The Casket Girls have arrived at TIFF, and they’re not leaving any survivors. Deadline revealed the first image from the upcoming horror movie that’s being shopped at this year’s festival, featuring Gabrielle Union and Mike Colter up against a horde of undead killers.
Directed by Justin G. Dyck, Casket Girls was originally written by Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, with revisions by Dyck and Keith Cooper. Also starring Lennon, Matt Frewer, and Raúl Castillo, the film’s synopsis (per Deadline) is as follows:
The film follows Detective Shay Williams (Union) and her partner Galpin (Colter) as they investigate a child’s supernatural encounter and accidentally release the legendary ‘Casket Girls’ from beneath a centuries-old New Orleans church. Trapped inside, they and a handful of survivors must outwit the bloodthirsty vampires before they’re picked off one by one.
The term “casket girl” comes from the phrase “casquette girl,” used to refer to women brought over to the French colony of Louisiana in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a part of a program introduced by King Louis XIV to encourage French citizens to move to the new world. Rumor and legend morphed the idea into something else, supposing that the women were actually vampires being brought over to terrorize the new world — hence this film, as well as other depictions in projects like The Originals and Alys Arden’s Casquette Girls book series.
Casket Girls is produced by Sean McKittrick, Raymond Mansfield, Edward H. Hamm Jr., Jameson Parker, and Union. The film is being distributed by Aura Entertainment in the US, with international rights currently selling at TIFF.
No release date has been set for Casket Girls. Stay tuned to FANGORIA for more updates.
