The Box

Richard Kelly’s The Box - Poster & Details

Richard Kelly burst onto the indie scene when his micro-budget horror/sci-fi Donnie Darko became a cult favorite on DVD (he even made stars out of Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal while he was at it). However, his much grander follow-up Southland Tales was by all accounts muddled and tedious (though I can’t personally comment having not seen it). Well, Kelly seems to be going back to his roots with a smaller production this time. Called The Box, it is the story of a couple that come into the possession of a box (surprise, surprise) that can bestow upon its owner $1 million dollars, with the downside being that it will simultaneously kill an unknown person, somewhere in the world. To ratchet up the tension even more, the couple have only 24 hours to resolve their moral dilemma and decided whether they want to activate the box.

The poster for the film has just debuted on the web today and can be seen above.

From AintItCool -

I read an early draft of the script to Richard Kelly’s THE BOX a looooonnnggg time ago and found it to be pretty damn good. Dark, dark stuff there and then the movie cast up, shot and posted all on the quiet. Soon we’ll start seeing more promotional stuff from it, leading up to the release in October. Now the poster has hit, which Kelly has posted to his MySpace page. It’s a fine studio poster, definitely gets the point across without giving anything away, but at the end of the day it’s still a big head poster.

Personally I think it is a pretty awful poster. I am surprised to see that they are not trying to cash in on Kelly’s previous success (no mention of Donnie Darko) perhaps the studio is worried that Southland Tales flopping means that Kelly has lost his good will with the public. Still, from the poster, the average punter is going to assume it is just a run-of-the-mill Hollywood horror/thriller possibly with a torture-porn bent (that tagline ‘you are the experiment’ sounds like something out of a Saw movie) and are likely to completely ignore it. Hopefully the trailer will sell the movie to the public better.