I’m usually not one for VOD horror movies, but this trailer for Vincent Paronnaud’s Hunted has me hooked. It’s a modern-ish take on the classic fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, but saying that barely scratches the surface of what Red’s got going on in Hunted.
So we all know the story: Little Red Riding Hood travels through the forest to see her grandmother, the Big Bad Wolf wants to eat her, so he beats her to the grandmother’s house. The wolf kills, eats, and disguises himself as the grandmother, and when Red arrives things either end up happily or extremely unhappily depending on what version you’re reading. Now, compare that to the Hunted trailer. Hell, just look at the video’s still:
It starts like a grandmother is going to tell the fairy tale to her grandson, except she suddenly mentions a “wolf girl.” Then it smash-cuts to a father and son, looking for all the world like they’re on a road trip/bonding exercise, but this abruptly shifts into the dad meeting and abducting a young woman named Eve (Lucie Debay) for “flesh that would serve as sustenance.” The easy assumption to make is that the dad, at minimum, is a werewolf, given the fairy tale frame introduced by the grandmother. Although it’s extra creepy that the dad has locked the woman in his car truck when presumably his son is still riding shotgun.
We’re not even half-way through the trailer when the car hits a very large boar in the middle of the road, crashing the car so thoroughly that Eve is able to escape into the nearby forest. The dad gives chase, leering in a very Big Bad Wolf fashion, and you think you’ve arrived at a modern, very dark interpretation of the classic fairy tale. But then the grandmother/narrator starts talking about how the forest is full of giant wolves, and how it wished to protect Eve after hearing her song (screams).
Suddenly the movie is now about Eve and a bunch of forest creatures banding together to fuck the dad up. The trailer ends with her going full Princess Mononoke with blue paint smeared all over her face, running through the forest and screaming in rage, apparently the leader of a wolf pack, and oh my god, what is this movie?!
I guess I’ll theoretically find out when I watch this on-demand, digital, DVD, or Blu-ray on May 18, although I could have seen it on the horror streaming service Shudder, where the movie debuted back in January.