Round-Up: Three New KNOCK KNOCK Posters, Exclusive NOD Excerpt, BASKIN Trailer

2015/08/28 14:57:30 +00:00 | Tamika Jones

It's not too long now before Eli Roth's Knock Knock is released in theaters and On Demand, and we have three new posters to share with you. Also: an excerpt from Adrian Barnes' novel Nod, as well as a trailer and TIFF premiere details for the Turkish horror film, Baskin.

Knock Knock: "Lionsgate Premiere will release KNOCK KNOCK in theaters and On Demand October 9, 2015. Directed by: Eli Roth.

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Lorenza Izzo, Ana de Armas, with Aaron Burns, Ignacia Allamand, and Colleen Camp.

When a devoted husband and father is left home alone for the weekend, two stranded young women unexpectedly knock on his door for help. What starts out as a kind gesture results in a dangerous seduction and a deadly game of cat and mouse. A sexy new thriller from director Eli Roth and written by Eli Roth & Nicolás López & Guillermo Amoedo, KNOCK KNOCK stars Keanu Reeves as the family man who falls into temptation and Lorenza Izzo and Ana de Armas as the seductresses who wreak havoc upon his life, turning a married man’s dark fantasy into his worst nightmare.

Rating: R. Running Time: 95 minutes.

Website: www.knockknockthemovie.com Instagram: @KnockKnockMovie Facebook: www.facebook.com/knockknockmovie Twitter: #KNOCKKNOCKMOVIE"

Poster via Collider:

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Nod: "Nod: Dawn breaks over Vancouver and no-one in the world has slept the night before or almost no-one. A few people, perhaps one in ten thousand can still sleep, and they've all shared the same golden dream. A handful of children still sleep as well, but what they're dreaming remains a mystery. After six days of absolute sleep deprivation, psychosis will set in. After four weeks, the body will die. In the interim, panic ensues and a bizarre new world arises in which those previously on the fringes of society take the lead. One couple experience a lifetime in a week as he continues to sleep, she begins to disintegrate before him, and the new world swallows the old one whole..."

Nod, written by Adrian Barnes, will be released on September 1st. To learn more, visit: http://titanbooks.com/nod-8386/

An excerpt:

DAY 18: Words

The object of words is to conceal thoughts.

It’s getting harder and harder to tell the living from the dead.

Most of the remaining Awakened lay sprawled on the asphalt of Birchin Lane, six storeys below my balcony. Down there, everything’s akimbo: heads flop, tongues loll, and mouths are corkscrewed holes. Some are still ambulatory and stagger around in unsprung circles, clawing air. Others sit mannequin-still among the rubble, staring up at me from their laps, eyes blazing.

They sacrificed another Sleeper last night, some poor chump in Birkenstocks who’s now lashed to a lamp post across the street by bloodstained bungee cords. The head, as always, has been painted lollipop yellow.

And speaking of colours, there’s no sign of the Admiral of the Blue this evening: his rickety stage, cobbled together from smashed down doors and thrashed trash cans, is bare. For a while, the Admiral and his people treated me like a prophet, but I always knew it wouldn’t last. It’s Prophets-R-Us down there: what’s in desperate short supply is disciples. It reminds me of poets, before all this—how the sensitive souls who submitted their work to literary journals outnumbered those who read those same publications by a margin of about ten to one. Everyone wanting to be heard; no one interested in listening. Some things never change. Maybe nothing’s really changed.

What else do I see? Packs of dogs, heads hovering low, roam the periphery of things. The long-standing human-canine alliance has been irretrievably severed, I’m sincerely sorry to report—the gnawed bones and matted chunks of hair scattered along the shores of Lost Lagoon testify to this. It’s sad, but then again those plump collies and German shepherds don’t seem too weighed down by nostalgia for bone-shaped vegan treats and belly rubs from the opposably-thumbed as they wander about, licking their chops. Anyway, it’s not their fault. We’re the ones who broke the deal.

The Awakened spot me, and the crowd’s insect noise ratchets up. Beetlemania! I raise my arms, just for old time’s sake, and the street falls silent. I hold the pose for a moment then let them drop—a cue for the haunted house screaming to begin.

I’m sure this all sounds pretty terrible, dear hypothetical reader, but you might be surprised to learn that I’m of the opinion that while things are bad now, they really weren’t much better before. All that’s different here in Nod is that the molten planetary core of pain that used to roil away behind our placid smiles has now blurped out into open air. How we used to fetishize and differentiate our feelings. Rage! Hatred! Hunger! Pride! Jealousy! Ambition! Lust! We had a name for everything. But that colourful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham. It was all pain—all of it—all along. Rage was pain, hate was pain, pride was pain, lust was pain. All that’s different now is that where pain used to have the luxury of being a bit of a drama queen and playing dress up, now it stands out there on the
corner of Birchin Lane, quivering and naked.

