Theatrical one-sheet for NEVER AFTER DARK, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
Join the Japan-America Society of Houston for a special screening of Never After Dark, a Japanese-language haunted house thriller written and directed by Dave Boyle and starring SAG Award and Critics’ Choice Award Winner Moeka Hoshi (SHOGUN), Kurumi Inagaki, Kento Kaku, Mutsuo Yoshioka, Bokuzō Masana and Tae Kimura.
Produced in Japan with a largely Japanese cast and crew, Never After Dark has received high praise from some of horror’s most recognizable voices, with Stephen King calling it “amazing and haunting,” and THE BLACK PHONE and SINISTER director Scott Derrickson hailing it as “intelligent, unpredictable and bone-chilling” and “one of the best of the year.” The film has also won awards at film festivals all over the world, including SXSW’s Midnighter Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize for Feature Film at the Overlook Film Festival.
Kick off your October by experiencing this acclaimed thriller on the big screen. Screenings will take place at select Houston-area cinemas, including the River Oaks Theatre, Greenway Grand Palace Stadium 24 Cinemas, Willowbrook 24 Theatres, and Regal Benders Landing. For the most up-to-date cinema list and tickets, please click here.
Synopsis
A wandering medium, Airi spends her life guiding restless spirits out of the world of the living.Summoned to an isolated country house, she comes face to face with a grotesque apparition with powersthat defy Airi’s experience. As she digs deeper into the house’s past, a secret comes to light—and Airi finds herself hunted by a far more unpredictable force. For the first time, her greatest adversary is not the supernatural, but the living.
104 MIN. • JAPAN • JAPANESE • COLOR • 2.39:1 • 5.1 SURROUND
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT – DAVE BOYLE
Dave Boyle, writer/director of NEVER AFTER DARK, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
I’ve always been fascinated by mediums, seers, and spiritualists. I love the moment in any ghost story when things get rough, and it’s time to call in an expert. The seed of Never After Dark began with a desire to tell a story about a professional, following step-by-step in procedural detail how they get rid of a pesky spirit.
Only to have the rug pulled out from under them.
For a spiritualist trained to deal with the spirits of the dead, what could possibly be scarier than having to fight a living antagonist? With Never After Dark, I decided to have my cake and eat it too by combining two genres I deeply love: a haunting ghost story and a visceral home invasion thriller.
This story also scratches another itch for me: to create a new set of rituals and visual grammar around ghost stories, mediums and seances. Our main character is neither a Western-style psychic, nor is she a Japanese onmyoji… She is from a fictional tradition that we’ve created in meticulous detail. All of that would be in vain without the ferocious commitment of the one-and-only, irreplaceable Moeka Hoshi.
Within the boundaries of this small-scale story, I hope audiences find themselves transported to a world they’ve never seen before.
PRODUCER STATEMENT – KENTO KAKU
Kento Kaku in NEVER AFTER DARK, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.
When Dave Boyle and I work together, the questions we always return to are whether a project speaks to something universal and deeply human—and whether it offers a sense of uniqueness and originality.
Never After Dark is a film that draws on the classic foundations of horror while presenting a fresh perspective on the fear inherent in human nature itself. With our combined sensibilities, my hope is that we were able to blend Japan’s distinctive sense of horror with a Western style of visual storytelling. The result feels to me like something fresh and new.
Our goal, first and foremost, is to make a piece that functions as entertainment. That said, even for me as a producer on the project, I found the resulting film has a lingering impact that is difficult to describe. I hope that each viewer discovers their own way of engaging with and enjoying it.