Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story has been a mainstay in horror literature and classrooms for a long, long time, and over the years, it’s had its share of adaptations.
There’s a new film coming from Alexandra Loreth and Kevin Pontuti, who wrote the film and respectively star in and directed it, and it looks exactly as creepy as it was when we first read the story years ago. (via Literary Hub)
If you somehow missed “The Yellow Wallpaper” (you can read it here), it’s a short story written as a series of journal entries by a woman whose physician husband brings her to “a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house,” to help with her recuperation after a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency.” While there, she becomes preoccupied by the nursery’s walls, described as “repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight.” It’s a horrifying story, and the teaser for this new adaptation looks like it captures the look and feel perfectly.
Alexandra Loreth stars as the film’s central character, and in his director’s statement, Pontuti says that it’s a project that they’ve been working on for five years to bring it to life.
The teaser is short, just 37 seconds long, with Loreth narrating the description of the wallpaper while we see brief glimpses of her character in the yellow room. And that wallpaper? It looks like they nailed the look perfectly—it’s creepy and dilapidated, and just how I imagined it.
The film is slated to premiere at this year’s Cinequest Film Festival this Saturday in California. There’s no word on a wider release, but hopefully, we’ll get to see it before too much longer.
