Demonic, the new horror film made by writer-director Neill Blomkamp and distributed by IFC Midnight, reveals more about its twisted storyline in its second trailer.
The new trailer contains many of the same visuals as the first teaser, including scenes of a woman attached to a machine dropping into another world and the movement of a monster's finger cutting into a woman's arm, but also offers more detail about what these images mean for the film's plot. It turns out that the other world is a video game-esque simulation that the protagonist's mom has been trapped in following her homicidal rampage. Hoping to question her mother about her violent crimes, the main character goes into the simulation and, once she does, things in the real world begin to glitch.
As a result, the young woman, who is unnamed in the trailer, begins to see horrifying things outside of the simulation, which others assume are hallucinations, though they clearly have a supernatural source. The trailer also introduces a government-funded Black Ops team of demon-hunting priests armed with both crosses and guns, mixing action elements in with horror and science fiction.
Though Demonic is Blomkamp's first full-on horror movie, the use of science fiction technology and the stylized special effects have notes of the director's previous films, including the Best Picture-nominated sleeper hit sci-fi mockumentary District 9, the Matt Damon-starring big-budget Elysium and the artificial intelligence-centered bomb Chappie.
Since Chappie's failure with critics and audiences in 2015, Blomkamp has gone back to the basics with a series of low-budget effects-heavy short films. In that time, he has also been attached to film projects set in the Alien and Robocop universes, but those projects were ultimately scrapped. Demonic is Blomkamp's first full-length feature film in six years, produced independently and shot in secret during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The official synopsis of Demonic is as follows:
From the director of District 9 and Elysium, a young woman unleashes terrifying demons when supernatural forces at the root of a decades old rift between mother and daughter are revealed.
Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, Demonic stars Carly Pope, Chris William Martin, Michael J. Rogers, Nathalie Bolt and Terry Chen. The film will be released in theaters on Aug. 20 and on VOD Aug. 27.
Source: YouTube