Tagline: Evil will do anything to live.
The Unborn movie storyline. Sometimes the soul of a dead person has been so tainted with evil that it is denied entrance to heaven. It must endlessly wander the borderlands between worlds, desperately searching for a new body to inhabit. And sometimes it actually succeeds.
Writer / director David S. Goyer (Blade: Trinity, The Invisible, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight) and producer Michael Bay (Transformers, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Armageddon) give a terrifying glimpse into the life of the undead in The Unborn, a supernatural thriller that follows a young woman pulled into a world of nightmares when a demonic spirit haunts her and threatens everyone she loves.
Casey Beldon (Odette Yustman of Cloverfield, television’s October Road) hated her mother for abandoning her as a child. But when inexplicable events begin to happen, Casey begins to understand why she left. Plagued by merciless dreams and a tortured ghost that haunts her waking hours, she must turn to the only person, Rabbi Sendak (Gary Oldman of The Dark Knight, who can make it stop.
With the help of Sendak, her best friend Romy (Meagan Good of Saw V, Stomp the Yard) and boyfriend Mark (Cam Gigandet of Twilight, Never Back Down), Casey uncovers the source of a family curse dating back to Nazi Germany-a creature with the ability to inhabit anyone or anything that is getting stronger with each possession. With the curse unleashed, her only chance at survival is to shut a doorway from beyond our world that has been pried open by someone who was never born.
The Unborn is a 2009 American supernatural horror film written and directed by David S. Goyer. The film stars Odette Yustman as a young woman who is tormented by a dybbuk and seeks help from a rabbi (Gary Oldman). The dybbuk seeks to use her death as a gateway to physical existence. The film is produced by Michael Bay and his production company Platinum Dunes. It was released in American theaters on January 9, 2009, by Rogue Pictures.
The Mystery of Twins: The Unborn Is Conceived
“I am thankful to You, eternal King, who has mercifully returned my soul within me. Your faithfulness is great.” – Modeh Ani, Jewish prayer said upon waking up.
For David S. Goyer, the concept of twins was a subject he had long found both fascinating and unnerving. While on a trip to Chicago to visit his wife, Jessika, on the set of a film she was producing, Goyer would become inspired by the subject matter to develop the script for The Unborn.
“David has been preoccupied with twins for a long time,” says EP Jessika Goyer. “There are a lot of great unanswered mysteries in the medical history of twins, and the more he researched it, he realized there were ways to write about them that could be very scary. We both wanted to do a horror film that felt fresh and relied on scares derived from our worst possible nightmares…instead of just a movie relying on torture and gore. We looked to movies we felt were really scary, like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, and considered the moments in those films that chilled us to the bone.”
David Goyer felt what was most interesting about those landmark movies is that, while they could easily be called horror films or supernatural thrillers, they are also intense dramas. “When something’s real, it scares me,” he offers, “and those films have an air of realism to them that offers the dramatic intensity I wanted in this film.”
Of his interest in the subject matter, he continues: “I’ve always found twins to be scary. Jessika and I were having dinner at a restaurant in Chicago, discussing the subject, when the idea came up about someone being haunted by their unborn twin. I’ve heard stories about one twin dying during the pregnancy, or even during delivery, and I started to think about what kind of psychological effect that could have on the surviving twin.”
With the loose idea for the script beginning to take shape, the writer/director traveled to his good luck writing spot in Wyoming to start fleshing out the story of The Unborn. The celebrated comic-book author, known for his ability to imagine entire worlds down to their minutiae, began to research what was known of twins. This led him to uncover material about gruesome experiments by Nazis upon children during the Holocaust.
Led by sadistic researcher Dr. Josef Mengele, Nazi scientists believed that members of the Aryan race could have perfect blue eyes and were willing to torture Jewish twins in concentration camps to find the best way to alter pigmentation. They conducted a series of painful experiments to inject lethal dyes into the eyes of children to make their natural dark eyes turn blue.
Goyer’s studies also led him to examine ancient Jewish folklore, from which he learned of the ancient spirit called a dybbuk. He found that these cursed, wandering souls who can enter the bodies of the living have been a part of mythology for centuries. Discussing the behavior of the vengeful entities, with whom reason is impossible, Goyer says: “Like a moth tapping against the glass trying to get into light, they keep trying to come back into a body, because they can’t go into heaven.”
With The Unborn’s tale filled with spiritual and religious undertones, Goyer comments on why spirituality and archaic symbols resonate so profoundly in the horror genre: “Religion and horror films always seem to go hand in hand,” he believes. “Most religions address some form of an afterlife, supernatural figures, entities and ghosts. It’s a mystery we didn’t understand 3,000 years ago, and we still grapple to come up with explanations-which makes it a natural fit for genre films.”
The original subject matter of Goyer’s script resonated with Platinum Dunes partners Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller. With a history of producing successful movies that include the 2003 remake of the 1974 gore-fest The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, as well as The Amityville Horror, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning and the upcoming Friday the 13th, the filmmakers were looking to find an original script for Platinum Dunes to produce.
Producer Fuller admits that their production house is sent a number of horror scripts, but he and his team weren’t ready to put another remake on their slate. He offers, “We loved David’s script, and the level of writing was so much higher than what we were receiving at the time. From the inception of Platinum Dunes, Michael, Drew and I have always talked about making a film that dealt with religion and exorcisms. It’s a subject matter that is very frightening and resonates with audiences.”
Adds producer Form: “It’s not every day that you get a spec script from a writer like David Goyer, who was coming off of Batman Begins, the entire Blade franchise and The Dark Knight. We jumped on it, and it was exactly what we were looking for.”
For Platinum Dunes, having Goyer direct the film was the only option. “It’s not fair to assume that everyone who writes a great script can direct one,” states Fuller, “but David had directed three movies, and in talking to him, he understood where all the scares were. Traditionally, choosing a director is our hardest decision, but this was the easiest director choice we’ve made in the history of our company. There was no discussion; it was going to be David directing the film, or we weren’t going to make it.”
For Goyer, the decision to direct was heavily influenced by two of his previous leading actors. “I had known about Platinum Dunes for a while and happen to be very good friends with Jessica Biel and Ryan Reynolds, who I directed in Blade: Trinity,” he says. “They went on to do The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror and said very good things about working with Michael, Andrew and Brad. Platinum Dunes had a deal with Rogue Pictures, who was looking for a genre movie, so it seemed like perfect timing and a good fit, creatively.”
With Goyer’s script firmly anchored by the character of Casey Beldon, a young woman who realizes a cursed spirit has been stalking generations of her family, the filmmakers began the task of finding the right young actress to play the pivotal role, as well as a cast to share in her terror.
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The Unborn (2009)
Directed by: David S. Goyer
Starring: Odette Yustman, Gary Oldman, Cam Gigandet, Meagan Good, Carla Gugino, Jane Alexander, Idris Elba, Rhys Coiro, James Remar, Atticus Shaffer, Rachel Brosnahan, Craig J. Harris
Screenplay by: David S. Goyer
Production Design by: Craig Jackson
Cinematography by: James Hawkinson
Film Editing by: Jeff Betancourt
Costume Design by: Christine Wada
Music by: Ramin Djawadi
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and terror, disturbing images, thematic material and language including some sexual refernces.
Distributed by: Rogue Pictures
Release Date: January 8, 2009
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