Somewhere in Louisiana there’s a lake, and in the lake there is something old, and next to the lake there is Tommy Wiseau. Make of that what you will. The first trailer has arrived for Silt, a cosmic horror thriller from director Aaron Jay Rome. Wiseau plays Bartleby, the odd man who runs a lakeside retreat and insists its water contains “the genes of the Gods”. The film was shot in Baton Rouge under the title Lake Vernon. It has its Los Angeles premiere on 7 November as a double bill with Dead Dawn, and it’s still looking for a distributor.
For anyone who has spent the last twenty years safely under a rock, Wiseau is the man behind The Room (2003). It’s the most lovingly heckled film of the century, and audiences still pelt the screen with plastic spoons at midnight showings. Since then he has managed a kind of cult afterlife, including a turn in the shark film Big Shark. Casting him in cosmic horror makes a certain sense. The whole genre rests on the idea that some things are beyond human understanding, and Room fans have been saying exactly that about Wiseau’s accent, age and finances since the Bush administration.
The set-up comes from the official logline. A fractured group of friends gets together for a weekend at an exclusive lakeside sanctuary. Old wounds reopen, the water seems to heal people, and something else is clearly going on underneath. The logline promises that “healing and horror are one and the same”, and Fangoria pitched the project as Talk to Me meets The Invitation. Rome says the film is about the things we do and don’t tell the people closest to us. That’s a sensible thing to bring to a lake, since cosmic horror has always been wary of water. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth ran on fishy bargains, the well water in The Colour Out of Space didn’t do the Gardner family any favours, and A Cure for Wellness showed that a miracle spa usually ends with eels. Water that cures you always wants something back.
Then there’s the name. Melville’s Bartleby was the scrivener who famously would prefer not to. This one seems all too keen. The cast also includes Olivia Grace Applegate (Love and Death), Malcolm Goodwin (Reacher), Andrea Sixtos (Arrow), Krishna Smitha and stunt veteran Michael Papajohn. David Anders spent years on The Vampire Diaries, so he should know a thing or two about immortality on dodgy terms. The story is by Vernon Davis and Tiffany Toney. Davis is a former NFL Pro Bowl tight end turned actor and producer, and he also appears and produces through his Real 85 Productions banner. We’re sure the original title, Lake Vernon, was a complete coincidence.
Release plans are unusual. Viewers can sign up through DemandTheScreen.com, which asks local cinemas to book the Silt and Dead Dawn double bill. It’s audience-led bookings for the streaming age. Here at SFcrowsnest we have a soft spot for indie horror that turns up without a studio and simply knocks on the door. In fairness, Wiseau’s whole career runs on audiences who arrived uninvited and refused to leave. Silt could be a properly creepy piece of Southern Gothic Lovecraft, or the first cosmic horror where the Elder God gets upstaged by the caretaker. Either way, pack a spoon.
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