In case you missed yesterday’s Comic-Con Antlers panel, here it is below. Antlers director Scott Cooper (Hostiles) joined producer Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water) to discuss their upcoming horror flick. The conversation moderated by Collider‘s Scott Weintraub began with a new Antlers featurette from Searchlight highlighting the Wendigo figure that drives the film and the Indigenous consultants used to get the story right.

Cooper and del Toro discussed treading into unfamiliar ground with Antlers and exploring one’s inner darkness. They dig into the the themes evoked by the Wendigo myth to explore the insatiability of capitalism. “There’s a lot of familiar rage,” says del Toro. Cooper also looks at the influence of del Toro’s work on injecting myth into Antlers. The duo unpacks the difference between creating a monster and making a horror figure rooted in people’s beliefs.

Besides nerding out over del Toro’s jam-packed Zoom background, the conversation was a film geek’s delight. The filmmakers discussed the importance of watching DVD extras as film school add-ons to learn from other filmmakers. The Antlers Comic-Con panel also saw the filmmakers gab about their love for Hitchcock and Coppola. But you might be surprised which directors del Toro says, “hold the most mystery” in their craft!

Antlers stars Keri Russell, Jesse Plemons, and Graham Greene. The film is also produced by Toronto’s J. Miles Dale, who won an Oscar for The Shape of Water. Antlers was originally scheduled for an April 2020 release by was delayed by COVID-19. The pandemic also delayed del Toro’s next directorial effort, Nightmare Alley, which went on hiatus mid-shoot. Listen to the end of the panel to hear how filmmakers are adapting schedules to COVID-19. Only del Toro would call it “extracting beauty from adversity.”

 

Antlers opens in 2021.