Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath are the writing / directing duo behind Entrance, an indie, slow-burn horror film / psychological thriller. It’s a slasher film in which you might not even realize it’s a slasher film until you’re a good deal of the way through it. Entrance is about Suzy, played by Suziey Block (The Island), a lonely young woman in Los Angeles who begins to develop a growing case of anxiety and uneasiness living in the city. The movie is about the limits of our perception, how things lurking in our periphery of our lives can lead to horrific conclusions; and it’s about how Suzy fell out of love with the city of LA but the city wouldn’t let her go. It is also one of the most unique and unnerving films I’ve seen in a quite a while. Entrance is now playing in theaters, as well as IFC Midnight Cable VOD and Digital Outlets (SundanceNOW, iTunes, Amazon Streaming, XBOX Zune, Playstation Unlimited).

I recently had the chance to speak with Directors Dallas Richard Hallam and Patrick Horvath about Entrance. The directors spoke about where the idea for the film came from, what films and filmmakers influenced them, creating tension and anxiety for the audience, their metaphor for Los Angeles, sound work, and their upcoming project.

The first Paranormal Activity movie, as written and directed by Oren Peli, cost around $15,000 to make, was purchased by Paramount for somewhere in the neighborhood of $300,000, and went on to gross more than $100 million when it reached theaters in October of 2009.  Last year, Paranormal Activity 2, made for just a few millions dollars, grossed just under $85 million. 

Given those ratios of expense-to-profit, it was guaranteed that another entry in the found footage franchise would roll around this Halloween, and probably for the next several Halloweens as well.  The first poster for Paranormal Activity 3 premiered online today, sticking to the style of its predecessors while claiming that audiences will "Discover how the activity began."

The unknown and mysterious is, pretty much without exception, way scarier than the known and explicit.  This makes it somewhat odd that the trailers for so, so many thrillers and horror films rely on heaping helpings of exposition, would-be jump scares, and an excess of assaultive quick-cuts.  By comparison, the first teaser trailer for Red Lights is refreshingly simple and ominous.  It consists of a few title cards and one creeping shot crawling towards the back of Robert De Niro, then finishes with a clean, intriguing little surprise regarding his character. 

It's a simple trailer that creates an aura of mystery around De Niro as Simon Silver, a world-famous psychic who may be a fraud but also might just be the real deal, with his finger on some serious goings-on.  The film is written and directed by Rodrigo Cortes, the Spanish director who made an impressive debut last year with Buried, which took place almost exclusively in a simple box underground as Ryan Reynolds' character was, as the title suggests, buried alive.

Thanks in no small part to films like Seven, police procedurals are most commonly associated with the grimy, foreboding environs of the big city, particularly when these procedurals involve the pursuit of possibly serial-killing murderers.  The upcoming thriller Texas Killing Fields stars Sam Worthington and Jeffrey Dean Morgan as two detectives, one from rural Texas and one from New York, attempt to track down a murderer who deposits his victims in a bayou known as a popular body-dumping site.

The first trailer for the film suggests that the desolate atmosphere of small-town Texas lends itself to the slow-build dread  of a serial killer-mystery just as well as an apathetic metropolis.  Also on hand in the trailer are Jessica Chastain and Chloe Moretz, who has dropped a body or two onscreen between her roles in Kick-Ass and Let Me In.

When a trailer starts off by introducing an impossibly well-adjusted family in their impossible perfect and secure home, you know immediately that something horrible is going to befall the family, probably within the confines of their oh-so photogenic house.  Such is the case in the first trailer for Trespass, a thriller starring Nicolas Cage, Nicole Kidman, and Liana Liberato as that apparently perfect family.  Horror arrives right on schedule in the form of a home invasion, with two masked dude played by Ben Mendelsohn and Cam Gigandet (and possibly Dash Mihok, too) intent on getting Cage to open a very secure safe on the premises.  Of course, the situation deteriorates from there.

Not many literary figures of the American Romantic period could credibly serve as the lead character in a period-era thriller.  Ralph Waldo Emerson couldn't pursue a killer dubbed 'The Self-Reliant Man', Henry David Thoreau couldn't investigate grisly murders on Walden Pond, and Herman Melville couldn't go head to head with his nemesis, a morbidly obese albino named Moby Dick.  Edgar Allan Poe, though, with his phantasmagoric sensibilities, is a surprisingly perfect protagonist for a suspenseful yarn.  In The Raven, which stars John Cusack as a slightly fictionalized Poe, the writer teams with the Baltimore police to solve a series of grisly murders inspired by his work.

At San Diego Comic-Con today, Relativity Media treated the crowd in Hall H to the very first look at the first official trailer for The Raven.  Director James McTeigue, who previously helmed V for Vendetta and Ninja Assassin, joined stars John Cusack, Alice Eve, and Luke Evans on stage for a panel shedding new light on the film.

IMP Awards has uncovered the first poster for the upcoming Chris Pine and Denzel Washington action suspense thriller Unstoppable, but you can dig on it right here. The Tony Scott-directed action flick about a runaway train that is Unstoppable, hence the title, will be released this November.

Last week it was reported that "The Tudors" star Henry Cavill just nabbed his second leading man role (after Immortals) in The Cold Light of Day, a kidnapping thriller set in Spain. Now, a few more names have boarded the project - and big ones to boot.

According to Variety, action heroes of yore Sigourney Weaver and Bruce Willis are in talks to star in the flick, which is being directed by JCVD helmer Mabrouk El Mechri.

Henry Cavill is a very pleasant bloke with the chiseled face and presence of a star. The fact that he hasn't quite become one already surprises me, but he's going to get his day sooner or later. The man missed out on playing James Bond, Clark Kent and Batman by this much, so obviously he's got Hollywood's attention. (And not just because he was featured in "The Tudors" or was in Hellraiser: Hellword either.)

Next year will see him star in his first major Hollywood epic, Immortals, which will absolutely thrust him onto a bigger stage; but before that comes out (next November), he'll be thwarting kidnappers in The Cold Light of Day, a thriller being made by Summit Entertainment and Intrepid Pictures.