Fear is the Rider, described as an ode to “gore-drenched Ozploitation slashers of the 1970s,” sees a woman pursued in the Australian Outback by a pack of ruthless serial killers. While that already has our attention, Deadline reports the nod to gory slashers has lined up an impressive cast so far. Ben Mendelsohn (Star Wars: […]
Fear is the Rider, described as an ode to “gore-drenched Ozploitation slashers of the 1970s,” sees a woman pursued in the Australian Outback by a pack of ruthless serial killers. While that already has our attention, Deadline reports the nod to gory slashers has lined up an impressive cast so far.
Ben Mendelsohn (Star Wars: Rogue One), Abbey Lee (Old, Mad Max: Fury Road), Toby Wallace (The Bikeriders) and Eliza Scanlen (Caddo Lake) have been cast in lead roles.
As for plot, the film follows “a lone woman, searching for her missing mother, who is pursued into the Australian Outback by a terrifying family of serial killers, with only an ex-con and a young girl willing to help her.”
Fear is the Rider is an adaptation of the novel The Hunted by Gabriel Bergmoser, written and directed by John Michael McDonagh‘s (The Guard).
Daniel Henshall (Mickey 17), Brenton Thwaites (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales), Thomas Turgoose (This is England), Rhys Wakefield (The Purge), Shane Jacobson (The Bourne Legacy), Susie Porter (Gold) and Jacqui Purvis (Home and Away) round out the cast.
As if this adaptation isn’t intriguing enough, Deadline also reports that this will be the first installment of a trilogy of thrillers. The second part is currently titled Fear is the Rider: Australia Day, based on a novel by the late Kenneth Cook (Wake in Fright). Cook’s 2016 novel, Fear is the Rider, also centers around an intense cat-and-mouse chase through the Outback. The novel was a previously unpublished manuscript from the ’80s and rediscovered among Kenneth Cook’s papers.
The project was initially but has now been dusted off with a different cast and production and finance partners.
