After taking some time to work on experimental short films, District 9 and Elysium director Neill Blomkamp spent his lockdown directing a secret project: Demonic. The film is slated to come out later this summer, and earlier today, Fandango premiered a teaser trailer for it, showing off a tale of virtual worlds and gruesome deaths.
The film stars Carly Pope—a collaborator in a couple of Blomkamp’s projects over the years (Elysium and Rakka)—who we see entering a virtual world. After that, things get creepy: something is unleashed, and it’s affecting things in the real world.
Speaking with EW earlier this year, Blomkamp revealed that Pope’s character is someone who has been estranged from her mother for years, and learns about something new about her past when they’re reunited. The project looks like it will fit nicely with Blomkamp’s repertoire, who’s turned to ideas like cybernetics and brain implants in projects like Elysium and Firebase, as well as a good blend of body horror with projects like District 9, Rakka, and Zygote.
That’s not all that Blomkamp has on his plate: He’s been working on a sequel to his acclaimed film District 9 (to be called District 10), and was working on another horror project prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Inferno, which will star Taylor Kitsch as a detective investigating a strange murder in New Mexico. He was also attached to direct an adaptation of Thomas Sweterlitsch’s time travel novel The Gone World, although it’s not clear if that project is still in the works (given that Disney has since acquired the studio producing it, 20th Century Fox).
Demonic is slated to hit theaters and VOD platforms on August 20th.
