It is not, in hindsight, surprising to learn that the teaser for new horror movie Crossed has its origins in Garth Ennis’ brain. Ennis, after all, managed to make some truly fucked-up things out of his particularly skewed understanding of superhero comics with The Boys; is it any wonder that his approach to tried-and-true horror tropes would be something even worse?
Of course, you also can’t blame Ennis alone: Crossed is also the product of director Rob Jabbaz, working in a furrow he previously plowed with 2021’s gorefest The Sadness. (Both works, for instance, are about a disease that turns anyone infected into the most sadistic and psychopathic version of themselves, acting out their worst impulses; the main difference with Crossed, from what we can see here, is that it also gives its victims/killers a gnarly rash on their face to help distinguish who’s out to get ya.) Posted online earlier today by Bloody Disgusting, the Crossed teaser is actually a little lighter on depravity than you might expect for a promo video that includes a dude wearing a Speedo made out of a tanned human face—but it still makes the mission statement pretty clear: Put as much fucked-up gore on the screen as it can in the shortest amount of time, with “zombies” who are smart enough to know how to maximize their victims’ pain.
Although he only wrote the first run of Crossed comics way back in 2008—with the series having since passed through a pretty massive number of contributors, including, against all odds, Alan Moore—Ennis reportedly returned for the film, which he wrote the screenplay for a few years back. There’s no word yet on when or where the film will be available for regular folks to traumatize themselves with, but we assume a horror industry that’s made the most out of films like the Terrifier movies will be able to find a streaming niche to comfortably plug it into.
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