This weekend marks the release in some territories of Down a Dark Hall (2018), the new work by Rodrigo Cortes. Today it opens in Spain, while it has been already released earlier this week in Italy. Other countries like Portugal, South Africa and the USA will have the movie in their theaters later this month. And, so far, the reviews achieved have been pretty positive!
After the international success achieved by his 2 latest films, the independent productions Buried (2010) and Red Lights (2012), Spanish filmmaker Rodrigo Cortés is back with another dark horror thriller in the English language. This marks the first time in his career to direct a movie he has not been involved in the writing process or doesn’t come from a story of his own. This is the first big studio job. Temple Hill Entertainment, creators of popular young adult fantasy movie sagas like Twilight or The Maze Runner, hired Cortes in order to bring the movie a high tension with a minimal staging and that classic European feeling that flourish his works. And that’s how he landed on the director seat of the movie adaptation for the novel Down A Dark Hall, written by Lois Duncan and published in 1974, which screenplay has been penned by Michael Goldbach and Chris Sparling.
Lois Duncan was the author of numerous young adults novels in the 1970s decade developing in the styles of horror and mystery. Some of her works like I Know What You Did Last Summer, Summer of Fear and Killing Mr. Griffin has been adapted as movies. Down A Dark Hall is a supernatural suspense novel and is the only gothic fiction she wrote. It tells the story of a girl who was sent to a boarding school by her parents where only four students were admitted including herself.
Uma Thurman, as the most notorious name, heads the primarily female cast. AnnaSophia Robb, Taylor Russell, Isabelle Fuhrman, Rebecca Front, Rosie Day, David Elliot, Kirsty Mitchell, Noah Silver, Victoria Moroles and Jim Sturgeon also star. Filming took place in Barcelona and the Canary Islands.
So if you are in Italy or Spain and wanna go to the movies this weekend, this is a good recommendation. Check out the official trailer of Down a Dark Hall (2018), also known as Blackwood here:
