Neil LaButedoesn’t get the credit he deserves these days. While he attained acclaim as an occasional enfant terrible in the ’90s for writing and directing dark dramediesIn the Company of MenandYour Friends and Neighbors, after his masterful filmNurse Betty, LaBute became less synonymous with the great American indie scene of the ’90s and the sophisticated films directors like Stillman, Soderbergh, and Linklater would make. LaBute’s trajectory was a bit different, oscillating from theater to television, from surprisinghorrorproject to thoughtful drama, like some soft and quiet pinball machine.
One of his two 2022 films,House of Darkness, found LaButehaving fun once again with the horror genre, and he seems to be continuing his winning streak with the upcoming horror-thrillerFear the Night. Both films, like most LaBute projects, study the mechanics of power, the similarities and differences between men and women, and the depressing and dangerous sides of sex. Fear the Night will make a worthy addition to his incredible filmography. You can check out the synopsis and trailer below.
Hell Is Other People in Fear the Night
Fear the Nightstars Maggie Q, Kat Foster, Travis Hammer, andnew LaBute regular, Gia Crovatin. The synopsis reads as follows:
Eight women attend a bachelorette party at a remote farmhouse in the California hills. They are interrupted by the arrival of masked intruders who surround the place and begin shooting arrows at the home and the guests. One partygoer — Tess, a military veteran who is fighting her addictions and her difficulty at fitting in with other people — leads the women in making a stand against the attackers as they fight back in an effort to save themselves over the course of a single dark night.
LaBute remains one of the most poetic directors when speaking about his own work, or at least a director who deserves to be poetic. Just check out his incredible Director’s Statement, truncated here:
“Whatever I can’t see, that’s what scares me…
“It’s the waiting that is the most terrifying; waiting for something to happen — because let’s face it: none of us are ever going to get attacked by Jason or Freddy Krueger in an old house, most of us aren’t going to be eaten by a great white shark, and very few (if any) of us even believe in the devil, let alone expect to carry his baby or have him slip inside the body and soul of your child.
“Today, ’terror’ comes from within ourselves and from those around us — we scare ourselves by imagining what our neighbors are really up to and who that new person is who moved into the apartment at the end of the hall. We’re much more likely to have a bad boyfriend or a nasty stepmother or a scary guy accost us in the grocery store than we are to run into some fantastical, phantasmagorical creature from beyond. There is an everyday evil that pervades our modern lives, and that is simply the world we live in.
Related:Exclusive: Neil LaBute Returns to Horror With House of Darkness
“As Jean Paul Sartre famously wrote: “Hell is other people.”
“In the case ofFear the Night, ‘Hell’ is actually the people that Tess is with… until things get worse and the bad guys arrive. And arrive they do, armed with bows and arrows and knives and wanting to kill and rape and torture but to play with you first, to scare the sh*t out of you for fun. Like Deliverance or Straw Dogs or The Last House on the Left, this film is about what happens to good people when they are confronted by bad people with violent means. This is a movie about survival and living, not about body count and blood and dying (although we have a bit of that going on as well).”
“I hope that Fear the Night is a nasty little piece of work — a movie that will burrow into your brain and stay there, playing on your own worst nightmares. I hope it will keep you guessing right up until the end, and then keep you up at night long after you see it. It’s meant to be a relentless and chilling story about the people you love and are willing to fight for, facing off against the kind of people that you sometimes have to stand up to and fight against. Imagine running into the kind of criminals that you fear the most, and then realizing that you are going to have to fight them to the death and there’s no one coming to save you and there’s nothing you can do about it…
“Or is there?”
LaBute makes it clear thatFear the Nightcarries the fine pedigree set by the aforementioned ‘protect the castle’ films likeStraw Dogsand the recent masterpieceYou’re Next. In fact,You’re Nextseems to have set a new standard for these kinds of films, and whileFear the Nightis undoubtedly distinct due to LaBute’s iconoclastic vision, it does shareYou’re Next’s paradigm. You can see this influence most explicitly in 2019’sReady or Not, 2022’sThe Invitation, and the upcoming film,Til Death Do Us Part.
Take our word, though —Fear the Nightis different, and Neil LaBute is still a master. From Quiver Distribution,Fear the Nightwill be in theaters, on digital, and on demand beginning June 15, 2025
