'Antlers' Trailer: Scott Cooper And Guillermo Del Toro Have Cooked Up Something Scary

The trailer for Antlers is here, and it's creepy as hell. Director Scott Cooper and producer Guillermo del Toro have teamed to adapt a short story from Channel Zero creator Nick Antosca, and the results look incredibly promising. In the film, Keri Russell plays a small-town school teacher who begins to suspect all is not well with one of her students. Watch the Antlers trailer below.

Well, this looks terrifying. Scott Cooper isn't exactly the type of director I associate with horror – although his anti-Western Hostiles was plenty horrifying – but it seems his first official foray into the genre is a winner. At the very least, whatever Cooper has filmed makes for one effective trailer. In Antlers, " a small-town Oregon teacher (Keri Russell) and her brother (Jesse Plemons), the local sheriff, discover that a young student (Jeremy T. Thomas) is harboring a dangerous secret with frightening consequences." Graham Greene, Scott Haze, Rory Cochrane, and Amy Madigan also star.

Regarding his influences for the film, Cooper said: "I was so influenced early on by the work of John Carpenter, like Halloween, or certainly The Exorcist which is a favorite of mine, or even Tarkovsky's Stalker. So I'm able to bring all of that into one film which is exciting."

Cooper also added:

"[Guillermo] said I've obviously never seen you direct a horror film, but there's a lot of horrific moments in your movies, so I'm more interested in someone who doesn't work in that genre to step into it. Which is I guess a bit like Friedkin in a sense, having not directing in that genre before he took on The Exorcist...[Guillermo is] fantastic and so supportive and wildly imaginative, so it's really been a great collaboration."

The film features a script from C. Henry Chaisson & Nick Antosca and Cooper, adapted from Antosca's short story The Quiet Boy (which you can read here). Antosca is the creator of the criminally underrated horror anthology series Channel Zero, and I'm excited to see his material on the big screen. I've read the short story, and it's plenty spooky – although it's also brief. Antosca and company likely had to flesh things out considerably.

Throwing producer Guillermo del Toro into the mix certainly doesn't hurt things either. All in all, this might just shape up to be a great new addition to the horror genre.

Antlers opens in 2020.