JP Nunez
I love it when horror movies execute time-honored cliches really well. It gives me the perfect Goldilocks balance between comfortable predictability and exciting novelty, and if the trailer for The Passenger is any indication, it looks like this film is going to excel in that regard. Here’s what The Passenger is about:
A group of strangers sharing a van have their trip abruptly interrupted when the driver accidentally hits a woman hiking in the middle of the night. They decide to take her to the hospital, but on the way quickly learn that she is not in need of a hospital and that they shouldn’t have let her in at all.
That’s a pretty vague plot synopsis, and the trailer doesn’t add much to it. All we know is that the woman who gets hit by the van seems to be possessed by some sort of disgusting, slug-like monster that passes from victim to victim through their mouths, but we don’t know anything about this creature.
We have no idea where it comes from, what it wants, or what it’s truly capable of, and that’s just the way I like it. As I’ve said a million times before, we don’t need to know a ton of plot details before a movie comes out. All we need is some cool visuals and/or a chilling atmosphere, and if a trailer gives us that, I’m sold.
And thankfully, the trailer for The Passenger has that in spades. From about the 30-second mark on, it’s chock-full of creepy horror imagery, and it looks awesome. Sure, a lot of this imagery seems to be replicating tropes we’ve seen numerous times before (especially the slug monster passing from mouth to mouth), but it looks like it’s done well enough that the lack of originality won’t be a problem. Whether it’s trying to gross you out, get under your skin (pun totally intended), or make you wonder what the hell you’re looking at, everything we see in this trailer is really effective, so I can’t wait to see the full movie.
The Passenger hits theaters on June 3 and VOD on June 28.
