‘The Crow’ Director Alex Proyas Prepping $35M Horror-Thriller ‘Sister Darkness’

The Crow, Gods of Egypt and I, Robot director Alex Proyas is prepping horror-thriller Sister Darkness, marking his directorial return to his mainstream independents roots.

The film is the first under a new co-production/financing partnership between Proyas’ production house Heretic Foundation alongside his IP development company Mystery Clock Cinema and U.K.-based 108 Media, which has launched worldwide sales and packaging in Cannes.

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Described as a macabre female-driven fever dream of revenge and gothic terror, in the same vein as Proyas’ cult hit The Crow, Sister Darkness is set in the U.K. in the 1930s, a time when women were marginalized and exploited. It follows the newly wed but unhappy Alice “who stumbles across her doppelganger Isla, whose existence is a mystery seeped in a tale of bloody retribution against her oppressors, the hellish supernatural nightscape and a dreaded uprising against the deceitful aristocracy.” Proyas’ primary vision is inspired by U.K. horror movies of the 1960s and 1970s, with deep reverence to legendary films, such as The Innocents and The Legend of Hell House.

The production, which comes with an estimated budget of $35 million, is based on an original script by Proyas and will be shot in his home base of Australia in late-2022 into mid-2023, using a fully virtual production process specially developed and refined by his VFX studio Heretic Foundation, which has been in operation since 2020.

“We are excited to be embarking with 108 Media on what we genuinely believe will be the first step of a long and fruitful journey together,” says Proyas. “Sister Darkness will be a milestone in the use of virtual production at this scale, and Heretic’s talented team will allow us to establish production values at much higher levels in this budget range than ever before thought achievable. This is the future of filmmaking.”

The multi-faceted deal was struck and negotiated by 108 Media’s CEO Abhi Rastogi and president of production Justin Deimen, supported by acquisitions director Rod Smith and legal counsel Steven Rosser, with Heretic Foundation CEO and creative director Alex Proyas, general manager and executive producer Andrew Robinson, studio producer Erasmo (Raz) Raimundo and Craig Emmanuel of Paul Hastings in Los Angeles.

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