When Scott Schirmer’s next movie Plank Face was announced, very little information was given in the way of what it’s about. Then, last month, we got a trailer and this description:

A dark and disturbing movie about a man who is captured by a wild wood-dwelling family who wants to make him one of their own — whether he likes it or not!

Now, the Found and Harvest Lake director has a new video out talking a little bit more about the project and where the horror lies within:

 

“One of the things we were most interested in doing with this movie was a character arc in Max where he’s kind of like Tarzan returning to the wild, and by meeting these feral women in this cabin in the woods, they’re kind of giving him license to return to that state of wildness,” Schirmer says in the video. “And while they’re violent to him and humiliating to him, if he didn’t have those roots in wild behavior, he wouldn’t make the transformation that he has. It’s a weird and a scary movie to make because it does suggest that some people, left to their own devices, might be uncivilized monsters, but at the same time, I don’t think that that’s a stretch to think that a lot of people might make that decision if they could. So, that’s what I like doing. We like taking an icky thought, and that’s the horror. The horror doesn’t have to be peeling wallpaper and ghosts and tropes. It’s a disturbing concept, and I think that’s the one with this one – is the wilderness within our soul.”

The way Schirmer describes Plank Face sounds to me like he’s venturing further down the path he started down with his previous movie Harvest Lake. That movie was very much about human nature at its most basic, primal level, and it sounds like Plank Face will have a similar theme, even if executed in a different way.

As far as I’m concerned, Schirmer has yet to disappoint since breaking through the indie horror scene with Found, and based on his track record since, I have no reason to believe Plank Face won’t be interesting at the very least. Harvest Lake showed some growth in both Schirmer and his DP Brian Williams K. Williams as filmmakers, and it should be fun to see how this progresses with Plank Face.