According to Fangoria, Sebastian Gutierrez (scribe of Gothika) has wrapped shooting in Los Angeles on Rise, his new supernatural feature starring Lucy Liu, Michael Chiklis, James D’Arcy, Carla Gugino, Robert Forster, Cameron Richardson and Marilyn Manson.
The film is about reporter Sadie Blake (Liu) who against her better judgment, joins up with a group of vampires and decides to seek revenge by killing the cult members who made her a bloodsucker in the first place. All of this action takes place during a 48 hour time span and she is aided by a police detective (Chiklis) who’s daughter was killed by the same group.
According to Gutierrez, Rise is deeply rooted in the tradition of film noir. “The story itself is very simple, but it’s told in a nonlinear fashion,” he states. “And hopefully, it has a very nightmarish and relentless quality. It’s very bleak noir, like John Boorman’s Point Blank.”
Gutierrez says that the vampires in his film will more closely resemble ones from movies like Near Dark and The Hunger. “There are some conventions that we keep—I’m not trying to reinvent the vampire movie,” he says. “I’m just taking out the elements that I find silly. Nobody says, ‘I’ve been around for 300 years’ in this movie.
“We’re walking around a lot of potential landmines—we don’t want to go into an Anne Rice Gothic/romantic terrain, or an Underworld/Ridley Scott sort of thing,” Gutierrez explains. “I’m not knocking those movies, because they’ve all been done very well, but we’re trying to do something that’s more like a modern-day noir. It’s very stylized, because it’s horror—all the colors are very saturated. We’re keeping away from the usual look you see in these movies, which is that steely-grey, industrial sort of thing.”
Gutierrez’s wrote the screenplay for Gothika and he also wrote and directed She Creature and the feature Judas Kiss (both starring Gugino). He is currently completing writing duties on Hideo Nakata’s U.S. remake of The Eye for Cruise/Wagner, and Pacific Air Flight 121, starring Samuel L. Jackson.