Shudder has unleashed the first trailer for Ruth Platt’s upcoming horror movie Martyrs Lane. The movie tells a tragic ghost story, a ghost story “built on the pain of a child whose bedrock parental relation fails her – Martyrs Lane turns on Leah, 10, left to her own devices in a rambling vicarage.”
Her mother’s too busy by day and distraught at night to attend much to her. Something is clearly wrong. Investigating why her mother sleeps clasping a golden locket, Leah begins to be visited by a cherubic-looking little girl wearing tawdry angel’s wings.
Drawing deep on a humanistic tradition of family relationship-driven films led by Victor Erice’s “The Spirit of the Beehive,” Martyrs Lane plumbs to the heart of horror, charting, its makers say, a young girl’s journey into her deepest fear, that her mother doesn’t love her.
Platt explains, “Ghosts are metaphors for something that’s suppressed or hidden that’s very human, metaphors for trauma.”
The trailer depicts “Leah’s gradual understanding of deep tragedy in the family’s past as well as a building sense that the ghost she has summoned is a threat to what she holds most dear. The damage that inadequate parents can deal with their children is, however, ultimately the really haunting feature of the film.”
It’s set to be released on Shudder on September 9th.
