LOS ANGELES (AFP) - US filmmakers who scored a surprise hit in 2003 with a terrifying tale of two divers lost at sea are back with a spine-chilling film about a woman driven to terror inside her own house.
Chris Kentis and Laura Lau struck box office success nine years ago with “Open Water,” a watch-through-your-fingers movie about a couple left adrift in shark-infested waters when they are forgotten by their diving tour boat. In “Silent House,” out this weekend in the United States, the directors take a similarly stripped-down plot but weave in an edge-of-the-seat tale of horror about a young woman trapped inside her family’s lakeside retreat.
Their earlier film, which evoked terror whole showing almost nothing other than what was going on in the water around the abandoned divers, was made on a tiny budget but brought in more than $38 million around the world.
Movie studios were quick to take the young filmmakers on board, but for much of the last decade they couldn’t find a project that suited their particular talents — until “Silent House.”
“We had a couple of big projects, we kind of got into the (trap of) indie filmmakers who go to Hollywood and get caught up in development and bigger budgets and the economy,” Lau told AFP. “We couldn’t get something off the ground and it was very frustrating.” Then last year producer Agnes Mentre, a big fan of “Open Water,” suggested they make a US version of “La Casa Muda” (“The Silent House”), a Uruguayan horror movie from 2010. “We had no idea what it was, and she said it’s a single shot, and instantly we were very excited about this challenge,” said co-director Kentis.