And what about Love—our alpha and omega, our porn and our purity? In the past, we’d held love in reserve as something special and untouchable, an element of our personal narratives that we felt would, in a pinch, absolve us of all our other petty sins. A Get Out Of Jail Free card, I suppose. But as it turns out, love doesn’t set us free—love keeps standing outside the jail on an endless candlelight vigil. So love? Yes, love was pain as well. Especially love.

And so logically then, the question arises: what isn’t pain?

I stand there on my balcony as the question rises, coiling into the sky above Vancouver, and hangs still, with no breath of breeze to make it blow away. The orange sun, made hazy and huge by the million square kilometre dust cloud that used to be Seattle, is slowly sinking into English Bay. I can almost hear hissing as the day, maybe the last day extinguishes itself.

Directly across the street from my apartment, in Demon Park, a siege of great blue herons bobs on overburdened cedar boughs. The names we give gatherings of birds are telling: murders of crows, sieges of herons, unkindnesses of ravens. They must have made our ancestors nervous. Birds pick at bones and lap at eye juice. Maybe they reminded our forbears that they’d be bones themselves, soon enough. The sight of pigeons waddling along the pavement has always seemed eerie to me; I’ve never been able to get over all that armlessness.

Behind me, the stairwells gag on fifty apartments’ worth of furniture: everything but the kitchen sinks. The building’s risen bile cost me a couple of days of heavy labour, but it also bought Zoe and me some time. Since yesterday morning, though, I’ve been hearing ripping and snapping sounds coming from the lower floors. I’m pretty sure that Blemmyes are burrowing up toward us. White moles, digging into ceilings, discovering floors. Escheresque. Three floors below now? Two?

And speaking of Escher, it’s worth recording this for posterity: the artists were right, literally right, all along. Beneath what we used to call ‘reality’ there was always an Escheresque, a Boschian, a Munchian fact—a scuttling Guernicopia of horrors just waiting to be discovered once the civilizational rock was finally overturned. Who’d have thought that the real high wire act of imagining was the old world, that seemingly bland assemblage of malls and media that came to a crashing endless than one month ago? Who’d have thought that the real fantasists were the Starbuckling baristas, the school teachers, and the pizza delivery boys? If we’d really stopped and thought, it would have been obvious. A cursory look at the latest appeal from sub-Saharan Africa should have told us that our privileged world was a pretty slapdash affair, always smouldering at the edges.

But no one stopped, and no one thought.

Christ, I’m tired in a million ways. We’ve been staring into the whites of each other’s eyes for weeks now, the Awakened and I—all of us coming up blank. But that’s okay. I really don’t mind. I’m just about ready to give it all up anyway.

But what about poor, silent Zoë, already asleep in the spare bedroom, curled up with the stuffed grizzly that Tanya gave her? I may be about done with the whole sorry human comedy, but I still want her to survive. I want something that Tanya loved to live on. But tell that to those flayed faces down there, freshly-arrived for the night shift, insomniac suns thrust deep inside their pockets, scorching their thighs.

What about Zoe? What about the child?

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Baskin: "Five cops, working the graveyard shift in the middle of nowhere are dispatched to investigate a disturbance. Isolated and without back up they find themselves confronting a labyrinthine ruin. Pushing ever further into the depths of the lair, it becomes clear they have stumbled into the darkest pits of a terrible evil. A squalid and blood-soaked den of ritual led by The Father - the master of all their nightmares - who will plunge them ever deeper down the rabbit hole and into the very mouth of madness.

BASKIN

TIFF 2015 MIDNIGHT MADNESS

**World Premiere**

Directed by: Can Evrenol

Starring: Gorkem Kasal, Ergun Kuyucu, Mehmet Cerrahoglu, Sabahattin Yakut, Mehmet Fatih Dokgoz, Muharrem Bayrak

Running Time: 97 minutes

MPAA Rating: n/a

2015 TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL SCREENING TIMES

Friday, September 11, 2015, at 11:59 pm, Ryerson Theatre **WORLD PREMIERE**

Saturday, September 12, 2015, at 9:30 pm, Scotiabank 7 **P&I Screening**

Sunday, September 13, 2015, at 4:00 pm, Scotiabank 13

Tuesday, September 15, 2015, at 11:30 am, Scotiabank 9 **P&I Screening**