One of the more pleasant surprises of the past cinematic year has been director Kevin Smith actually getting to make Red State. For some time Smith has been talking about his idea for a horror film and for those of us who are fans of his comedies, the idea of him writing a script that Harvey Weinstein deemed too dark to invest in was pretty intriguing.
But Smith managed to get the cash he needed to make the film and this past fall he rolled cameras. Editing each day’s work in the evening, he had Red State almost entirely locked by the time shooting wrapped at the end of October.
And with the film heading to next month’s Sundance Film Festival, Smith has released a trailer for the film and it is like nothing we have ever gotten visually from the director before. If I were to have seen the trailer without knowing what it is was for, identifying it as Smith’s work would have been the last thing that I would have done. As he has no distributor for the film, the trailer hasn’t gone through the MPAA so it may be a bit unsafe for work.
