By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The hallucinatory horror film is coming later in 2024.
Independent horror filmmaker Eric Stanze, whose past features include SAVAGE HARVEST, SCRAPBOOK, DEADWOOD PARK and IN MEMORY OF, got in touch with details and pics from his latest movie, ANXIETY. Currently in the final stages of postproduction, it stars Jackie Kelly, Jason Christ and Marcella Miller. The synopsis: “A recovering alcoholic’s journey lurches into a nightmare tailspin during a global crisis. Sober for only a few months, her sanity erodes as the demon in her brain drags her deeper and deeper into a vortex of madness.”
Stanze tells RUE MORGUE how his phantasmagorical film takes off from real-life issues: “When someone physically addicted to alcohol quits cold turkey or is otherwise denied the consumption of alcohol, the human brain gets viciously bombarded. Some people experience delirium tremens–which is similar to experiencing schizophrenia. Reality twists and crumbles amid recurring episodes of psychosis, including visual and auditory hallucinations. What is real and what is not real become almost impossible to ascertain.
“I’ve never personally experienced any of this terrifying stuff,” he notes, “but I was fascinated and horrified enough by the topic that I wanted to process it all through the making of ANXIETY–and turn unsettling realities into surrealism rooted in a horror movie.
“Back when Jason Christ, Jackie Kelly and I were conjuring the screenplay for our film IN MEMORY OF,” Stanze continues, “instead of writing a drama about memory loss, we used the real-life horror of memory loss, and all of our contemplations on the topic, as a jumping-off point into that fever-dream film, exploring the topic in an abstract way. Similarly, ANXIETY is not a drama about alcoholism or getting sober–it is instead a hallucinatory, sometimes absurd nightmare inspired by the real-life terrors of alcohol-withdrawal-induced psychosis.”
A specific release date for ANXIETY has yet to be determined, but it will hit streaming before the end of this year, and pre-orders for the Blu-ray are already open at the official website of Wicked Pixel Cinema.
