In exactly one month, Sitges Film Festival will commence. From the 3rd of October until the 13th, the hottest movies in horror, science-fiction and fantasy will be screened in the Catalan little town. And Ganiveta will be there, like every year. This year the festival will pay homage to George Miller’s Mad Max (1979) in its 40th anniversary, and Sam Neill, star of Jurassic Park (1993) and In the Mouth of Madness (1994), will receive the Grand Honorary Award at Sitges 2019.
A good bunch of titles has already been announced to be part of the line-up of the festival. Some of those movies include Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum (2019), Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space (2019), Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Ready or Not (2019), Roxanne Benjamin’s Body at Brighton Rock (2019), Mitzi Peirone’s Braid (2018), Pollyanna McIntosh’s Darlin’ (2019), Jovanka Vuckovic’s Riot Girls (2019), Adam Egypt Mortimer’s Daniel Isn’t Real (2019), and Rob Zombie’s 3 from Hell (2019).
The opening day is always one of the main dishes of any festival. If Sitges Film Festival opened last year with the delicious Suspiria (2018) by Luca Guadagnino, this year it is Vincenzo Natali who has the honors with his latest work, In the Tall Grass (2019). The movie is based on the horror novel of the same name written by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill. Natali has been in charge of writing the screenplay. In the movie, after hearing a young boy’s cry for help, a sister and brother venture into a vast field of tall grass in Kansas but soon discover there may be no way out and that something evil lurks within.
Going more in detail of the plotline of this claustrophobic horror story with supernatural elements, when siblings Becky and Cal hear the cries of a young boy lost within a field of tall grass, they venture in to rescue him, only to become ensnared themselves by a sinister force that quickly disorients and separates them. Cut off from the world and unable to escape the field’s tightening grip, they soon discover that the only thing worse than getting lost is being found. The movie is starred by Patrick Wilson, Harrison Gilbertson, Rachel Wilson, Laysla De Oliveira, Will Buie Jr., Tiffany Helm and Avery Whitted.
Vincenzo Natali is a well-known personality at Sitges Film Festival. He has been a guest of the festival promoting some of his previous science-fiction movies Cypher (2002), Splice (2009), and his debut feature film Cube (1997) which was the title winner of the festival in 1998. This year, Natali will be accompanied with the star of his new film, Patrick Wilson, also known for a bunch of supernatural, horror and thrilling productions like The Phantom of the Opera (2004), Hard Candy (2005), Watchmen (2009), Insidious (2010) and its sequels, Bone Tomahawk (2015) and, overall, for being Ed Warren in all the films of The Conjuring universe.
