Sound familiar? Toby Wilkins takes us back to a classic monster movie format with his new flick, Splinter, but this is no tired, old re-hashing of the genre.
Splinter is a fresh yet reminiscent take on a good, old, scary movie. The monster in this film is a brand new bad guy on the block, one that’s parasitic and uses living beings as hosts in a whole new way.
“We’ve been sort of brainstorming this creature for a couple of years trying to figure out what we could do with it,” Wilkins explains. “It was sort of one of those ‘What if’ scenarios. What if an entity gets inside you and takes over the human skeleton with no regard for how the joints normally work and no regard for how we normally move? What would that look like?”
The old school creature effects are masterfully done and quite effective. It’s very creepy and very disturbing, but in staying within the constraints of a small-budget film, it was done with no computer-generated effects.
Though the characters in this film fit the classic formula in terms of story structure and plot, there’s a new take on how the roles are defined. Wilkins explains that he didn’t want any “trophy characters” in the mix.
“I didn’t want the female characters to be, you know, the ‘damsel in distress scraping and breaking her high heel’ character,” he says.
His male lead is a non-typical as well.
“I don’t want to fall into that trap of having this macho guy, whoever it is, coming in and saving the day,” he says. “There’s nothing interesting about that journey at all.”
Though not a big budget, scream-a-minute epic, the brilliance of Splinter is that it makes no pretense about itself.
Splinter releases in select theaters Oct. 31.
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