Who — or what — is knocking on the wall? That’s the mystery at the center of Samuel Bodin’s feature directorial debut, “Cobweb,” which unveiled its first trailer on Wednesday.
As the trailer lays out, a young boy named Peter (Woody Norman, last seen in “C’mon C’mon”) is hearing a chronic knocking behind his bedroom wall. But his overly amiable parents, played with menacing glee by Lizzy Caplan (“Fatal Attraction”) and Antony Starr (“The Boys”), chalk it up to his overactive imagination. But as Peter becomes more afraid, the question is whether his parents might be involved in something horrifying.
There’s an old-school “Tales From the Crypt” vibe to everything, though the movie is playing up its echoes of “Barbarian,” aided by the fact that producer Roy Lee worked on both features. Caplan and Starr seem perfectly suited to playing frightening parents with a secret, more so if you’ve watched their previous work over the last year or so.
This marks screenwriter Chris Thomas Devlin’s second script, having penned the 2022 reboot to the “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Lee, Evan Goldberg, Seth Rogen and James Weaver act as producers on the project, while Andrew Childs, Connor DiGregorio, Josh Fagen, Jonathan McCoy and Christopher Woodrow are executive producers.
Lionsgate has had success with genre fare of late, particularly with the ultra-successful “John Wick Chapter 4.” Most of their slate this year consists of established IP brands, like “Saw X,” “Expendables 4” and “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes,” so this original feature should be a good change of programming between franchise releases.
You can watch the full trailer in the video above.
“Cobweb” hits theaters July 21.
