The concept of the horror film ‘The Vigil” is enough to get your blood pumping, but star Dave Davis also had some eerie experiences reading the script for it.
“The script itself was haunted,” Davis told TheWrap’s Steve Pond at the Toronto International Film Festival. “I didn’t know what a wolf spider was and I’m reading this one scene where a wolf spider crawls cross my character’s foot and not three minutes later, the biggest spider I had ever seen, which was a wolf spider, was on the wall behind me. That was just one of the first of many weird things that happened to me while reading the script. That script was later banned from my house!’
“The Vigil” was written and directed by Keith Thomas and also stars Menashe Lustig and Malky Goldman. It is about a man who watches over a deceased member of the Orthodox Jewish community, but things start to become malevolent.
“When a member of the community dies, it is required that they get buried quite quickly,” Thomas explained. “Before the body is entered into the ground, there needs to be someone sitting the vigil over the body and reciting the prayer… essentially protecting the body. It’s a perfect set up for a horror film — I don’t know why it hadn’t been done before!”
He added: “It took a while to figure out what Yakov was going to bring to the story and how we were going to represent those inner fears and put them in the pressure cooker: facing death, facing morality directly over night. I also knew that I wanted to get into horror tropes, [so it wasn’t] just a film that explores the culture and religion — and that’s when it got exciting.”
“The Vigil” premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month.
Watch the video above.