Description

Blood, dismemberment, and pretty, young flesh. It’s a formula employed by the slasher film for so long that you’d think it would have grown stale, but here comes Austrian box office hit Dead In Three Days –- so successful, a sequel is already in the works –- to prove that there’s still, ahem, life in the corpse.

Life is looking good for a group of five young friends. Having just passed their final high school exams, they have one last summer together before moving on to adult life. But the excitement wanes quickly when, on the day of their graduation party, all five receive the same anonymous text message warning simply that in three days they will be dead. Is it a hoax? A prank by a spurned, would-be lover? Everybody assumes so until the corpses begin to pile up and by then, it’s far too late.

For several years now, the rise of cellular technology has been the bane of horror filmmakers everywhere, forcing directors to jump through hoops to explain why exactly help isn’t simply a phone call away, to the point that the inevitable plot twist now most often draws a knowing laugh from the audience. A small few, however, are taking this problem and turning it to a strength, building their scenarios around these new technologies. While the central premise of Dead In Three Days may strike some as overly similar to Takashi Miike’s One Missed Call, the films couldn’t be more different in terms of execution. While Miike’s film is an exaggeration and repetition of the standard Japanese hair-ghost trope, this picture has a frequent collaborator of hugely acclaimed director Michael Haneke at the helm, and that makes all the difference. Rather than dipping into the supernatural or indulging in stylistic excess, Dead In Three Days takes a much more naturalistic approach, presenting a disturbingly realistic and believable take on the slasher genre.

—Todd Brown

"A repository of fear and dread" - Derek Elley, VARIETY

"Extemely suspenseful... beautiful cinematography... stellar cast" - SLASHERPOOL

Website

http://www.in3tagen.com/

Credits

Director: Andreas Prochaska
Screenplay: Thomas Baum, Andreas Prochaska
Cast: Sabrina Reiter Laurence Rupp Michael Steinocher Julia Rosa Stöckl Nadja Vogel
Producers: Helmut Grasser
Distributor: Celluloid Dreams

Screens with...

The Eyes of Edward James Montreal Premiere Canada 2006 | 15 min English language