You can see from the look on Keri Russell’s face, the story she’s hearing from one of her students is no ordinary fairy tale.
In “Antlers,” an upcoming horror and fantasy film from director Scott Cooper and producer Guillermo Del Toro, Russell plays a teacher in a small town in Oregon who along with her brother (Jesse Plemons), the town’s sheriff, discovers that a young boy is harboring a dangerous secret with frightening consequences.
“Once, there were three bears that lived in a dark, unlit cave up above a small town. Every day, Little Bear went to school, and at night he would come home and eat dinner,” the boy played by Jeremy T. Thomas narrates. “But one day, Little Bear came home, and Big Bear and Baby Bear were different. Big Bear got sick, and his insides turned black. Big Bear has become more angrier and meaner, because they had no food, no meat, but they had each other.”
The story is just the backdrop to a chilling trailer that suggests the absolute worst of what might’ve happened to that boy’s family, and we get a glimpse at some mutated monster or beast at the very end.
David S. Goyer and J. Miles Dale are also producers on the film written by C. Henry Chaisson, Nick Antosca and Cooper. “Antlers” is actually based on Antosca’s own short story called “The Quiet Boy.”
Graham Green, Scott Haze, Rory Cochrane and Amy Madigan also star in the film that Fox Searchlight is releasing in 2020. Check out the trailer for the film above.
For the record: A previous version of this story misspelled Chaisson’s name.