The eleventh annual Popcorn Frights Film Festival is gearing up to unleash an 11-day horror celebration next month, and that includes closing out with a bang. The fest will host the U.S. premiere of Max Minghella’s Shell as its closing night film.
Popcorn Frights will run from August 7-17, in person and virtually.
Elisabeth Moss (The Invisible Man), Kate Hudson, and Kaia Gerber star in Minghella’s genre-bending body horror comedy.
In the film, “Down on her luck actress Samantha Lake (Moss) is invited into the ultra glamorous world of Zoe Shannon (Hudson), CEO of health & wellness company Shell. When their patients start to go missing, including starlet Chloe Benson (Gerber), Samantha realizes Shell may be protecting a monstrous secret.”
The body horror dark comedy was penned by Jack Stanley, the scribe behind last year’s riveting thriller The Passenger.
Shell’s screening at Popcorn Frights marks the first U.S. screening since its TIFF premiere. I wrote in my review that “Shell centers around an aging actor who embarks on a risky beauty regimen in a desperate bid to retain relevancy, Minghella opts to use it as a vehicle to craft an escapist love letter to ’90s cinema.”
Minghella made his feature directorial debut with 2018’s Teen Spirit, but horror fans will recognize the actor/filmmaker for his roles in Spiral: From the Book of Saw and Alexandre Aja’s Horns.
Individual tickets and All-Access Badges for Popcorn Frights’ in-theater experience—hosted at Savor Cinema Fort Lauderdale and Cinema Paradiso Hollywood—are now available. Virtual All-Access Passes can also be purchased for streaming access to the full digital lineup. To order an In-Theater All-Access VIP Badge, click here; to order a Virtual All-Access Pass, click here.
Catch up on Popcorn Frights’ first and second waves of programming while we wait for a third wave of announcements still to come.
