“It won’t let you sleep.”
Whether that tagline refers to new film “Dream Eater” or whatever it is that goes bump in the night, horror icon Eli Roth was hooked on filmmaking trio Mallory Drumm, Alex Lee Williams and Jay Drakulic’s scary movie from the moment he laid eyes on it.
“When I saw the film, I was just really, really, really f–king scared. I was watching this going, this is the scariest movie I’ve seen in a long time — and I would go out on a limb and say the last 15 minutes of this movie, I don’t think there is a scarier ending, a scarier movie released in 2025,” Roth told TheWrap at a private screening on Wednesday. “If a film is just undeniable that I get so excited about it, that if I was in 7th grade and I saw it that I wanted to take the VHS tape and run to my best friend’s house, I need that feeling. And I think that horror fans really respond to authenticity and they know when someone truly loves the genre and when something is innovative and creative.”
“You can’t replicate it on a TV, you have to see it in a theater. I had that adrenaline rush where I was dreading what was going to happen next. My palms were sweating,” he continued. “I thought they had made it for a million and a half or two million, and when they told me they made the movie for $50,000 CAD, which is like $40,000 USD, my jaw was on the floor. This is why I created The Horror Section, to help these filmmakers get attention where a movie like this could very easily have gotten lost on a streamer.”
“Dream Eater” is the latest independent film to receive theatrical distribution as part of Roth’s Horror Section studio/media company. In the lead-up to its release, the team held an early screening at The Aster in Hollywood on Wednesday night. What’s more, Drumm and Williams are also the main pair in front of the camera, as their characters Mallory and Alex isolate themselves in the Canadian wilderness in order to document and nail down exactly what’s causing the latter’s parasomnia and sleepwalking episodes.
“A fun challenge about found footage is justifying why you’re filming certain things. We knew that we wanted to make something cinematic, so to kind of give credence to why the shots you’re seeing are super crisp and super nice, we decided to have our character, Mallory, be a documentarian so that we can sort of justify the beautiful shots that you see versus just handheld shaky cam,” Drumm explained.
“It’s fun to play with tropes and kind of put your own spin on them, but there were things we definitely wanted to avoid. One of the things that we said was not going to happen in the movie was we were never going to review footage. The characters could review footage, but we would never play that footage back,” Drakulic added. “It works for certain films, but when you see that enough times, it feels like you’ve doubled up on a scare where you had opportunity to either include more character development or just put in a brand-new scare.”
“Another thing that we were very conscious to avoid was not trying to force turning the camera on to Mallory so that it’s more like a standard, straight narrative,” he continued. “There are times that she does spin it around, but they’re for a purpose — either for levity or for a moment of setting the story up. Then there’s a lot of times that the character, being a cinematographer, is setting up these shots; some Alex is aware of, some he’s not aware of.”
“The audience is smart, you want to treat them with respect. So when the camera is flipped around to get Mallory’s response when something scary is happening, the first thing you’re going to think of is, why are we seeing her?” Williams agreed. “With Mallory, too, she’s almost forgetting that she’s holding the camera because she’s using it more as a light source.”
Whether your familiarity with the found-footage subgenre comes from “Cannibal Holocaust,” “The Blair Witch Project,” “Paranormal Activity” or “The Last Exorcism,” the people behind “Dream Eater” wanted to expand upon the classic formula while telling a story that hits close to home.
“I did a lot of sleepwalking as a kid, don’t remember any of it. I never, like, woke up in a different room or anything like that, but my family would tell me that it was a particularly creepy thing. So we borrowed one particular scene where Mallory wakes up and Alex is standing in the doorway,” Drakulic shared. “Then both Alex and Mallory suffered from pretty devastating night terrors. Mallory has even taught herself how to lucid dream because of it.”
The private event also featured an open bar, a post-screening Q&A moderated by movie guy Chuck Shaughnessy and even a curated scent from Generation by Osmo.
“Eli Roth Present’s Dream Eater” hits select theaters on Oct. 24.
