After making her feature debut with last year’s Sundance hit Piggy, Carlota Pereda is set to return with The Chapel from prolific Spanish production company Filmax (REC franchise).
Variety, who bring us this news exclusively today, also tell us that excerpts from The Chapel will be unveiled Fantastic 7, a showcase of international genre movies in advanced production put forward by seven leading film festivals which unspools May 21 at Cannes’ Marché du Film.
Written by Albert Bertrán Bas, Carmelo Viera and Pereda, The Chapel centres on:
Emma, 8, who seeks out Carol, a fake medium, to communicate with the spirit of a little girl which has spent centuries trapped in a chapel. Contact, Emma thinks, will allow her to still talk to her own terminally ill mother when she dies. What Carol doesn’t realise is that Emma has a real gift and, if she goes on trying to use it without Carol’s help, will put her young life in mortal danger.
Described by Marché du Filmas “a fantastic fable that navigates between past and present, the real world and the paranormal”, The Chapel is said to make reference to one of the most creepy images from history – that of the ‘bird men’ or plague doctors, hermit-like doctors who hid beneath disturbing masks and long tunics during outbreaks of bubonic plague.
According to Pereda, The Chapel is “a very personal story” about “how hard being a mother and daughter can be, how, sometimes, we don’t understand each other until we reach adulthood and, like in all ghost stories, it’s too late…. Or maybe, just maybe, this time, it isn’t.”
Seeing as Piggy was one of our favorites from 2022, we’re very excited to see Pereda’s next venture into the world of horror. We’ll bring you updates on The Chapel as we get them!
