Dread Central confirmed that Focus Features and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster have acquired Play House, the creepy children’s television horror movie that […]
Dread Central confirmed that Focus Features and Blumhouse-Atomic Monster have acquired Play House, the creepy children’s television horror movie that recently world-premiered at Fantastic Fest.
We’d been hearing this was a hot title coming out of the festival, with plenty of excitement surrounding its disturbing puppets and mysterious VHS tapes. Now, coming off the heels of Buddy’s success, Focus is taking a swing on another childhood nightmare.
Nicolas Curcio makes his feature directing debut with Play House, which he wrote with Kirby Gladstein. Will Harrison, Jessica Sula (Split), Jordan Gonzalez (The Long Walk), and James Urbaniak (Oppenheimer) lead the cast.
Harrison plays Elliot, a young man who buys a dilapidated house to prove to his ex that he can finally get his shit together. While renovating, he discovers VHS tapes of an unaired children’s television show in the basement. What initially looks like a creepy homemade kids’ program becomes an obsession, pulling him into the disturbing history of the tapes and the house itself.
And we were fans here at Dread Central. In her Fantastic Fest review, Mary Beth McAndrews praised the filmmakers for crafting “a deeply affecting horror experience that’s both haunting and life-affirming in one fell swoop.”
The enthusiasm extended beyond our review. Brandon Wainerdi wrote at Fangoria that the team made “a very good, very scary movie that might just be my favorite horror movie of the entire festival.”
What makes this particularly cool is how the movie got here. As we previously reported, Play House won the inaugural Fantastic Pitches competition, an initiative from Fantastic Fest and Chroma that awarded the filmmakers . The challenge was to return with a finished movie for the following year’s festival. They did, and now we’re hearing it has landed at Focus.
