The Woodshed, Elijah Wood’s new horror film company, announced a pair of new projects on Friday, “Toad Road,” a completed film, and “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night,” a new production.
Wood and partners Daniel Noah and Josh C. Waller discovered “Toad Road” while they were programming Nightmare City, a Los Angeles-based horror film festival put on in collaboration with The Cinefamily and Cinespia. They have partnered on the project with Blackout Films and Random Bench.
Flirting with the border of documentary and narrative filmmaking, the film chronicles drug use in youth culture in connection with a supernatural event on New Jersey’s Toad Road.
“Programming the festival, we viewed scores of new horror films, but ‘Toad Road’ leapt out of the pack with its devastating power,” Wood said in a statement. “We knew we had to do whatever we could to make sure this special film is seen.”
The film, written and directed by Jason Banker, will debut in the United States Nov. 23 as part of Nightmare City.
The Woodshed is also about to begin production on Iranian vampire Western “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” The film marks the feature debut of Ana Lily Amirpour, who both wrote and will direct the project about a lonely vampire feasts on the depraved residents of a fictitious Iranian ghost town in what turns out to be a love story.
“When I first heard about Ana's project; a vampire western noir, shot in black & white, in Farsi, and utilizing an entirely Iranian soundtrack, I was extremely excited,” Wood said. “I then saw her proof of concept short and was convinced that this was a film that we'd be proud to be a part of bringing to life.”
For the record: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to the Iranian Western as "A Girl Walks Home Late at Night." The name of the production company Random Bench has also been corrected.
