First-time director Anne Hamilton offers up a new horror-thriller to add to the dark and gritty fairy tale genre. THR revealed the first trailer for American Fable, which is set in the rural Midwest in the 1980s.
Much like in Pan’s Labyrinth where a young girl escapes the atrocities of her reality by entering an eerie fantasy world, American Fable tells of an 11-year-old farm girl named Gitty whose fairy tale imaginings become real. This tale seems less fantastical and genre-heavy as Guillermo del Toro, but she, too, is stalked by a horned figure — trading The Pale Man for a medieval warrior on horseback. Soon, she grows horns as well, after discovering a mystery man held prisoner in her family’s silo.
Watch the trailer below:
Hamilton, who also penned the script, told IndieWire amid the film’s premiere at the SXSW Film Festival that the story stemmed from an image kicking around her mind: “a girl field dressing a deer in her barn when a strange man from the city pulls up and they somehow know each other.”
American Fable opens in theaters on and VOD on February 17th. The cast features Peyton Kennedy, Richard Schiff, Kip Pardue, and Marci Miller.
Here’s the official synopsis:
A dark, dreamlike mystery plays out amidst the expansive farmlands of the American Midwest in this wondrous, storybook thriller. With her family’s livelihood imperiled by the farm crisis of the 1980s, eleven-year-old Gitty (Peyton Kennedy) loses herself in a world of fantasy and make believe. But she stumbles into her own fairytale when she makes a startling discovery: a well-dressed mystery man (Richard Schiff) being held captive in her family’s silo. It’s the beginning of a labyrinthine journey that will turn Gitty’s world upside down and force her to question her loyalty to her own family. The feature debut from director Anne Hamilton unleashes a torrent of gorgeous, stunningly surreal images as it immerses viewers in a child’s imagination.