New horror anthology coming from Blair Witch director and Final Destination creator

In 1999 The Blair Witch Project came out of nowhere and changed the face of horror movies forever. The a year later the first of the Final Destination movies arrived, kicking off a much loved series

Now more than 20 years later, Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick and Final Destination creator Jeffrey Reddick have teamed up to work on a new horror project designed specifically for streaming. 

Black Veil is a series of six short form films with various collaborators. “It all revolves around that vibe in Florida, in Georgia, Alabama, that sort of Southern Gothic spookiness,” says Myrick.

The pilot, titled Camera Obscura and directed by Myrick, went into production in December 2019 but COVID19 prevented the series from being completed.

“We were full steam ahead right before the pandemic hit. We had just wrapped shooting on my episode, the pilot episode, and started the edit, and then everything got locked down. But we’ve got really cool scripts that are in the works right now,” Myrick told us, when we sat down with him to chat about his new sci-fi mock-doc Skyman.

Post pandemic it’s possible smaller budget content, available online, could see a boom.

“My background in being able to shoot things effectively cheaply, with small production footprints is all the rage now,” says Myrick, though exactly what the lockdown will mean for the genre going forward isn’t clear.

“It may further polarize the inequality in producing films, where you have a handful of tent-pole movies and then a bunch of a little micro-budget stuff,” says Myrick. “Or hopefully, it opens up a sort of indie middle-class again, where there is an avenue for guys like me to make risky films and find an audience out there many of whom are now sitting at home looking for content.”

Episode one follows a young woman who discovers a photo at an exhibition which seems to have been taken from a terrible memory she’d long suppressed. Myrick says the rest of the series won’t be made until COVID19 danger has truly passed.

“Until there’s a real viable treatment or a cure for the pandemic, I think we’re just going to be in this sort of ‘work the best we can with what we’ve got’, state for the foreseeable future, because it’s just not worth risking anybody’s life over shooting a horror movie,” he says, but he’s excited to bring the project to an online audience when the time is right. He says the team is currently in talks with various companies about where the show will be housed, though he says the dream is to have his own horror platform.

“Ultimately, Netflix may put them all together as an anthology and stream them, we’re open to that as well,” he says. “But I love the idea of having my own site as sort of a central hub to create the community and be able to watch these really cool, risky shorts and maybe partner with some of these other streaming outlets. So we’ll see what happens.”