the beginning of the trouble that will consume everyone in Alexs orbit. There is his wife Sam, played by Sarah Lind of the underrated recent horror film A Wounded Fawn,...

The Tribeca Film Festival 2024, presented by Okx, is back this week with tons of new genre premieres, retrospectives, and events to get excited about. This year’s Festival, which takes place June 5-16 in New York City showcases the best emerging talent from across the globe alongside established names.

Horror fans can look forward to buzzy titles like The Devil’s Bath, from filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. But the horror extends beyond the Midnight section, including the premiere of Amfad: All My Friends Are Dead. Look for the festival to give special presentations of Alfred Hitchcock and Tod Browning classics, too.

Finally, if you’re a Godzilla fan, don’t miss the epic bash the fest is throwing for the classic film’s 70th anniversary.

Read on for 14 can’t miss events and screenings to catch at Tribeca:

The A-Frame (United States) – World Premiere. A quantum physicist’s machine...

Exclusive: Sarah Lind (A Wounded Fawn) is the newest addition to The Necklace, the indie horror flick from director Juan Pablo Arias Munoz that’s shooting in Atlanta. As previously announced, Jacob Moran, Madeleine McGraw, Violet McGraw and Felix Solis will also star.

Written by John Ducey, The Necklace watches as the Davis family navigates through tough times in 1960. Laura Davis (Lind) has separated from her husband Frank due to his unpredictable temper, fueled by alcohol. As Laura returns to work as a nurse, her daughters, 11-year-old Ellen (Violet McGraw) and 16-year-old Judy (Madeleine McGraw), grapple with the changes in their family dynamics. The plot thickens when Frank attempts to win Laura back with a beautiful antique necklace, which turns out to be a conduit for the tormented soul of an evil boy from long ago, putting Laura and her daughters in grave danger.

Daniel Aspromonte and Christina Moore are producing the film,...