IFC Midnight has acquired the rights to Keith Thomas’s Jewish-themed horror film The Vigil, taking over distribution from Blumhouse, and has scheduled it for release early next year. The Vigil previously premiered at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, and was on the schedule for the canceled 2020 South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas.
The Vigil stars Dave Davis, perhaps best known before this for getting shot in the head by Michael Rooker in season 3 of The Walking Dead, as Yakov Ronen, who has recently left his Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. Despite that, his former rabbi bribes Yakov into taking up the traditional role of a shomer, or guardian, for the recently deceased Mr. Litvak. Yakov has to watch over Mr. Litvak’s body until it can be buried the next day, but quickly finds out that being a shomer is harder than it sounds. Litvak’s house is haunted in a very particular way, and his only guide as to what’s actually happening is the elderly Mrs. Litvak (the late Lynn Cohen, Sex and the City, in her final film role), who suffers from dementia.
The Vigil is Keith Thomas’s first feature-length film as both a writer and director. It draws upon Thomas’s experience as both a rabbinical school dropout and a clinical medical researcher, trying to filter many of the standard elements of a horror film through orthodox Jewish mythology. Thomas is currently attached as a director to Blumhouse’s forthcoming remake of the 1984 film Firestarter, based on one of Stephen King’s first books.
“I have always struggled somewhat with ‘religious’ horror films because most of the time they come from such a clearly Christian perspective,” Thomas said, in a 2019 interview with Filmmaker magazine. “While it’s an outlook I don’t know that well, it doesn’t stop me from enjoying the themes and set-ups in them. Whenever you’re dealing with the supernatural, you’re dealing with questions of life and death, which are truly the two pillars of all religions. How each faith addresses the question of a post-life existence informs almost all of horror, and I’m particularly drawn to stories that explore that in new or at least unexpected ways.”
IFC Midnight is a division owned by AMC Networks’s Independent Film Channel. Midnight is a specialist label for producing and distributing horror, science fiction, action, and erotic arthouse indie films, which some people call “genre” movies and others call “the ones that anyone would actually want to see for fun.” It scored two sleeper box-office horror hits earlier this year with the Sundance film Relic, starring Emily Mortimer, and Dave Franco’s directorial debut The Rental.
The Vigil is currently planned for wide release in the United States on February 26th, 2021. IFC Midnight has not yet established what form that release will take, but if it follows the same course as The Rental, it may bring the film out simultaneously in theaters and on VOD services.
Source: Deadline
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