First Look: Bryan Bertino’s A24 Horror ‘There Are Monsters’ Starring Zoe Kazan

It has been nearly a decade since Bryan Bertino brought audiences his magnificent home-invasion debut, “The Strangers.” Since then he only helmed 2014’s found footage thriller “Mockingbird,” but last year’s Cannes Film Festival delivered the promising news that A24 picked up distribution rights to his original creature horror “There Are Monsters” and would be eyeing a 2016 release date. Today a first image from the eagerly anticipated follow-up has arrived featuring star Zoe Kazan.

The movie focuses on a mother and daughter who are trapped and tormented by a ruthless creature. Here’s the official synopsis:

From the creator of The Strangers comes a world of the lost; freezing, spitting needles of rain, thunderbolt lightning, hypothermic cold and disorientating utter darkness. Mother and daughter trapped and tormented in a black forest by a screeching creature – it is unlike anything we have heard before. Not human. Not animal. Like a thousand horses, like a mother’s clamour, a baby’s wail, a father’s howl. Their relationship at breaking point, 10-year-old Lizzy is all out of faith in her mother Kathy but tries to stay brave and fearless. Kathy, on the edge, barely keeping it together, knows that only a mother’s protective love, her most primal instinct, can save her daughter from what’s lurking in the darkness…

Rounding out the cast is Scott Speedman and Ella Ballentine. No firm release dates yet for “There Are Monsters,” but a premiere in the midnight madness section at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival seems like a realistic possibility for the horror shot in the Great White North.

First Look: Bryan Bertino’s A24 Horror ‘There Are Monsters’ Starring Zoe Kazan 1

First Look: Bryan Bertino’s A24 Horror ‘There Are Monsters’ Starring Zoe Kazan