Like Rick Astley with love, when it comes to horror movies you know the rules and so do we. Scream. Run. Fight for your life. Pretty straightforward, right? But what if you couldn't scream, you couldn't run, and you couldn't fight for your life? What if instead, minute by minute, your entire body was slowly closing down as your would-be killer slowly closes in? That's the hook of Brian Netto and Adam Schindler's inbound Netflix chiller Don't Move, which takes the notion of being frozen with fear quite literally as it follows the nightmare experience of Kelsey Asbille's (Yellowstone) Iris, whose head clearing walk in the woods takes a sinister turn when a murderous stranger (Finn Wittrock) injects her with a paralytic agent. Check out the tense first trailer below:
Cameras whooshing through an eminently unfriendly feeling forest? Sinister unseen forces at work? It may not be directed by Sam Raimi, but you won't be surprised to learn the Evil Dead maestro produced this one. Although as this new trailer makes clear, who needs Deadites to create hell on Earth when humans are monstrous enough already? Heavy on vibes and quick to set up the high concept, this first look at Don't Move — narrated with an unnervingly chipper cadence by Wittrock's would-be killer — really hammers home the horror of our protagonist Iris' situation as we see her trying to escape death whilst her body, piece by piece, closes down. "You have about 20 minutes before you're completely paralysed," calmly explains Wittrock, detailing how within a minute Iris will lose her fine motor skills, within 10 she'll have tingling legs, and before the time is through she'll scarcely be able to breathe over shots of, well, exactly that happening. It's properly unsettling stuff, made all the more so by the movie's real-time element.
Written by T.J. Cimfel and David White (Shut In), packaged in a tight 85 minute runtime, and boasting a concept so killer it persuaded one of the genre's great masters to get aboard, all signs point towards Don't Move being a must-see when it hits Netflix on 25 October. We would say run, don't walk to catch this one, but true to the horror movie's premise, we reckon we'll just stay rooted to the spot right here until Don't Move drops.