Movie review: 'The Vigil' a efficiently creepy horror film rooted in Jewish lore gazettextra.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from gazettextra.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Writer-director Keith Thomas' "The Vigil" is a supernatural Hasidic Jewish horror film starring Dave Davis as a young Brooklyn man performing a religious ritual.
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The works of Stephen King have been adapted more times than any other living author, with short stories and novels being transformed into movies, shows, and miniseries â and itâs not all that uncommon for filmmakers to take multiple cracks at the same material. For example, Kingâs first three books were
Carrie,
Salemâs Lot, and
The Shining, and since they were released in the late 1970s all three have been given the Hollywood treatment multiple times. For Constant Readers itâs always interesting to watch how things shake out, which is why one project that has grabbed my attention is director Keith Thomasâ upcoming remake of
New FIRESTARTER Will Carry Heavier Dramatic Punch
Blumhouse and The Vigil director Keith Thomas’ upcoming remake of Stephen King’s Firestarter with Zac Efron will carry a heavier dramatic punch. By Mike Sprague
The Vigil director Keith Thomas’ upcoming remake of Stephen King’s
Firestarter with Zac Efron will hopefully begin filming later this year. And today Thomas teases his film will carry a heavier dramatic punch.
Thomas tells ComicBook.com: “
Firestarter]
first came to me, I was very lucky in that the script by Scott Teems, who wrote the upcoming Halloween Kills, was just very, very good, and very rich. The material itself isn’t different, right? I mean, it’s the same book that this film is drawing from, the one the earlier film did. But what we’re leaning into from the book is different. That’s the angle where you can do something. So, for me, it was really leaning into more emotiona
Thomas told
The Algemeiner, “There’s an old writer’s adage that says, ‘Write what you know.’ When it came time for me to draft the story of what I envisioned would be my first film as a director, I stepped back and took stock of what might make a unique story. What was it that I knew that I could bring to a project that would make it feel… different, fresh.
“I realized that I had never seen a Jewish horror film that was set in the Hasidic community or that dealt with truly Jewish themes in terms of its lore and construction. The idea of a shomer facing a demon allowed me to explore the culture of Hasidic New York and, at the same time, dig into the horror filmmaking that I love.”