Magnet Releasing
Newlyweds Paul (Harry Treadaway of Penny Dreadful) and Bea (Rose Leslie of Game of Thrones) have had it up to here with your conventional wedding behavior and are taking a honeymoon off the beaten path. Keep your lush white sand beaches and ice cold tropical drinks with their tiny whimsical umbrellas that magically get refilled by a kindly bartender, okay? They’re not interested. They’re heading off to a decrepit cabin in the spooky, spooky woods for some quality one on one time in order to relax and not get turned into zombies, thank you very much.
Honeymoon, directed by Leigh Janiak and written by Janiak and Phil Graziadei, seems to follow a familiar path for young lovers on vacation in a secluded location. They’re about to face certain and treacherous peril, and there’s not a lot that they can do about it – if the first trailer for the film is any indication. As any good horror movie lets you know, if you’re attractive, horny and out in the woods, the forces of evil are going to be knocking on that cabin door in about five minutes looking to harsh your mellow. Hope you can get your security deposit back on the rental cottage, kids. Or at least see the silver lining in all this and tell the folks back home about the bitchin’ summer you had with your sweetheart amongst the trees?
When the couple arrives at their honeymoon cabin, our intrepid bride decides it’s high time to go off exploring by herself right away. Never seeing a horror movie even just once in her life, she and her groom think nothing wrong with this plan, and off she goes. When she comes back later that day, it’s clear that something went wrong on her solo journey. Something happened out in the woods, something sinister, maybe evil, but whatever it was, she’s unable to explain to her new husband exactly what. Yet after her arrival, nothing is ever the same again. Their carefree honeymoon together is now a malicious exercise in keeping a bloodied zombie bride appeased and whatever malevolent force in the woods from coming back and consuming them whole.
The trailer depicts a film that will fit in perfectly in the “evil lurking in the woods” subset of the horror genre. There’s the tragically romantic couple so wrapped up in each other to notice the perfectly creepy wonderland popping up around them. The security cameras watching their every move, the lake full of debris and maybe something else and the influx of moths and other creepy crawlies. The transformation of the lovely bride into a muddy and bloody … something.
Check out the trailer below.
Our own Rob Hunter reviewed the film at SXSW, writing that “Honeymoon tells a tight tale that sticks to it guns past its final frame, but revealing way too much far too soon immensely damages the film’s overall effect.”
Honeymoon hits theaters and VOD on September 12th.
